After blasting through Greenlight in just 27 days, Leadwerks Software today announced the launch of Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition, exclusively available on the Steam distribution platform. The arrival of Leadwerks adds 3D game development software to Valve’s lineup of creative and productivity tools.
Leadwerks is designed to make game development easy for Steam’s 65 million users, with a royalty-free license for making commercial products. A new renderer built on OpenGL 4.0 provides h
Leadwerks 3.1 is nearly ready for release! In Leadwerks 3.0, we focused on making a solid cross-platform art pipeline and editor. In 3.1 we're adding graphics that go above and beyond the capabilities of Leadwerks 2.
New Features in 3.1
OpenGL 4.0 deferred renderer with up to 32x hardware MSAA.
Geometry and tessellation shaders.
Support for the Linux operating system, for both the engine AND editor.
Leadwerks 3.1 is now available for pre-ordering in the Leadwerks s
Leadwerks 3.0 has been updated with bug fixes and productivity enhancements. To get the update, run the Leadwerks Updater. Use the Project Manager to update your project with the latest files.
Resolved bug reports are listed in the Bug Report Forum. This release fixes a few issues including Android multitouch indexes sometimes not working right, sphere casting that was sometimes wrong, and several other small problems.
Some new enhancements have been made to improve productivity. Cam
Leadwerks 3.1 has entered the beta testing phase on schedule according to our development plan laid out in the Leadwerks for Linux Kickstarter campaign. Supporters who chose the SUPER BACKER reward have been granted access to try the early builds of Leadwerks for Linux.
We chose to use the excellent Code::Blocks IDE for Linux development. Beta testers can access the full Leadwerks API to program graphics, physics, and gameplay, along with a few new functions like Camera::SetMultisampleMode
You did it! Leadwerks 3.1 is coming to Linux.
As traditional gaming platforms are becoming more and more restrictive, software developers, hardware vendors, open-source coders, and gamers are working together to build a better future for gaming on the open platform Linux. I count myself fortunate to have found my place in this movement, and am very grateful that over 700 Linux gamers believed in this idea.
What now?
I'm driving over to the IGDA Summit today to sit in on a few sessions. The
I wanted to add some default procedural generation tools in the Leadwerks 3.1 terrain editor. The goal is to let the user input a few parameters to control the appearance of their terrain and auto-generate a landscape that looks good without requiring a lot of touch-up work.
Programmers commonly rely on two methods for terrain heightmap generation, Perlin noise and fractal noise. Perlin noise produces a soft rolling appearance. The problem is that Perlin noise heightmaps look nothing like re
Leadwerks is a prize sponsor for Cereal Hack 3 at the Sacramento HackerLab. I stopped by in the morning to listen to the pitches and say hi. Here are a few photos from the event:
I've added new rewards including international shipping for our T-Shirt and sticker, as well as an indie team and professional site license. A lot of people have been asking for international shipping for the T-shirt and sticker rewards, but I wanted to make sure I knew what the shipping would cost first. It's a good thing I checked because it costs $16.75 to ship. The good news is its a flat rate for any country, so I can rely on that cost when I price things. To sweeten the deal, I am incl
I'm pleased to announce the full stretch goals for the Leadwerks for Linux Kickstarter campaign:
$26,000 - Android + Ouya for All: We will provide all backers who pledged $100 or more with Android support. We’ll also add support for OUYA, the Android-based open game console. This will let you build games for Android and OUYA, without ever leaving the Linux operating system.
$30,000 - Blender integration: We want to integrate Leadwerks with the free 3D modeling package Blender. We’ll star
I'm starting to get terrain integrated into the Leadwerks 3 editor. For the most part, it stays pretty close to the design of the terrain tools in Leadwerks 2, and you should have no trouble figuring it out. I'm implementing the critical features first: This will be added into version 3.0 before the release of 3.1.
As I described in my previous blog, my goal is to take all the lessons learned from Leadwerks 2 and come up with something more refined and powerful.
In just three weeks, the Linux community has successfully funded the development of Leadwerks for Linux. This means we're going to bring Leadwerks 3.1 to Linux, with native support for developing Linux games...so Linux games can now be completely free from Windows.
Greenlight It's been an amazing few weeks. During this time, we also successfully completed our Greenlight campaign to make Leadwerks available on Steam and take advantage of features like the Steam Workshop. You can see from th
The Leadwerks 2 terrain system was expansive and very fast, which allowed rendering of huge landscapes. However, it had some limitations. Texture splatting was done in real-time in the pixel shader. Because of the limitations of hardware texture units, only four texture units per terrain were supported. This limited the ability of the artist to make terrains with a lot of variation. The landscapes were beautiful, but somewhat monotonous.
With the Leadwerks 3 terrain system, I wanted to reta
Leadwerks has been successfully Greenlit for Steam, meaning we can integrate great features like the Steam Workshop and Valve file formats right into our game engine! Thank you so much to everyone who voted.
We saw an incredible response from the Steam Linux community, both here and on our Kickstarter campaign for Linux support, which is nearly 85% funded. If the campaign reaches the first stretch goal, we're throwing in Android and OUYA support for everyone who pledged $100 or more to the c
I wanted to post an update on our Steam Greenlight campaign. Basically, we're doing better than most of the top compaigns did during the same time frame. However, because items in Greenlight are never removed, they slowly accumulate votes over time. Some of the software in Greenlight has been there for almost a year, and we've only been in there about three weeks. So their number of votes will be higher than ours for a while, even if we are accumulating votes much faster.
The campaign go
Last weekend I attended an OUYA game jam and got to play around with the OUYA dev kit for the first time. My goal was to see if I could get Leadwerks running on it over the weekend. I had problems with the USB driver, but compiling went smoothly:
I didn't have any problems with controller latency, but did not finish mapping the controls or updating our project to use some newer functions we need. In the end, I had to manually copy the compiled .apk file to the device to deploy it. All in
Wow! We crossed the 50% mark in less than a week. At this point, the campaign has shown enough strength that I am willing to begin allocating resources to the development of Leadwerks for Linux. (To be clear, we will only deliver a Linux product if the entire target amount is met.) Kickstarter has been fantastic because it allows us to gauge demand before we do the hard work of supporting a new operating system, so we can figure out in advance whether it's worthwhile. Fortunately, it appears the
You may recall a few weeks ago we added consideration of smooth groups in the lightmap calculations. (Explanation for new people: we use a forward renderer with static lighting as a fallback that runs across-the-board, and are working on a deferred OpenGL 4 renderer for the next major update. I've been working with deferred rendering since 2006, so this is relatively easy to add.)
You may recall the case of luxels (lightmap pixels) that fall outside a face were problematic, and I used a bi
Linux is a solid and secure operating system that’s perfect for gaming, but at this time Windows remains the lead platform for PC games. One company wants to change that by putting the game development process right on Linux. Leadwerks Software has launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring their game development software to the Linux operating system. The company says this will allow users to build and play games without ever leaving the Linux operating system.
The company's Kickstarter page
Last week we launched our Steam Greenlight campaign to get Leadwerks into the hands of the Steam community. This week, we're rolling out the second stage of our plan with a Kickstarter campaign to bring Leadwerks to Linux. This will let you build and play games, without ever leaving Linux. The result of this campaign will be Leadwerks 3.1 with a high-end AAA renderer running on Linux, Mac, and Windows, with an estimated release date before Christmas.
Valve has given Linux users a taste of
Valve Software's Steam is a game distribution platform used by millions of gamers worldwide. What started as simply a way to buy and update games has evolved into a vast ecosystem with instant messaging between friends, game hubs featuring players' screenshots and video, and workshops for sharing user-generated content. Last fall, Valve added software titles to its lineup of products, and implemented Greenlight, a system that lets users vote directly on which titles should be sold on Steam.
I first connected with Valve Software during GDC 2013. I recognized an opportunity to work together, so last week I paid a visit to Bellevue, Washington and met with Valve employees (no one has job titles in the company except Gabe) and discussed Leadwerks and the evolving Steam platform.
Today, I'm excited to announce our Greenlight campaign for Leadwerks 3: Steam Edition.
This software will be distributed through Steam and allow you to build games with Lua script and publish
This update brings the addition of lightmapping across curved surfaces with smooth groups. The image below is a set of lightmapped CSG brushes, not mesh lighting. You can read a detailed account of our implementation of this feature here.
The project manager now includes an "Update" button, so you can easily update your project any time we modify files in the template folders. Although we tested with no problems, it is recommended you back up your project before using this feature.
I'm a big fan of constructive solid geometry because it allows people without advanced modeling skills to design a game level that looks great. In fact, I originally got my start in game development using the Quake and Half-Life modding tools, making game maps.
One of the criticisms of CSG has been that it only allowed creation of faceted objects. (Valve's Hammer Editor has a workaround for this that lets you set smooth groups, but you can't see the results until they are run in the game.)
An update for Leadwerks 3 has been released, bringing new graphical enhancements to mobile games. Building on the efficient art pipeline and user-friendly tools of Leadwerks 3, the engine now supports projected shadows for characters and other dynamic objects. This technique works by casting a shadow onto the surrounding world geometry, to provide real-time shadows that run fast on all platforms.
To enable dynamic shadows on a single object, just select it in the editor and choose the
Leadwerks Software announced today the release of Leadwerks 3, their new development platform for building mobile games with native code. Based on the technology developed for their successful game engine for PC, Leadwerks 3 brings a totally new approach to mobile game development.
While environments such as Unity and MonoDevelop use managed code...that is, code that is designed to be easily run on multiple devices...Leadwerks uses an approach called native code. Applications built with na
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