The environment probe feature is coming along nicely, spawning a whole new system I am tentatively calling "Deferred Image-Based Lighting". This adds image-based lighting to your scenes that accentuates the existing deferred renderer and makes for higher quality screenshots with lots of next-gen detail. The probes handle both image-based ambient lighting and reflections.
Shadmar helped by implementing parallax cubemap correction. This provides an approximate volume the cubemap is rendered
After a resolving a few odd and ends I was able to create a proof of concept of the deferred environment probe idea I talked about earlier. The environment probe is basically the same as a point light. They have a range and affect a finite area. The color property can be used to adjust the intensity of the ambient lighting / reflections. Basically, you want to cover your indoor environments with these, but it's okay if you miss some spots. The environment probes fade out gradually so you do
Previously I talked about the idea of implementing a new "Ambient Point Light" into the engine. This would work by rendering the surrounding environment to a cubemap, just like a regular point light does. However, this type of light would render to a color buffer instead of just a depth buffer.
The light could then be rendered to display ambient reflections and soft lighting on the surrounding environment. While it would not provide perfect real-time reflections, it would give an extra bo
The Leadwerks Mercenary Action Figure has been released as a DLC. Previously, I talked about how the Workshop Store was not selling much content, and that we need game-ready content to be available to use in Leadwerks. At the same time, DLC sales are quite good, which seems contradictory.
To date, this item has total sales of $299 since release and cost $2000 to produce. (Additional characters will be a bit cheaper if we reuse animations.) After Steam's cut, I've lost $1800 on this proje
An update is available on the beta branch with the following changes:
Fixed System::Print() command which was printing char* values as bools.
Added optional parameter to the end of Entity::SetInput().
Add optional parameter to the end of Emitter::SetVelocity()
Fixed light occlusion culling bug.
Fixes a sound source position bug.
Yesterday I tried a plugin I've been meaning to try out for a long time, Steam Sign-in for IPB. It worked without a hitch and I was able to easily figure out how to locate a Steam ID from a forum account, and vice versa. You can sign straight into Leadwerks using your Steam ID, or you can add a Steam ID to your existing account. (See "Edit Profile".)
The gallery, videos, Workshop, and games sections will now correctly link to your Leadwerks profile page. Notice when you click on the auth
An update is available which fixes a problem when antialiasing is disabled on AMD hardware. You must update your project to get the new shaders and executables for the fix.
As described previously, the open-market model store approach does not work for Leadwerks and I am shifting my focus to providing DLCs made by third-party authors. The first thing I want to do is create more consistent branding that all DLC model packs will use. Here's what I came up with:
I'm also developing terminology to apply consistently to say what the DLC contains. The meaning of "Material Pack" and "Model Pack" is obvious. "Action Figures" will refer to charac
As discussed before, sales in the Workshop Store have been measly compared to what the DLCs regularly do. People just don't want to use it. Without revenue coming in, I can't convince third parties that it is a good idea to sell through this system (it isn't), and no new products will get added. We need a large library of content to be available for use in Leadwerks, but this isn't working. So I am moving on to another approach.
The "Workshop" menu item in the website header has been pla
An update is available on the beta branch which makes changes to the way DLCs are installed. The SciFi Interior Pack has been added as a paid Workshop item. You can obtain this item by either purchasing it through the Workshop Store interface, or buying the DLC on our Steam Store page. At the time of this writing, the other model pack DLCs have not been added yet.
To install the SciFi Interior Pack DLC you simply browse to it in the Workshop interface. If you own the DLC the "Buy" button
I've expanded the turret AI to include a visibility test. This is performed initially when selecting a target, and is also performed on a continuous basis to make sure the target stays in view. To avoid overloading the engine I am only performing the visibility test at most once every 500 milliseconds. This provides near-instantaneous updating while preventing the picking from becoming a bottleneck and slowing down performance.
Adding bullets was mostly a copy and paste job from the Soldi
In this series of blogs I am going to describe my implementation of AI for a new Workshop Store model, the Leadwerks turret. The model is shown below, without the weapon inserted.
Before writing any code I first decided the main behaviors I wanted this script to involve.
The turret should scan the area to identify an enemy (using the team ID to differentiate between enemy types) and choose the closest target. Unlike the soldier AI, the turret AI will not change targets when another
After I have my project crashed and there is no chance fully to restore it
, I started with Akt1 again new.
But after all its not a completly bad thing. I have now the chance to redesign things and rewrite some scripts. So it now looks like , that i probably win a little performance (fps). Also, I have a little busy myself with the theme animations . A soldier can now be shot
And i build with more structure (Flowgraph, and also Prefabs)
I sent my mockups off to the designer to create our very own hoodie as a super tournament prize. This garment will come with not one, not two, but three separate printed graphics on a high-quality American Apparel hooded fleece. Here's roughly what it will look like:
And here is a t-shirt design for a future production run:
If you entered the Winter Games Tournament, I am shipping prizes to you now (late, I know).
You will receive a friend request from the Leadwerks Software Steam account. Please accept this. I will need your mailing address in order to ship your prize.
An update is available on the beta branch which resolves the AMD rendering issues on Windows 10 with 1x MSAA setting enabled:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/13273-graphical-glitch/
The following components have changed:
Lighting shaders adjusted to handle regular 2D textures (MSAA level 0)
Editor updated, for Windows.
Lua interpreter and debug interpreter updated, for Windows.
The C++ library has not been updated yet.
Happy Friday.
One thing I will point out is that success is much more about creative experimentation than it is about sheer willpower. You have a little control over willpower, but not a ton. It's much better to keep the same amount of effort and just be smarter about what you do, than to try really really hard. That means taking a lot of risks and experiencing a lot of small low-cost failures to find what works.
Dexsoft Games, producers of game content with a library of thousands of game assets, have released five new material packs in the Workshop Store. All materials and textures are ready to use with Leadwerks, with source image files included in TGA format.
All of these can be purchased now through the links below, or through the Workshop interface in Leadwerks Editor. See the links below for more information and additional preview images.
Sci-Fi Materials 1
Sci-Fi Materials 2
Note: this is highly experiment and subject to cancellation, change, revision, etc. Now on with the blog...
Shadmar and Reepblue have paved the way for this research, and I am experimenting with some of these ideas in Leadwerks.
Environment probes in Leadwerks are an experimental entity that creates a vantage point from which a cubemap is generated. The cubemap provides a 360 degree view of the surrounding environment in a single texture. This texture can then be used in the deferred
With the recent popular substance shader by Shadmar, more talk and focus has been about cubemap reflections surfaced in the community. Reflections in Leadwerks were done in the past with the SSLR post process shader which made all surfaces reflect the world in real time.
However, it had the following problems:
It was applied to ALL materials in the scene. If you had a material that wouldn't normally reflect such as concrete or wood, the shader would still effect those materials. B
The most used wokflow is metal/roughness (I think)
metalness gives the environment reflection amount.
roughness does two things
spreads the light so environment reflection would be more blurred
spreads the light so specular reflection from light sources would be spread/blurred
.
Like this:
I'm not doing PBR discussion on how to correctly compute energy conservation and all that. It's not really important. But looking at some of the methods anyway on how metal and rou
My productivity has not been good lately because I am agonizing over where to live. I don't like where I am right now. Decisions like this were easy in college because I would just go where the best program was for what I was interested in. It's more difficult now to know if I am making the right choice.
I can "go big" and move to San Francisco, which weirdly has become the capitol of tech. I lived there before and know all the craziness to expect. I used to work at 24th and Mission (be
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