After the release of the Vectronic Demo, I started to seek out how to make the game to be able to stand-alone without any additional launchers, batches, or required installations. Shortly after my last blog post, Josh informed me about Inno Setup, and it answered my questions about providing OpenAL if the user did not already have it installed. More about that here. I haven't played with it yet, but it gave me insurance about packaging it up for the final release down the road. Alternatively, St
Miniaturization has been a big trend over the last five years, but it isn't limited to mobile. It's impacted other areas of technology that I find much more interesting than cell phones. Previously, I wrote about the changing PC form factor, and how my current rig is a no-compromises full-size PC packed into a form factor about the size of a bread box.
I happen to have my hands on a few pieces of technology that are brand new, unreleased, or things I myself am creating. All these technolo
We're going to release a version 3.6 early with decals and the other enhancements I've recently made. This is scheduled for Monday, August 17th. At the same time we will be releasing Leadwerks Game Launcher as a free early preview title. So you've got exactly two weeks to prepare any other games you want to show off. I'm happy with the lineup we have of 25 games, and am looking forward to the launch so we can show your werk off to the world!
My market positioning with this product is goi
I've been lots of programming, mostly small stuff that when joined together will present the player with a better playing experience. Sadly I don't really have much to actually show currently, but in the coming weeks time provided i should be able to go down my list of to-do's
I DO have a video where I show my new test level that can be used as a playground to test all sorts of scripts and game mechanics. I also talk about what next I plan to implement.
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It's been 4 long months, I had time to think about what I wanted to do with the game and this is the result.
Before I talk about the game I would like to apologize for the huge hiatus that the game went on. Since April that you guys haven't had any news whatsoever, but know that this "Hiatus time" didn't go to waste at all. I had time to think about the game and how I want to improve it. So here's what happened.
First, all the levels have been scrapped. Yup, all of them, I wasn't h
An HTML renderer for Linux has been implemented. This adds the welcome window and full Workshop inteface for Linux. This will be available soon for testing on the beta branch.
An update is now available on the beta branch.
A new decal entity type is available. Decals are used to project an image into surrounding geometry. A decal requires a material using a decal shader, located in the "Shaders\Decals" folder. The FPSGun.lua script has been updated to add bullet marks and gunshot wounds to objects a bullet hits. You can also place a decal in a map for adding large details to walls, terrain, or anything else.
Decals are rendered similarly to the way a
The results of the Leadwerks Summer Games Tournament are in! I think you will agree, this tournament produced some very fun playable games. Each author will receive a Leadwerks sticker via mail if this is their first entry, and a T-shirt if it is their second!
So without further ado, let's look at the games, in no particular order:
Slafstraf 2
By Slafstraf
An ominous industrial setting with plenty of interesting puzzles shows the progress the author has made since the original Slafst
Well I seem to have left it till the last minute again and found only a single day to get this game done.
Turned out to be more of a prototype than a full game. Modification of the Leadwerks marble game sample.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/games/_/u-rev-r103
Single level. Collect the 10 energy spheres in the shortest time.
Needs more work, but out of time.
Here is our entry for the Leadwerks Summer Games Tournament...Beach Roll! As stated it is a just a small variation on the Marble Game Tutorial that Leadwerks provides. Our small four person team works under the name Aphelion Games and we were previously working on a 2D platformer prototype in Unity. However after some delays and that project losing a bit of momentum we decided that we needed to shake things up and get some of our enthusiasm back.
I had previously purchased the Leadwerks engi
I've got a pretty good idea of what features I want to pack into Leadwerks Game Engine 3.6, and I'm ready to share them with you now.
Just about all the simple easy features I think I can implement are already built into Leadwerks, but there are some bigger more involved things I want the engine to support. Instead of doing these one at a time, I am doing research on them all, and changing my focus when I get stuck. I've got a big block of research done that all revolves around creating ne
It’s been a while since my last blog post and since then I haven’t had the chance to put in as much game dev time as I'd have liked. But in the last week or so I have made some more progress.
So what’s new..
Mostly I’ve been continuing work on the map adding more buildings, areas and objects from the workshop to make the town more visually interesting and give more areas for the player to explore. I would say I’m probably over 50% of the way now from where I would consider it to be a dec
Things are very good on the business side of Leadwerks, so I wanted to take some time right now for some research and development so I can give you guys some new and shiny features. It's very interesting to me how the design of Leadwerks 3 has laid a foundation that allows us to do lots of new things that have never been done, and now I am getting to dig into some of those areas and explore.
I've decided the area I want to focus on is all under the banner of "outdoor rendering". The vegeta
A new build is available on the beta branch with the following changes:
Fixed sidepanel tab switching bug.
Improved compatibility with intel graphics.
Fixes instance rendering bug with instance count over 256.
Added terrain hardware tessellation.
To enable hardware tessellation, select the Tools > Options menu item, select the Video tab, and set the tessellation value. Terrain layers much have a displacement map to display displacement mapping. Each terrain layer has an
Our "dynamic megatexture" terrain system contains a lot of powerful capabilities we haven't yet been able to tap into. One advantage of this approach is that it works extremely well with hardware tessellated terrain. In fact, our terrain system was originally designed with this in mind, which is the main reason we have a slot allocated for a displacement map. This video shows my first-pass implementation of the technique. When a displacement map is assigned to a terrain texture layer, painti
The Leadwerks 2 vegetation system used a grid of "cells" that each contained a quantity of vegetation instances. If the cell was close enough, each instance was checked against the camera frustum like a regular entity and then all visible instances were rendered in a batch. Cells that were further away were collapsed into a single surface consisting of a quad for each instance. This is how we were able to draw massive amounts of foliage in the distance at a fast framerate:
This w
The Leadwerks 3 vegetation system is being designed to side-step the bottlenecks that limited the Leadwerks 2 vegetation system. The Leadwerks 2 system involved large collections of 4x4 matrices for each instance, resulting in hundreds of megs of data stored with the map. Eliminating this data results in small map sizes and reduction of memory usage.
Here we have 10,000 trees being rendered (with no billboards), for a total geometry count of 14 million polygons. Memory usage is...zero!
PC towers have been about the same since they became popular in the 1990's, replacing the previous horizontal form factor:
Cases have gone from beige to black, but very little else has changed.
PC towers tend to be designed for the old ATX style motherboards, which were first introduced in 1995:
PC cases are still designed primarily for this form factor, ignoring the fact that many internal components have changed.
The sound and ethernet card are now typically built into
Thought I could write my first Blog entry and report about my ventures into network programming with Leadwerks, ENet and Lua. Also, provide some source code. Okay, here we go:
What I wanted to do
My test app should be a client-server setup where clients can connect to the server, see each other's avatar, send chat lines and move around their avatar on a plane. Nothing fancy really, just to get into the topic.
The ENet network library (http://http://enet.bespin.org/) should be used, and
There's basically two kinds of vegetation, trees and grass.
Grass is plentiful, ubiquitous, dense, but can only be seen at a near distance. Its placement is haphazard and unimportant. It typically does not have any collision. ("Grass" includes any small plants, bushes, rocks, and other debris.)
Trees are fewer in number, larger, and can be seen from a great distance. Placement of groups of trees and individual instances is a little bit more important. Because these tend to be larger
It's been an eventful first half of 2015, and the second half promises to be just as exciting. I'm happy to say the Steam summer sale was a big success. I haven't done the calculation yet, but this year's sale did a lot more than last year, and we keep adding more and more new users. So that makes me feel very good about the future.
I've begun researching a way to create our own built-in store based on Workshop and Steam microtransactions. This is the same system that TF2 uses for in-app
An update is available on the beta branch with the following changes:
Implemented "CollisionMesh"-named limbs in models.
Added "Strip vertex colors" option in model editor.
Workshop items can now be submitted as free or curated paid items, although no mechanism is in place yet to actually purchase items.
Curated items appear in the Workshop and can be voted for, but cannot be downloaded.
You can enter your bank information for receiving payments, and you can even c
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