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New build provides texture lock, improved tex mapping

A new build has been pushed out on the beta branch on Steam. This update increments the map file format. Maps saved from the beta build cannot be opened in the standalone build until the update goes out everywhere.   The editor now has the option to use a centimeter grid. The previous meter-based grid is still available in the viewport tab in the options dialog. This is important because it allows us to more easily line brush geometry up to textures. By default, a 1024x1024 texture will m

Josh

Josh

CSG Texturing Enhancements

In order to get ready for the Workshop, and to get ready to implement texture locking, some preliminary work needed to be done. First, I needed to improve the CSG texture mapping routine. It was modified to take into account a texture's dimensions. This means that wide flat textures like this trim piece will be mapped to their texel area, not with the same aspect ratio as a square image:   The default mapping scale is that 1024 texels maps to 256 centimeters. This ensures it is easy to l

Josh

Josh

Diving into Constructive Solid Modeling

It's pretty clear that constructive solid geometry modeling is a high priority for our community. I like being able to easily sketch out my ideas. In fact, when this feature went away in Leadwerks 2, that was when I just stopped making game levels. It's not that I don't know how to use 3ds Max and other programs, it's just that they're not fun. The upcoming release of Steam Workshop also fulfills my long-held dream of building a shared repository of textures and models scaled correctly to wo

Josh

Josh

Building maps with modular props

The beta branch on Steam is updated with a new build. Fixes and Enhancements The camera movement options have been made more sane. The range of possible values is a little more practical now. A mouse smoothing option has been added that makes the camera motion in the perspective viewport feel a lot more smooth and natural. I also found a bug that caused the camera move speed to change when a map was loaded. It was an annoyance that was almost unnoticeable but it feels much better now.  T

Josh

Josh

Publish your games directly to Steam with the Leadwerks game player

One of the coolest things I'm seeing in Leadwerks 3 is a lot of minigames being made. These are finished products, without super high expectations, but they are complete, don't take long to make, and some are quite fun. Seeing these gave me an idea for a feature that's been in development in the background for some time, and when you see what it does, it will explain some of the design decisions I've made over the last few months.   The next build on the beta branch on Steam will support Lua

Josh

Josh

Leadwerks Game Engine Launches in Ubuntu Software Center

Following completion of a successful Kickstarter campaign to bring Leadwerks’ game development software to Linux, Leadwerks and Canonical have joined forces to make Leadwerks Game Engine available in the Ubuntu Software Center. This provides Ubuntu users with a powerful tool for rapid game development.   Bringing Leadwerks Game Engine to Ubuntu also means that existing games can be more easily deployed for Ubuntu. The lineup of featured games on the Leadwerks website covers a diverse range o

Admin

Admin

Blender Character Walk Cycle

The animation pipeline continues to established.   This time using Blender's animation tools and the rig I created to make a walk cycle. We needed to start testing some animations in Leadwerks. Rick will test soon and according to his information we can find tune and figure out any problems.   The rig has only the control bones now showing. Next is to create the control shapes and those will hide the control bones.   I am glad the old days of just having paper manuals is history. Manuals

digman

digman

Blender Character Rig

As Dave is texturing, I started to build our first basic character rig from scratch. Soon we can give some animations to Rick to start testing and working on. This rig still has a few problems but all in all works well. The rig can be adjusted to meet varied human type of characters.   I am working on creating this production pipeline, from creating rigs, exporting out of blender and importing the animations (working correctly) into Leadwerks.   The rig in the picture is shown with all the a

digman

digman

Lua and Gui's

Gui's at the moment seem to be all the rage on the Leadwerks forum. We have the recent release of the noesisGUI, Patrik's showing of his gui's progress, and tjheldna's release of tjui and probaly many others. I also decided to try my hand at gui creation.   Coming from a BASIC background (started with qb 1.0), I don't have the proper skills to use a third party gui without malloc errors or segfaulting everything. That, and my game is a lua game. Taking inspiration from Tjhldna's gui I started

Einlander

Einlander

Leadwerks Gets Update for Workflow Enhancements, New Features

Leadwerks Game Engine on Steam and standalone versions have received a major update that include enhancements to the workflow and new features.   The FBX model importer will now auto-generate materials for imported models, and select the appropriate shader to use. This even works with animated models that use GPU skinning, so it's super easy to get new models into Leadwerks. Other enhancements include support for multi-track animations and animation sequence names.   Lua script post effe

Admin

Admin

What's the Big Idea?

I think of the Leadwerks community as a big loosely affiliated collaborative game studio. I see people working together to add value in different ways. Some are dedicated to a single project, and others bounce around and participate in different projects. I like that everyone can just find what they like doing best and provide value in that way.   Voluntary collaboration, without being too restrictive, allows us to achieve economies of scale, while diversifying risk. Basically that means i

Josh

Josh

Texture Import Features

Since I am working with the Blender import pipeline and also getting artists onboard the Steam Workshop, it makes sense to work out any little details in the art pipeline that can be improved. One of these is the texture import process.   Leadwerks 3.0 was designed to function across PC and mobile, and one of the compromises that had to be made was texture compression. There is no universally supported texture compression format on mobile, while the PC has several variations of DXT compressi

Josh

Josh

Artistic Game Workflows for Phobia

I will write various articles as we progress through the making of Phobia.   Our team Dave, Rick, Rose and myself are like the Leadwerks promo states "turning players into game makers". In the end hopefully some things we learn you can use as well.   As Josh said marketing is considered before one line of code is written so it is with modelling, UV set creation and texture \ normal map workflows.   My first job as I saw it when I joined the Phobia team was to establish a modelling and tex

digman

digman

Marketing begins before you write a line of code

The lean startup methodology posits that life is to short to build a product no one wants. The old way of doing business involved a limited number of companies with very high barriers to entry adopting a "push" strategy. Sears could effectively create demand for a product by choosing what they wanted to feature prominently in their mail-order catalog. Television advertisers could craft a promotional strategy that would reliably result in a certain response. Those days are over, fortunately,

Josh

Josh

noesisGUI: XAML-based User Interface

We are proud to announce a version of noesisGUI compatible with Leadwerks 3.1.   In the last weeks we have been working very hard to provide an integration of our GUI framework into Leadwerks. The result of this work if the following layer (still in beta phase):   https://github.com/FourthQuarter/NoesisLeadwerksWrapper   Kudos for Bryan for helping us a lot with this integration!   EARLIER ADOPTERS SALE! 40% discount over regular prices until 16th May. With this discount, the Indie Li

jsantos

jsantos

Beta branch update: Tons of art pipeline enhancements

I'm happy to say I nailed the design of the Leadwerks 3 workflow overall, but there are a couple of places where there's still some friction. Because the community is going to soon be moving a lot of content into the Steam Workshop, now is a good time to take a look at those issues. It's also smart to address them before the Blender exporter is written.   A new update has been pushed out to the beta branch on Steam that contains a lot of improvements in this area. However, both the map and

Josh

Josh

Blender modular assets making

There are many way to make modular stuff. I just expose a simple basic one in Blender, it just covers modeling and preparing for FBX export.                       Mirror on Y the object     Align to grid to be sure it is aligned on red axis with the other                                               For the UV part : Just download the Blender file before the merging , make UV seams on one half modul

YouGroove

YouGroove

This week's progress

This isn't really a fancy PR post that's been carefully thought out, more just a quick update of what I've been doing.   A third party firm was contracted to provide a Debian package for Leadwerks. We tried to do it in-house, but were unsuccessful. I expect it to go live next week, at which point I will have a final Kickstarter update and start the Linux push in earnest. I've been fairly quiet about it because I wanted to make sure things worked, and I was also waiting for the distribution

Josh

Josh

Blender making curved tubes and pipes

An easy way of making curved tubes or pipes for your 3D assets models or for your level.               Click images to Zoom               Some example of use : Spice up 3D models   Or bring curved tubes to your level I hope you enjoyed this tutorial

YouGroove

YouGroove

Linux Editor Updated

An update to the Linux build of the Leadwerks editor has been posted. This resolves a few UI issues: The way the scene browser tree renders is changed to eliminate visual artifacts. Some scroll bar behavior bugs are fixed. The popup menu that appears when you right-click on an entity in the scene browser now contains an "Add to flow graph" menu item. This odd UI bug is fixed. Double-clicking on items in the scene or asset browser trees will collapse/expand that item if it has chi

Josh

Josh

Next Steps

Previously, I talked about my plan for Leadwerks for the next 6-12 months:   Leadwerks Editor Adding new tools to make life easier. Refining the workflow to eliminate any remaining"sticky" points. Bug fixes, to make it a super slick and polished experience.   The Engine New features in graphics, physics, networking, etc. Performance optimization. Improved compatibility across all OpenGL 4 hardware.   Third-Party Technologies Blender, SteamOS, Steam Workshop, vir

Josh

Josh

Leadwerks Standard Edition Brings C++ Game Development to Steam

Following the successful debut of Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition on Steam, Leadwerks Software today announced the launch of Leadwerks Standard Edition. This DLC on Steam adds support for programming in modern C++11 with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2013.   C++ is the game industry’s leading programming language, due in large part to its superior performance and flexibility. However, the language is sometimes considered to be too complicated for indie developers to take advantage of. Lead

Admin

Admin

Pass the tessellation, please! (Part 2)

Yeah, I know, the suspense was too much... :-) Who am I to torture you any longer? Here is the eagerly awaited next step in the tessellation pipeline - the evaluation shader.   After having defined the tessellation factors in the control shader, a fixed (non-programmable) tessellation stage takes over and creates all those little vertices and triangles for you. The result is then passed into the evaluation stage as patches whose size was defined in the control shader by the   layout (vert

Rastar

Rastar

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