This is my first blog creating the integration of leadwerks, and blogspot.
I have been having a little fun with BlitzMax. I am starting to get into how much easier it is to code with. I love how many modules there are for it, but its still lacks quite a bit in the 3D and Physics world. I only mention this as leadwerks is a commercial product, and I and talking of freely available Modules... There is a irrlicht module for BM(BlitzMax), but it to looks limiting, and a lot of custom rendering n
Hello everyone! My name is Dave Lee, and I am a 3D artist and level designer. As Josh mentioned in a recent blog post, he has hired me to create a AAA-game quality environment for the Leadwerks engine — one that really shows off what it's capable of. This environment will be a fictional scene inspired by the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. For now it is titled simply "The Zone".
While I'm still getting the hang of Leadwerks and the Editor, I've found it pretty easy to just jump right in with
Dave Lee has joined the Leadwerks team. His job is to create a AAA game environment in Leadwerks Engine. Check out his work here.
(Influences of Crysis and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., how could I not hire him? )
Simon Benge, the lead artist from FPS Creator X, is also completing some animations for us.
I've being working on a locomotion/animation system that will provide nice results and gives good transitions from one stance/animation to the next. I was inspired by articles I read on the Internet and the Unity locomotion video. Luckily the person who did the Unity locomotion system posted his thesis on the Internet so I could read some of the concepts and then do futher study of the concepts from the internet.
The Unity system is highly mathimatical/analytical and because of this I have n
I have not entirely made my mind up on the new SSDO (screen-space directional occlusion). I liked, in some circumstances, the effect SSAO gave, especially on bump mapped brick textures. But I find SSDO to be quite "fizzy" possibly from the curve on the camera look values. This may well be down to settings but so far try as I might I still get this. Not sure it will be useful in an FPS situation as the HUD model seems to interact.
It does however have a very pleasing effect on "organic"
The new Indoor Lighting Optimization is truly a fine addition to the Engine. It has taken a little while to get into the habit of automatically setting the lights to Dynamic, Dynamic + Static, Static or Dynamic + Static + Buffered, as well as the needed setting for the objects in the scene. Objects that would normally always be static I have, for the time being, simply added an ini file to set them to static automatically. This will later be set via their scripts but for now it suffices.
Well, after much testing I have decided on an actual 3D modelling app to use in my workflow. I already have Blender, and while there are some very skilled users of this on the forum (Niosop and afecelis spring to mind and their tutorials are definitely worth checking out), I still find its user interface awkward and clumsy. So I demo'd a few different ones that would not break the bank. In the end I decided on AC3D. I find it simple to use and has enough features for what I wanted it for. 3DWS i
I implemented rising numbers of the amount of damage or healing that is happening to a unit. I spent a decent amount of time to have it like a billboard so it had depth but I think I'm better off just using DrawText() instead. It looks better. I made the the Shield Slam cause 5 damage and it worked very well. Just 1 minor bug with the way the health bar is drawn on the right hand side. Instead of the just the width to worry about like the left hand side I need to change the x value and the width
This will be my dev blog for Warlords. It's coming along very nicely and I'm very proud of what I have so far. This is a game that has been in my head for a long time. I've made past attempts to make this game but they all failed because when I would find a "bug" in Leadwerks that would set me back I would just stop. This time I'm determined to complete this game. Players don't care about if you had to hack something together and now either will I. If Leadwerks has a bug or doesn't do something
Leadwerks Engine SDK 2.31 is now available. A new SDK installer in the download area allows you to download different versions of the SDK. You must have an activated Leadwerks account to download the new SDK installer.
New features include lighting optimizations for point and spot lights. You can read about this feature in detail here. Another new feature is character controller crouching behavior. Note that the origin of character controllers has been moved to the very bottom of the co
I dabbled in a lot of little things recently, like GUI code and networking, just to make sure things would work the way I want in the long run. The lighting optimizations weren't planned to come out yet, but were moved to the front due to one user who is finishing up a commercial game. I've also been helping Pure3D a little bit, but I can't say anything about that right now. Of course, our website is still in progress, and that will hopefully come together by the end of the month.
We'll h
Screen-space directional occlusion (SSDO) is the next logical step after simple screen-space ambient occlusion. This routine uses a raytracing approach to approximate global illumination. You can get my shader here.
I got selection and rendering order working correctly, which is really the problem I wanted to solve with this. Here's a screenshot of the work in progress:
as i am an hobbyist, i am not under pressure to make anything but roaming around here for a year and always waiting for releases...
makes me uncomfortable towards efforts consented by josh since 2.3 release.
Really a great shot and as i played with the new toys, i understood that a lot of time is necessary for beginners like me before producing a single workflow.
I am not either young nor talented, working for myself alone (without the pressure I've got at my salaried work), but i wanted to
After 8 months since I purchased the Leadwerks Engine I'm still doubting about which direction to choose when it comes to game developing. At the moment I'm at a point where I can't choose whether I should focus more on moddeling, or if I should pay al my attention to scripting/coding. I'm doing a lot of these things at the same time without actually making some good progress. I never expected that I would learn how to programm by just messing around in the Leadwerks editor, but I have to admit
I've never considered myself a fan of writing GUI code, but now that I have a small job I need to get it done for, I'm actually having a lot of fun with it. I've been tinkering around with Lua GUI code for two days, and I came up with a really neat system after lots of trial and error.
Controls
A "control" is the name for a button, label, or other widget. A control is a Lua table.
The programmer creates the controls they want and then inputs mouse coordinates and the left mouse butt
Well nothing much to report, that does not mean nothing much has been going though
I have decided that as and when I make an emitter for a specific purpose, I will now create its own editor entity to save time by not having to create the exact same settings over and over. Also not every setting available needs to be adjusted so I will now re-write the properties to reflect what they effect and remove the ones not requiring adjusting for a particular effect and simply hard code them into th
I had a challenge last week for this game project. Allow an NPC to come up with a quick way to navigate to a particular place, even if the environment around him is dynamic. Some high-budget games use static node path meshes, which must be a final step in production for each map. I wanted a different approach that didn't require a web of objects hand placed into the world.
I decided to create my own rotational node path collection.
MS Paint FTW!
On a pivot, a box would rotate
So I have been thinking a lot about LE and how far it has come. A few months ago, I really wasn't feeling that great about LE. Things have really improved the past few months. When it was announced that 2.3 and the new editor would be paid updates, I wasn't real thrilled. My main reasoning behind it was that I felt 2.3 finally got LE to a level where I felt like it was usable in a professional project. So I felt like I had paid for a beta and was now paying for the real product as well.
I no
In Leadwerks Engine 2.3, two rendering paths are used for point lights. One uses a depth cubemap (for shader model 4 hardware). The SM3 fallback uses an unwrapped cubemap on a flat texture. On SM4 hardware, a depth cubemap was used because it allowed a point light to be rendered in one pass. However, when implementing my double-buffered technique for point lights, some problems arose. As a result, I changed the renderer to draw point lights as a series of six pyramidal volumes. This is how
