Hello all again,
Today I received an email from our BFG contact. The game is very possible to be released this Sunday 11/07.
We almost finished our game site and you can visit it here:
http://www.jane-croft.com
After the exclusivity ends we will share the demo to other shareware sites in order to raise our Google rank. The game will also be available to purchase directly from our store. We use for this, the FastSpring.com services. They have a very cheap commission fee
Also we
In the process of sweeping changes to how the game loads vehicles and other data. A lot of data the describes how the virtual cockpit works, where you sit, angles of views etc. was not available early on and since my long term plan is a system in which we can serve you new vehicles down the wire, even adding the Chinook was going to need a bit of fiddling around. Some data was in the object LUA, some in an external file, some embedded. It wasn't the original intention to build vehicles this way,
Hello fellow programmers, designers, and hardcore gamers. I just wanted to get on here and make a really short V-Blog about our new video game, Grim.
Grim is a Gothic first person action shooter that puts the player into the role of a man, named Russ, who possesses some of the powers from the Grim Reaper during a zombie apocalypse, controlled under a horrifying evil cult, in a wintry setting. With countless hours of enjoyment and easy to pick up controls, the main purpose of Grim was to make
Hello again! Just in time for Halloween, my blog once again rises from the dead. Although I wrapped up the Zone project back in July, I just recently finished a 13 minute HD video tour of the completed project. I may be doing a "behind the scenes" video some time later on if there's interest.
For now, welcome to The Zone:
When I saw specs for the graphics card they are using in the new iMacs, I knew it was time for Leadwerks to come to Mac. Steam for Mac also recently came out, so the time seems right for Mac gaming. Of course, some guy blew up the Roseville Galleria, so the Apple store was closed. I ordered the 27" iMac with a 3.2 ghz dual core processor and upgraded the graphics card to an ATI 5750. Here's what they sent me:
The computer case/monitor (it's all one piece) is a solid piece of aluminum that
Hello all,
For almost 1 month we made changes and add some new stuff to our game: Jane Croft. After we send to Big Fish Game a first version to review they told us we should make some changes. Here is a list of the most major issues:
We started immediately the work and after 2 more builds we finally finished. Yesterday the game went to BFG QA and I hope I will receive an answer Monday.
Right now we are making the trailer and the site for the game. As soon as will be ready I will
Completed changes to the HUD section of the config file.
<HUD col="1.0, 0.8, 0.2" glow="0" shadow="1" breakoutfpi="1" />
I'm using the TinyXML lib for config functions, it's been fast efficient and easy to use. I added a new option today that was born out of looking at videos of games projected onto huge screens giving almost 1:1 scale. Before my tripplehead PC went pop I had a problem with virtual symbology relative to HUD size. The larger the screen, the smaller the HUD relatively.
The best way to learn is to teach others. Is what a wise sig once said.
I wanted to do a tutorial on enviornments. But honestly I'm just not ready. I think only a pro is good enough to do a tut like that.
Someone like this fellow right here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77485&page=4
And I've tried to hit the record button while modeling, UV'ing, sculpting, texturing.
And it's all just not something I'm ready for. Pressing the record button just makes me wor
I just had a 3 day course about Advanced C++ programming.
It was pretty cool, and I enjoyed every second of it.
I already knew most of the C++ language itself, but I've never taken any course about the different ways of programming, and which way suits best each solution. This was exactly what I wanted to learn, and I feel much more professional now
The course talked about the following things, and we had to write also real C++ code for most of the ways we just learned and compile and
Spent a lot of time today house cleaning. No not code, literally the house. It's amazing what teenagers can do to your treasured Monty Python DVD collection, it's not funny. Stop that, it's silly.
I over-complicated the map drawing and stripped it down. Added functionality to the TSD page for controlling the map scale. I'm happy that it will work with 3rd party maps too. Oh I just noticed in the screen shots the scale index is off by one.
The green colour is from the low elevation rang
I spent a lot of time last weekend making sure resources are correctly shared between rendering contexts. It's surprising how many commercial games make you restart the game to switch graphics resolutions, and I find it annoying. Leadwerks Engine 3 uses a small hidden window with an OpenGL context to create the OpenGL 3.3 contexts, and it just stays open so there is always a persistent context with which resources are shared. Textures, shaders, and vertex buffers can all be shared between Ope
Working on the tactical situation display elements, the vector font output was never quite as crisp as I'd hoped for but that's now fixed by keeping the 1:1 scale and changing the ortho projection matrix. Bigger works better than smaller when it comes to float accuracy with consumer level drivers that focus on games and performance I guess.
Still have the map scale to do, that's forming part of the mission terminal code. But the rest of the TSD is coming together. I need to put an upper limi
I was working in the cantina of the school the other day when I noticed a showcase by 2 (second years) game developer students. Their project for the last 6 months was to build some kind of interactive system for a rehabilitation center. I was really cool to see and to think of it that only 2 seconds students made this. Really impressive. They also made a bunch of small games but I didn't make a recording after this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiNCt0m-HXY
Another little progress update but first a diversion. Yesterday I took some time-off to brush up on gaming skills and really enjoyed Disney Interactive's "Split Second", one of the few car games I keep going back to since I typically find racing games tedious (lack of skill and patience on my part). However this game is almost pure adrenaline and I find my self coming back to try and shave off 2 seconds while avoiding exploding aircraft and collapsing control towers. Split Second is actually the
I was looking at the problem of glass again, reflections for cockpit instruments and improving the canopy and TADS optics. FSX manages to do so much with so little (a small 128x128 DDS) for shiny metal parts, such as chrome props it was time to look at adding cube mapping again.
I know this has been added to Leadwerks 2.40 but the corona problem doesn't seem to be fixed yet. Retro-fitting cube-maps to 2.31 is an easy task and the river mesh material was updated (we don't use the single heigh
I can now load models in Leadwerks Engine 3 (as of this morning):
Edit - Here's a demonstration of buffers working (as of this afternoon):
Edit - And here's a comparison of a multisampled buffer next to a regular one (as of this evening):
It's nice to see a feature in Leadwerks 3.0 that 2.0 doesn't have.
I'm getting my iMac this week. I'm going for the dual core 3.2 ghz with an upgrade to an ATI Radeon 5750. Mac is still using OpenGL 2.1, and I have no idea how good the drivers ar
Hello everyone.
I am writing this blog entry to personally thank everyone of the Leadwerks forums for helping me in all the ways that you all have.
Today, I got approved for my job at Microsoft.
This all started when I discovered Leadwerks on The Game Creators and was instantly amazed by it. Soon after, Brandon Hush and I got together and created Third Initiative for our university midterm project. We decided to use Leadwerks because it offered superior technology with great support
First of all, a sincere thanks for the feedback. It's not something to get too hung up about and it's easy to get the idea that we spend hours and hours on making HUDs pretty colours without getting anything else done. Yesterday was pretty intensive in terms of tweaks and adjustments to the HUD but not just in terms of colours.
We've added clipping regions (using glScissor() ) so items like the pitch ladder no longer intrude into areas it shouldn't, this declutters and improves overall reada
That might be a question going through some people's minds. The answer is "yes" I'm still working on it. Just much slower than before.
At the start of the project everything was working brilliantly, I'd got as far as adding an external newton into the project. I'd even got it to correctly build the physics shapes from wavefront obj files on-the-fly, and force and torque was all working too. So where did progress suddenly freeze?
The answer was the player controller. I would have to write
HUDs often used in simulators adopt a green hue and use an additive or alpha blend. It can be hard to read them in some conditions and this is something I was thinking about so I tried a few experiments, non of which I like fully.
First: To improving readability of heads up displays by down-sampling the HUD buffer to a smaller buffer (I called the hud_fx_buffer) with a texture filter, a poor-mans blur. Using the resulting 'fuzzy' version to reduce the intensity level of the background image.
Textures in LE3 give you more control. You can retrieve all or part of any mipmap of a texture to system memory, edit the texture, then send it back to the GPU. Fortunately, the engine checks the bounds of the texture so you don't have to worry about producing any blue screens of death, as can happen when you're having too much fun with GPU memory.
Here's some simple code to retrieve the texture from video memory into a system memory bank, modify it, and send it back to the graphics card:
The HMD of the new MTADS Apache comes with a number of 'virtual' items displayed to the pilot. The currently selected waypoint is made virtual in cruise and tranistion modes, the waypoint position is marked with a flat bottomed diamond with a dot in the centre. See the take-off point (W00) on the image below.
Flying with the flight path marker inside this symbol and you should head right to that spot.
Waypoint marker
Source
