I wasn't going to add a complete gui system, we don't need anything complex. The address book needs to accept input from mouse and keyboard and when I thought about it, the planned map viewer/editor will require it too.
It had to be a simple gui system with input focus and keyboard entry. Since the chat console had functions for filtering keys and the input mapper directed keyboard input into it when active it was simple enough to change it to send to a gui class and whatever control input h
This is a quick blog to fill you in on some of the features planned for Leadwerks Engine 3.0.
-Any entity can be a physics body. The body command set will become general entity commands, i.e. Entity.SetVelocity(). You can make an entity physically interactive with Entity.SetShape( shape ).
-Any entity can have any number of scripts attached to it. The basic model script functions will be supported for all entities, plus specialized script functions for certain entities. For example,
We've been using the black and orange diamond logo for some time, it needed to reflect the game colour palette. As a 90's homage to sims of that era, a saturated colour scheme with the GUI elements using 90'-45' angles, black and orange. Two contrasting colours that are visible against most backgrounds.
It wasn't until after I had designed and coded a number of elements that I noticed other military games using the same colours.
Why bother with stuff like splash screens at this stage?
Today was spent working on reliable interface network client/server connections. It's apparent I need to add some additional items to the top of the screen:
Current world time
Mission Time (as offset of world time)
Connection status indicators (connecting/connected/ping status)
These to sit alongside the current game mode, camera mode and have a suitable background image.
Testing is proving difficult logistically. I would like a fairly inexpensive second PC with small form facto
As promised last week, it's finally time for a new blog update! Lots of new artwork has been created since the last update, but I'm going to start off by posting several large renders of the Zone project from a few weeks ago. These would make for great desktop backgrounds:
The biggest focus of the last few weeks has been the design of the derelict Ukrainian military barracks. This building was based off of a real barracks in the Exclusion Zone. One of the new Leadwerks features that
We finally sourced a a reasonably good infantry soldier, low poly model, rigged, animated and exported. We can fill the screen with dozens of these guys, falling, shooting prone, grenade tossing. We'll give them a couple of weapons they can swap between and a range of helmets swapped in by setting an entity key.
To initially test animation sequences I populated a drop-down control for the editor dialog with the following LUA, chopped up for readability. But lets you pick which frames to
Sometimes you need a break from work and do simple other stuff to get fresh in your mind or just relax a bit. While waiting for my new workstation which I exspect next week plus organizing some work, I had the idea for an additional iconset. I'm a fan of coherent icons in a simple look. I also support the trend of dark UI elements which doesn't hurt the eye if you look at them for hours. Plus dark colors give some kind of a frame around your working canvas.
I never was a big fan of the Leadwer
Just for the sake of writing, here's my computer story. Also, I'm not QQ'ing about anything, it's just the timing of it (weekend) really sucks since I had some stuff I was planning on doing. Anyways though -
Saturday May 15th, I ordered a 2TB backup drive and a sata/ide to usb adapter. I figured I'd go ahead and start backing up all my stuff during the week because one of my hard drives (750gb Seagate Barracuda) had been reporting errors (spin retry count) for over a year now. During that ti
I guess it's been a while since I added a blog entry. Since I don't have anything specific to write about, I've stuck with a generic boring title.
I spent all week working on backing up the past 5 years of my computer life to an external hard drive (WD Elements) as well as another internal one. One of my hard drives has been having some problems lately and I've ignored it for over a year. I decided to stop chancing it and simply put in the time to save all my stuff that I've worked on and ac
Another update of map progress on the SimHQ Combat Helo forums. Showing how the City of Herat as a sprawl of densely packed compounds and commerce is being built. Using blocks of prefabs and arranged on a grid. This is a selection of my favourite.
Meant to be viewed from a low altitude, the prefabs do a good job of keeping the eye busy. Here is half a city already with parks and minarets to add. All built to be frame-rate friendly.
And a mini-game for your base, the "Hello World" of
Before I code the address book, what do you think of this arrangement?
I'm trying to keep interface items as simple as possible as I hate coding fiddly bits. But these things are mandatory for modern multi-player games.
Source
Hello again, everyone! As some of you may of noticed, it's been quite a while since my last blog update. Lots of good things have been going on behind the scenes, which is why there haven't been any recent updates. I'm currently preparing a large blog post for this weekend, but for now you get this little teaser:
Dexsoft's Middle East City pack has been tweaked by the Dave-9000 supercomputer and has produced a low poly high density city block of 1038 polys. Requiring heavy edits of UV co-ordinates and placing all the textures onto a single surface for blinding performance.
Perfect for iPhone and as a building block of the high-density city of Herat.
Source
Today I added the ubiquitous chat console complete with 4 colour coded channel presets, Global, Side, Group, Vehicle. Complete with command parsing (/setkey lets you send keys to any object you're standing before which is handy). The console also has a command history using the UP/DOWN cursor keys.
Chat entry toggled by hitting the ENTER key ala Warcraft. Be aware that the primary action key has moved from the ENTER key to the "P" key (P for primary and also handily close to the square bracke
Hi, It’s my IK arm sample video.
We’ve been trying to implement IK in our characters for a while. this is my first IK simulated arm. However it looks like a robotic arm yet, but when I set some angular limitations, it got better!
I also smoothed its movements. It’s a lot better now.
This video shows my first concepts about an IK arm. It’s a simple arm with 3 limbs, Upper arm, Forearm and palm.
In its LUA script I create a target pivot which my arm try to grab. We sets this targe
Version 2.32 is the biggest internal change in the engine in a long time. It's also the last time version 2.x will undergo this extensive of additions.
LuaJit2 was implemented for fast Lua execution. This initially caused some BMX programs to not compile with the included modules.
The rendering buffer storage scheme was modified somewhat in preparation for a new feature that is unannounced.
Roads and saved to and loaded from SBX files, so they don't have to be generated at runtime.
Airbase preview at our SimHQ forum.
Gluing the airfield into place has been an interesting job, using terrain 'visibility' to cut out terrain chunks and fit it into place. Shindand airfield is used for medical and humanitarian flights, it's currently VFR only and no lighting system. We might modernise it a little for our scenario.
Most NATO flights will come and go from here. A node system for AI aircraft to follow the taxiways and tank-off/land will be added.
Multiplayer options sta
My wife reminds me that it takes typically two weeks after each engine upgrade to get things working as intended.
There's the odd "caps sensitive" issue in some of the LUA source. And a quick change of fw.Main to fw.main in Renderer to get ll the helo/sky scripts working. Rebuilding the lua-gluefunctions and making sure not residue from the previous version was causing problems.
All that's left is handling changes of appearance and shaders....and re-serialising all of the 3D work.
Pe
Formally announcing the foundation of the legal entity Tricubic Studios Ltd. developers of Combat Helo, associated content and iPhone/iPad games / applications.
This doesn't change very much, it grants us a recognised identity for trading, taxation and investment. Plus we get a chance to develop an insipid company website. We plan to have our first mobile platform release ready for the summer. More details on that in a few weeks. Blog updates will continue at this location.
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It's not going to win any awards for realism but we have a rudimentary ENV environment class that handles time-of-day ticking and updating scene elements accordingly. Lighting, colouring, fog, sun position. Currently it's using computed light values which renders lovely post apocalyptic scenes, the colours are terrible IMO, looks like a nuke's gone off. A lookup table will be better and an exercise I'll leave for later. Also I added some data structures for moving weather zones around the map. T
In the name of God
Welcome.
As you know, you are currently reading the FSR Game Development Blog!
in this blog we will share our activities, problems, achievements, technologies, fights and any other things related to our game development process.
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Finally I found some time to convert the four packages to additional formats.
Now all Vegetation and Environment packs have those formats: .max (2010), .gmf, .3ds, .dae, .fbx (2009), .obj
I feel comfortable with the formats now and can concentrate on new packs or make the existing packs "game-ready" for other engines.
But Pure3d also has tons of work to do so it will take a while.
The updates on the formats are free of course and all clients will get a mail within 24h from now on.
