Dave sent me his first bridge work for crossing the Death Star trench across our terrain.
Pictured below is an editor scene showing it in place with some of our other 3D assets rolling across it.
Five brickwork textures were used to break up the surface detail with colour matching used to make it blend with the terrain textures.
Last night I finished playing around with the cockpit night lighting thanks to Bushmaster and his reference photos and nudging to fix the colours. Three
The recent thread about Netwerks (wrapper for ENet) got me thinking some more about the library. I decided to fire up the latest source distribution and get hacking away at it. In this blog post, I'll share some of the modifications I have done to the library to make it a bit more usable as a core networking library to build on top of.
Let me start off by saying that ENet is a pretty well designed low level library. I've always liked the design, which you can read about here. The documentati
All actions relating to the AH64D go though a message receiver. Player mount, dismount, ground crew arming, lights, AI commanding and (getting to the point) virtual cockpit interactions.
The MPD button naming convention of "MPD_1_17" refering to MPD 1 (pilot left) and key 17 (counting from top left) that gets sent to the input handler for that MPD.
Key messages can originate from the client or network. I had to add a source ID to account for situations where one person in the same vehicl
well.. recently most of things became unwelcome to our project. some were our personal problems and some were not.. anyway according to our limited time, we had to work two times harder! and we are! the only thing makes us energetic, is to make more and more features work. unfortunately we lost our animator too and after two weeks looking for an animator, finally I have to do animate characters by myself. in these 2-3 days I could make a new rig template for characters and results seems good o
This post will talk about the (E)mbedded (W)eb (S)erver (I)nterface library I have been working on the past couple of days. In addition, this will probably be the last major post about the library for a while since I need to move on to more tech demos of other things. I'm not going to give up the project, but I've reached a point where I need to work on other things before investing more time on using the library in a practical application. In other words, I've put in the time to developing the
I like standard interfaces. I like the consistency of having all programs look the same. That's why web browsers bug me a lot sometimes; They each have their own unique look. It's disappointing to me how Microsoft has gotten away from this idea. Why oh why can't Windows have skins? But I digress.
In terms of performance, my favorite browser would probably be Opera. In terms of appearance, my favorite is Internet Explorer 6. I know, web designers hate it for its quirks. I don't use i
The world of games, game development and game design is awesome. I just love it. The fun part is, that I only realised this since the past year and a half. Before that, I just liked playing games. Nothing else slipped in to my mind about "how a game is made etc.".
I like to tell you a little story about myself. We didn't have a computer at home until I was 10. Before that, I used to play games at my neighbours house. My neighgbours where German and their kid had a computer at his room with o
I've been working a lot on the business side of Leadwerks lately, and although the results aren't yet visible, it's important to ensure our long-term goals are achieved. I wish I could say more right now.
My main machine is back on Windows XP. I don't want to discuss the relative merits of operating systems, but for me Windows XP is more productive. Other people might not work the way I do, so they will have their own preferences, and no one is "wrong". That said, I am surprised with ho
Currently I am taking a small break from actual coding right now, give or take the odd few hours now and then I thought it best to start construction of my testing level, or at least get the main parts of it built as the testing scene/areas are blueprints for a project I have had in mind for a while, basically some nasty persons do some nasty things which in turn brings about a whole lot of nasty and the player is the antidote to nasty in general. Yeah, not much of "game description" but radic
In my last blog post, "Why didn't I think about this earlier..." moment, I talked a little about how cool I thought the idea of having an embedded web server would be in your applications. So, for the past couple of days, I've spent some time implementing the idea and coming up with a simple tech demo alongside Leadwerks to show off the basics.
First, I had to code a simple TCP server. This was an easy task for me since I've kind of specialized in network programming for the past couple of y
In every type of program or game, the most annoying step for me is the installation setup. If you don't really need particular setup layout or functionality, then Inno Setup can be what you are looking for saving your time (and money, since it is free!). Here I go to explain how you can build the setup application for your game in few easy steps.
From the Inno Setup IDE begin to create a new script with wizard and compile the fields as you need:
The next step is to choose the default i
Quick update. Busy working on a lot of small things. We have a cockpit update coming to update MPDs, internal and external night lighting. MPDs taking to the TStores class and working towards having a number of cockpit functions up and ready for the start-up. Dave added the CP/G throttle panel too (which removes the power switch and engine startup).
Experiencing a problem with fps slowdown over time again. Mostly down to repeatedly running combat-helo, stop, edit, re-run. FPS drops to single
Recently I was doing research on some stuff when I came across this article: Web-Based Real-Time Application Analysis. I gave it a read through, modified the code a little, and tested it out. Sure enough, it worked.
Suddenly, the light bulbs in my head started lighting up.
Why didn't I think about this earlier?!
See, in the past, I've only through to use my application to generate web friendly log reports (an example) or used my application front end to communicate with a server back
The art-gnome at Combat-Helo has been playing with bloom and glow shader materials for the cockpit and came up with instrument night lighting. I thought it was a cool use of extra texture stages and materials with Leadwerks engine, it's an easy effect to add. With additional green point lights around the pit it should look pretty close to the real deal.
Here's a real shot with night lighting. Panel back-lighting and small point lights.
Source
This is OpenGL, vector based rendered to an offscreen buffer, now with added mipmaps. I'll try and detail the functions of these pages and sub-modes as I go and allow you to submit corrections early on.
The WEP (weapons) MFD page
Pictured below shoing the gun sub-mode. Main feature is the bust limit selector on the left side indicating the number of rounds fired when the pilot commands. The bottom MFD buttons marked GUN, MSL and RKT will switch the weapons and display rounds and options.
Like many hobbyist developers, I was looking for the biggest bang for the buck. So I experimented with every engine out there that I could find. One of the most common problems I found regardless of the engine is the challenge associated with the content pipeline.
Some engines use proprietary formats like Torque's DTS, or DIF, and others use common, but dreadfully inefficient formats like Microsoft's .x format. Leadwerks uses its .gmf or Game Model Format. And there in was my first obs
I have noticed the usefulness of others blogs on this site, and thought that my efforts to learn and utilize this great leadwerks engine might eventually be beneficial to others getting off the ground.
First and foremost, I am a decidedly avid fan of Blitzmax. At work, we use C# and Java which is great for professional work. I run a software company for my day job. But I am just a hobbyist at home. This means, I have no grandiose designs for the next great MMO, but rather just love playi
Today I took a break from the current pure3d game-art job and enjoyed the weekend. But I also took my magic blue carpet and camera with me to make shots for upcoming vegetation sets. A friend at Crytek showed me this photograph technique some time ago (they do it in a more professional manner). I just take a small branch with leaves from the bush/tree place it on my blue carpet and take a picture. Cloudy days are best because you get a nice ambient color without shadows. The middle photo was ta
AD has been finishing more of the villages and green zones around the region. You can read more about it here...
SimHQ Dev Diary update
This is "Dara" in the Northern region (See map below)
Source
Hello again, everyone! It's been a busy few weeks on the Zone project, and a lot has been accomplished. Besides the work presented here, a lot has been going on behind the scenes as well. Last week Josh wrote the GMF Processor, which collapses GMF models into an optimized mesh. This tool has helped speed up in-engine performance significantly, and you can try it out for yourself here: http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/topic/1767-gmf-processor/
I've also been fixing mesh errors and c
Progress has been good over the past few days of working on the editor. I've been implementing more logic for handling the designing of GUIs as well as adding some features that are vital for efficient GUI designing. I still have a bit of work to do and code to cleanup, but things are looking very good right now.
Here are some updated development screenshots.
I added the ability to easily resize the application to commonly used screen resolutions. I took this idea from the original CELay
I'm in the process of adding the weapon systems; avionics and links to the stores. While that's coming along at a steady pace I often come across a bit of code and think "I could quickly do this..."
So I just quickly added the third-person cam; as we don't yet have any character models I'm having to use this laughable code generated place-holder.
Character height is 1.8m.
We're going to require a rigged humanoid with a number of animations for sitting, prone, kneeling, aiming,
Spent the day working on the Helicopter entity and the sub-classes that handle all the pylons and stores. It's worth spending time automating these things as much as possible now to simply things later.
I broke out UMLet, a nice fast Java based UML editor to look at my structure. What's missing is the store-jett which needs to be a function of [TStore], pass it the pylon number and it will be required to generate the physics object, parent the rail/pod/fuel cell, detach it from the pylon and
