In just three weeks, the Linux community has successfully funded the development of Leadwerks for Linux. This means we're going to bring Leadwerks 3.1 to Linux, with native support for developing Linux games...so Linux games can now be completely free from Windows.

Greenlight

It's been an amazing few weeks. During this time, we also successfully completed our Greenlight campaign to make Leadwerks available on Steam and take advantage of features like the Steam Workshop. You can see from the graph below that our campaign did better than any other software in Steam we had data for. The votes look like they would have gone a lot higher, but Valve approved us early!

 

Megatextures

I also had a chance to prototype the major feature of Leadwerks 3.1 I was most concerned about. I wanted to implement a new terrain system that would remove the limitations of our old one, and thought that a technique I call "dynamic megatextures" would be a good solution. Basically, this works like id Software's megatexture technology, only the virtual textures are generated on-the-fly rather than being paged from the hard drive. This means the entire terrain can be uniquely textured, but it doesn't require the hard drive space megatextures usually need:

 

 

Getting that knocked out of the way makes me confident we can deliver Leadwerks 3.1 for Linux according to our original vision.

 

Congratulations, Linux community! I'm happy to make Linux a core part of our company's focus moving forward.