3.5 release candidate available

Entry posted by Josh · May 3, 2015

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An update is available which is a release candidate for version 3.5. Version 3.5 adds carve and hollow CSG operations, an improved project template system, and customizable filters for scene objects. In this update I reverted the group selection behavior to the same way it works in 3.4, and decided to hold off on adding an extra grouping feature. I expect a lot of new users soon, so stability is my most important goal.

The summer games tournament is coming soon! We had a really great turnout in the Halloween and Winter Games Tournament, and I am expecting a bigger result this time. There is some special surprises that make this a much bigger event, but you'll find that out soon enough.

Jorn and I are working together on a new set of comprehensive tutorials that cover ever aspect of Leadwerks. The Word document containing all the info is about 50 pages right now, so it's pretty comprehensive! The idea is to have one linear list of lessons, so we can eliminate all the nested information tucked away in confusing places. This will be rolled out alongside version 3.5.

The pace of new feature development has been pretty conservative lately, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes. We are working with third-party artists to prepare their content for distribution in our system. If you've been following the Skyrim news, it remains to be seen how the Steam Workshop will develop. Nothing else to say yet, but I think we will go forward with this one way or another.

Leadwerks Game Launcher is also in development. I expect a long beta testing period with a very large user base. Publishing your game for Leadwerks Game Launcher is a way to instantly put it in front of a lot of people, definitely a lot more players than you would get if you uploaded it online somewhere. This is important because I don't think making games is our primary challenge anymore. Leadwerks is really good at making that process simple, and the participation we see in the game tournaments confirms this. Our primary challenge is what to do with simple fun playable games once they are made. Five years ago, the answer would have been to sell them in the iOS App Store, but that's no longer a viable option. So what to do? That's what I want to solve.

A while back, the Steamworks UGC class was replaced with a newer iUGC class. This has unlimited file sizes, no upload quotas, and is more likely to be better supported than the older API. We are still using the original UGC class, but I think we need to upgrade this internally to the newer API. I suspect this will fix a number of small issues, and I don't think we can really expect Valve to keep working on the deprecated functionality, so filing bug reports there is probably not very effective. In fact, a revision of our Workshop integration is probably in order as we gear up for upcoming plans.