Leadwerks Engine SDK 2.31 is now available. A new SDK installer in the download area allows you to download different versions of the SDK. You must have an activated Leadwerks account to download the new SDK installer.

New features include lighting optimizations for point and spot lights. You can read about this feature in detail here. Another new feature is character controller crouching behavior. Note that the origin of character controllers has been moved to the very bottom of the controller, instead of the vertical center. In addition, particle emitters will now store the particle velocity in the first texture coordinate array of the surface. This allows the implementation of directional particles, for elongated sparks or other non-circular particles.

Shadow updating can be a bottleneck in rendering. To make matters worse, point lights require a total of six passes when its shadow is refreshed. We solved this problem by only redrawing shadows of objects that moved. The shadow is then combined with the rest of the cached shadow buffer, to make the final shadow map. The net result is fully dynamic point light shadows using a proper six-sided shadow map, with less rendering cost and better quality than dual parabolic shadow maps.