Development Blog

Nice work!

I've written some Android apps, and from my experience it's indeed easier and more productive to write first a fully working Windows game, and then compile it for Android. With LE3 that will be super easy, because it's the first 3D engine which supports C++ on Android. Other engines use Lua, or similar scripting languages, but they are too slow for advanced games.

Is it really? I didn't know that.

In my robot demo, I got about 20 FPS less in Lua than with C++, because it needs to calculate forces for each 8 limbs of each 40 robots each frame. That's apparently too much iterations for Lua. With LuaJIT it might be fast enough though. Sometimes there were also unexplainable halts for a second, which might be because of Lua's Gargabe Collection. In C++ it there are no halts.

 

Or did you mean the LE3 is the first C++ engine for Android? Yeah it is, because there are only 3 somewhat usable engines for Android, and one of them is pure Java, one is JavaScript, and one is Lua.

I meant the second thing, but the "somewhat usable" qualifier raises doubt.

I would buy immediately a good Android engine if there was one. I bought already one, but it's not perfect. LE3 might be perfect, if it has shadows

Won't the shadows pretty much still have to be baked though? Isn't that a limitation of the hardware?

Won't the shadows pretty much still have to be baked though? Isn't that a limitation of the hardware?

The capabilities are about the same as the Source engine, so you use lightmaps together with projected shadows. I've done these in the past, so it's easy for me to do.

huh? i thought LE's lua was luaJIT as of 2.41?

It is.

 

I think Lua may be faster in L3D because the binding with C++ will probably be a lot more efficient than what we are doing now. Don't have any numbers to back that up, but it's just my guess.