Josh

I estimate with pretty good confidence that the majority of times a Leadwerks game is or will be run on an end user's computer, it won't involve an installer at all. Someone will email a zip file, or it will be downloaded through a web browser plugin, and no traditional installer program will be used. In any event, when that doesn't work it falls back to me. The OpenAL installer alone has caused me a tremendous amount of problems. It's hard for a technically competent person to understand, but the Windows installation method is utterly broken, for your average consumer. It's safe to say the average consumer doesn't even know how to install a program, and if they did they don't want to, for fear of viruses or crapware. You have to understand, the normal usage model for most people is to purchase a low-price laptop, never reformat or maintain, then throw it out after 12 months and buy another when performance slows down. Therefore, every program they install carries a financial risk because it can make their replacement cost come sooner. I know it's idiotic, but that's really how people are. A lot of people don't even realize you can install a game on a PC and play it. To them, PC gaming = Farmville. I reformatted my neighbor's computer a couple months ago, and now it's covered in Ask.com and other crapware again. I gave up and told her to buy a Mac. Overcoming the barriers to getting a game on the consumer's hard drive is hugely important. It shouldn't be this way, but it is and we have to deal with it until a better system comes along.

I believe there's a significant number of computers that don't have the VC 2010 Redistributable Package installed.

It's pretty amazing how long the materials, textures, and shader system is taking, but it encompasses a lot of areas: Automatic asset reloading, autogenerated shaders, GLSL syntax highlighting, texture conversion options, and more. All this attention to detail is shaping up to create what I hope will be the best art pipeline, ever. The Asset Browser displays all files in your project directory. You don't have to use Windows Explorer at all anymore. You can rename, move, copy, cut, paste, and delete files, without ever leaving the editor: All recognized asset files are displayed in the editor, including materials, textures, shaders, sounds, scripts, models, and fonts: You can edit textures, materials, and shaders, and see how your changes interact in real-time:

We use Visual Studio 2008 for Windows, Xcode for OSX and iOS, and Eclipse for Android.

What will probably end up happening is I will expose various hooks and events, with the disclaimer that the system is completely experimental and could change at any time. Then after a long period of trial and error, the system will be finalized and become a real supported feature.

Eventually, I intend to have an editor script system that plugs into editor events and can control objects in the engine. As for letting entity scripts themselves access the editor, that seems difficult, because they would need to run with and without the editor. I am not going to include any plugin or editor script functionality in the first release because I can't design a system to solve an undefined problem. I'll let people use the editor for a while, find out what kinds of things they want to do with it, and then design a plugin system with that knowledge. If I tried to design that now we would end up with a system that doesn't really work.

That's something else I don't like. I have to continuously decide which languages warrant a separate subforum, and people form camps and start holy wars over it. I have declared repeatedly that all programming languages are terrible, so I don't understand what the fuss is about.

If your texture really only needs to be white, blue, or red, the entity color will work for that.

I can output Visual Studio help with this. Is that the same thing?

It's only useful if you are consistently checking for new content every 24 hours or so, or else you will be reading through multiple pages of content.

I sent you a link. It's normally not accepted because it's bad for digital goods, and even worse when I act as an intermediary, as I do with the Leadwerks Asset Store.

What I mean is that in C++, you have to include headers, add .cpp files into a project, then you usually have a lot of dependencies, macros defined in the project, and probably some other things I am leaving out...if it even compiles on all platforms, which most code does not. I have never once in my life included a single .cpp file in a project. The only times I have incorporated other people's code was as a whole library that performed some self-contained task, or very occasionally a single function I rename and change the syntax of. The hardest programming I've ever done was trawling through the Recast source code. I'm not trying to discourage you. I think you have much better chances of achieving this with Leadwerks3D, since it has more built-in functionality everyone can count on acting the same. It's like graphics APIs. Without OpenGL, things would be a mess and no one would work together, but because there is a common standard that can't be altered, programmers don't have to keep implementing the same things and can actually share OpenGL examples. Pathfinding and AI are normally a big system that interacts with lots of different parts. Guns shoot enemies, paths have to be loaded or calculated when a map is loaded, AI has to interact with the path data. Leadwerks3D simplifies that gameplay subsystem so now everyone can rely on those commands. If I can reduce the size of a Leadwerks3D C++ project, so you can do something like Left 4 Dead in a couple hundred lines of code, then we're going to see a lot more sharing and cooperation, notwithstanding the Lua aspect of it.

All difficult technical challenges for the completion of Leadwerks3D are solved. This includes navmesh pathfinding, cross-platform support, Lua and C# integration, OpenGLES rendering, the abstract driver model, etc., etc., etc. Basically, all the scary stuff is done, and the only thing that remains is hard work. I'll be turning my attention back to the editor shortly, but first I wanted to address a different kind of challenge: Documentation and the website. The present appearance of the website took a long time to develop, and is the result of four or five different people's work. It was difficult to find him, but I finally came across the one who is the master of the forum software and CMS we use. He was able to fix a few small issues I had, but he did not design the site. Now he has bee recruited to create a new website theme using the good elements of our current design, in a Web 2.0-ish style. We're also planning on an improved image and video gallery, and a better display for community articles. Professional web design services will be used to create product pages for Leadwerks3D that truly reflect how awesome the software is. I'm not a web designer, and I am happily surrendering that responsibility to someone who has instructions to develop Web 2,0-style product pages with my content. Last summer we launched a lot of new website features including a chat bar, video gallery, and embedded documentation. The first two were a success that I feel really add to the site experience. The third I consider somewhat of a failure. The documentation search is not very good, the pages take too long to load, and the organization is too categorical. I installed a temporary Wiki where I have been jotting down docs and ideas, but I wasn't committed to the idea of using it for the Leadwerks3D documentation. Then I found the documentation system we're going to use. Leadwerks3D documentation will be available in a two-panel searchable HTML page, which is pretty standard. However, the same docs can also be exported in PDF and even EPub format, which is what iBooks uses: So, with the documentation system decided and web design out of my hands, I now turn back to the Leadwerks3D editor...

The game framework sounds great but once you reach a certain level of complexity, others can no longer modify or extend the code. Remember my framework code? Then you are simply maintaining an open source game and taking feature requests. I'm putting all my hopes into entity scripts for future shareable code. C++ will never produce shareable code because the cost of adding code into a project is high. I don't think I have ever added a single c++ code file into a project. It's always a mass of interconnected classes. With lua in the new engine there is a predefined standard scripts can use to communicate and integrating new code is easy.

In the next version of IPB, it searches the appropriate database when you are on a page. You can search the database right now, but you have to open the full search, click on "website", then select the articles database.

The reason I don't read all the posts in "View New Posts" is because it contains lots of various topics, and the ones that need my attention mostly are programming topics. It's easier if I can see one forum and view which topics I haven't read yet, instead of having several pages of all activity in the last few days. The protected forums is one of the best decision I have made. Before that, it was chaos. By default, the search in the site header searches as though your query was in quotes. That sucks, and I will try to fix it. IPB has a ton of features, but I sometimes wonder if the people who implement them even use internet forums. IPB 3.2 is supposed to have some better search functionality, and we have a copy of Werkspace using that version we are working on. It's been duplicated so we can test it without disturbing the real forum. So you are saying community tutorials should not be allowed? There are too many categories to list, and having multiple levels of hierarchy was causing problems.

Stuff my PC can do my Mac can't: -Burn Blu-Ray discs. (50 gb vs. 3.6 for DVDs). I do use this for periodic Leadwerks.com backups. -Games. The situation on Mac is getting better, but PC is far ahead. -iMacs use mobile GPUs that are very good (Crysis on full, etc.) but they can't match the latest desktop cards. -Hardware upgrades. I'll be adding a solid state drive and an 8-core CPU, when they come out with models and prices I like. For email, internet, C++ programming, and mobile integration, I enjoy the Apple experience more. I think I'm moving towards Mac for every day use, and maintaining a clean Windows 8 install with only a few programs for games and large data archiving.

I agree, they are useful. Just make sure none of the elements in your loop change.

I don't use threading with Newton at all, so neither are called as far as I know.

A few people have asked me about this, so now seems like a good time to talk about my experience with Mac computers. My first computer was actually an old Macintosh SE30, but of course in the 1990's Windows took over and I forgot about Mac. When I started developing Leadwerks3D I invested in a 27" iMac. It includes a 3.2 ghz quad core i3 CPU and an ATI Radeon 5750. At the most minimal, the computer needs one cord for power, and that's it. The keyboard and mouse are wireless, and a built-in wifi receiver is convenient before you string a cable over from your router. It took a while for me to adjust to it, and I didn't have a big motivation to because it was just a dev machine. However, I started noticing the way it integrated really nicely with my iPhone and iPad (which I also only bought for development). Xcode 4 is a great IDE, and since it uses GCC build times are very quick. I think the build time for Leadwerks3D is about 1-2 minutes, compared to five on Windows. iOS provisioning profiles, which you need to run your app on a iOS device, are a pain but you can run the iOS simulator with no iOS dev account, and it does a good job. OSX Lion supports OpenGL 3.2. I had some early problems getting it to work, but Apple actually analyzed my application and told me what I was doing wrong. In a situation where a lot of new developers are working with OpenGL in a way that wasn't previously supported on Mac, I think it's understandable that they would need to provide a little extra support. So with that resolved, I don't see any problems with rendering on Mac, EXCEPT: -Even thought the hardware supports it, you can't do hardware tessellation, since OpenGL 4 isn't supported. -Deferred rendering with MSAA isn't supported. Well, technically it is supported, but the maximum number of samples is one. So it isn't. As for the OpenGL 2 renderer we use to match mobile device rendering, there's no disadvantage there. iCloud is a new part of iOS 5, and it's great because my bookmarks are always synced. I know there are various plugins that do this for other browsers, but with Apple it just always works, without requiring any effort on your part. Mail through me.com, which you can get a free account for, is always synced. I've tried setting up IMAP mail systems, and they just never really work properly. iCloud mail is by far the best email syncing I have ever seen. It's as instantaneous as GMail, but uses a local client so it is fast and responsive. The Mac Mail app itself is both simple and sophisticated. It doesn't have nearly the number of features as Outlook, yet somehow it does exactly what I want. Email search is near-instant, and it separates accounts so I can look at all mail, or easily select a single account and only view email for that address. There's a lot of good third-party apps available in the Mac App Store. Transmit is a solid FTP client, and Cornerstone is a great SVN client. The iWork suite provides an adequate replacement for Office. You can even install Steam, although the only games I have that run on Mac are Valve's library and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. iCal, the calendar app, syncs wirelessly through iCloud. This is the first time in my life I have ever actually used a calendar program for real life. It can send out alerts before an event, and everything is synced across my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. There does seem to be a bug right now where events created on my Mac don't go out to the mobile devices. Mostly due to the strength of the Mail app and Xcode, I now consider the Mac my "main" machine. For me, Windows is just a platform to run Steam on and compile builds for Windows. The purpose of this blog entry isn't to convince you one OS is better than any other. I would not be able to get by without my PC for some things. If you're thinking about getting into iOS or OSX development, Mac computers now have my seal of approval. Of course, you can install Windows with Boot Camp, so it doesn't have to be an either/or choice. The only reason I still have a physical PC is because mine has hardware that isn't available on Mac, like a Blu-Ray burner and a massive GEForce 480 GPU. I'd have a hard time giving up the infinite upgradability of a PC, but I do like my Mac.

Leadwerks Engine is pretty flexible, so you can process collisions on the server, and the server does not need to render anything. However, the server machine must still meet the minimum rendering requirements. Leadwerks3D (the new software I am working on) has better support for machines with no graphics cards. It is possible to run a dedicated server with no GPU.

2 decimal places = cm.

You can set it for each of the three stages: SetShadowOffset(linear,multiplicative,0) SetShadowOffset(linear,multiplicative,1) SetShadowOffset(linear,multiplicative,2)

If there's no finished documented game, even a simple one, then there's no product.