Josh

I don't think Windows service packs will have anything to do with it, but you should update your drivers: www.ati.com The demo version is rather old so it's not a good reflection of the current engine. I'm working to get a new demo out.

Tessellation and LOD don't really have anything to do with each other. Unfortunately, I can't rely on tessellation for terrain LOD because it only works on a very small fraction of total supported hardware. It would be awesome to just draw a quad and let the GPU create all the terrain detail dynamically by distance. I don't think the results would be much different, but it would cut down on the complexity of the code I write. There's a lot of confusion about tessellation, and I think they've done a poor job of explaining it. As I see it, tessellation is the final answer to surface detail. First there was plain diffuse textures, then bumpmapping, then various parallax shaders, and finally real surface geometry with tessellation. You could replace LOD with carefully designed tessellated models, but it require your assets be modeled that way to begin with, and since it would only work with SM5 cards I don't see this being relied on any time soon. Tessellation detail is controllable dynamically in the shader, so you just supply a detail parameter, and then my shader will use that in the calculation. The shader actually has to calculate distance from camera, so it's quite low-level. Changing detail level on the fly is no problem.

1. Yes. 2. Like LE2, the LOD distances will be near, medium, far, infinite, with control over what each of those values is. This is so the engine can sort objects in a list of objects for each distance, and discard far away objects without having to iterate through each one. For example, if the "far" distance is 200, and the closest point between the camera and a certain octree node is 220, then we know we don't have to check any of the entities in the "far" list for that node.

There is code in the forum from the editor that shows how to do this. It's not super easy, but it's definitely fast and doable.

Yes, that's what I define maintenance as.

Bug fixes and maintenance will continue. Mostly I worry about new driver bugs coming up.

I think iOS was the hardest platform so far to implement, due to the Objective-C nonsense, but ongoing support demands will be relatively low. The Android implementation should be easier, if they are finally doing away with the Java nonsense, but ongoing support will be more demanding. So I intend to make the sales on iOS first so I can afford the support demands of Android.

A WP7 product would have to be totally recoded in C#, including all the libraries I depend on for physics, networking, script, etc. So it would be a totally separate product, Symbian is abandoned. I am not even sure if it does 3D at all. If another platform were added, my money would be on WebOS. Not only that, but everyone wants to "differentiate" themselves so developers can't make the same app run on every platform. iOS has Objective C, and Android has Java.

Vote above.

I don't think iOS even allows you to render in an inactive app and eat up the battery. On OSX and iOS, I'm using an Objective C entry point that calls the C++ main() function. So you can just write your program in plain C++ and not worry about Objective C, except for the default setup code just to make it work. There will be a "Project Wizard"-like dialog in the editor that will create the starting project for you, so you never have to touch any Objective-C yourself. Of course, a pure Lua app bypasses all of that altogether.

In LE3, it's all built into the camera class, so you have command like Camera::SetMotionBlurMode(), etc.

I think brushes get merged upon export.

Does the scene appear fine, otherwise? ATI hasn't fixed their driver bug they created recently that makes terrain not appear He doesn't need a depth buffer for that, since the depth is processed by the time the results are copied to that buffer.

When you delete a face in 3DWS, it is marked as "hidden" and skipped when exporting a file. The face can still be selected and restored, because CSG solids are volumes, not polygons.

It all depends on whether they allow C++ code on Windows Phone 7. Requiring C# only is suicide for their platform. Both Apple and Google realized already programmers don't want an "easy" programming language if it means they have to rewrite their whole program for one platform.

So after a lot of learning and mistakes, I finally have Leadwerks Engine 3 running on OSX Snow Leapord, Lion, and iOS. Rather than write out a detailed blog, I'll just throw a lot of random thoughts your way: -OpenGLES2 is a nice blend of OpenGL 2 and OpenGL 3.3. I'm really surprised my OpenGL 3 shaders translate easily into OpenGLES2 shader code, with only a few changes. In fact, the iOS renderer looks exactly like the deferred OpenGL 3 renderer, except for shadows and some post-effects. The games I have seen running on the iPhone are severely underpowered compared to what they could look like. This little device has quite a lot of power, and you can be sure I will find the way to max out the visuals. -iOS uses it's own texture compression format. This sucks, because it means either you are using uncompressed textures for cross-platform compatibility, or you have to have separate textures for your iOS build. The OpenGL spec really should have a defined compressed format, but I guess there was some patent issue with DXTC compression, or something like that. -Lua and my other cross-platform libraries seem to work just fine with iOS, which is fantastic. I really had no idea when I started this project whether it would really work like I hoped or not, but everything looks good. -The iOS port was probably the hardest one, due to the use of Objective-C. Android should be pretty easy after this. The PS3 is another platform I am really interested in, and my guess is LE3 could be ported to PS3 in a few days or less. -OSX Lion has some very appealing characteristics related to Leadwerks Engine 3. I'm under NDA and can't say exactly what they are, but it's very good for Mac and graphics. BTW, the gestures they are adding to OSX Lion are really fantastic, and reason enough to get the upgrade. There's still a ton of work to do before I have an actual product ready to release, but the plan is working and we're on track for a fantastic 3D development system for a wide variety of platforms.

OpenAL is usually installed on most systems since it is used in many games: http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip

There was a change a while back, I think around 1.40. Of course the latest will always work.

The upgrade to LE3 will cost substantially less than a Unity license. I can't comment on the price of a new license, because I don't know at this time what it will be.

Oh yeah, there's also Armadillo and ASProtect, and they won't require any changes to your code.

The problem is actually that the light near and far ranges aren't set high enough to render the shadow. This can be set in the light properties dialog.

I'm not sure what else you expect to see in that situation. It looks like that car is travellng about 100 MPH down a narrow dirt road.

How does the iOS file system work? The standard C++ io functions compile just fine, but when I try to read a file it is always not found. Do I have to add files as resources in the Xcode project? I'd really prefer to store files in a real folder, not built into the project. Recompiling an app every time you add an art asset would be a pain.

The Asset Store skin is going to display file thumbnails with transparency and no border. You can take advantage of this by making thumbnails of your items in .png format with alpha transparency. This will look especially good for 3D models. Here's an example: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files/file/217-codeblocks-template-for-leadwerks-builder'>http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files/file/217-codeblocks-template-for-leadwerks-builder Downsampled images will look best because it will antialias the alpha map. These will also show up on the category pages: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files 3D models with alpha transparency will look similar to app icons in Apple's App Store, and look enticing to viewers.

Move those tires inwards a bit to prevent problems. You can put the visual tire mesh wherever you want, but the physics tire should be inside the body.