Josh

You should be fine if you just create a backup of the individual database. CPanel full website backup obviously can't be trusted. If it's really important, I would do a test restore on a second server just to make sure the data you are saving can actually be restored.

It was created and edited online, but I've been making lots of backups. The problem is the backups don't do what they say they do. There are no options in CPanel to include only parts of a full backup. It's explicit about what it includes, and tech support assured me on two separate occasions the databases would be saved. So I felt pretty good about using it. Even if one archive somehow got corrupted, I had full backups going back for months. The user data lost is very important. This isn't just a forum. People rely on it to host a lot of images, files, and their writing. I hope the protocols I enact will convince them to trust the site again with their data. I'll talk to my uncle about what steps should be taken. My hosting company is actually very highly rated and not cheap, and they've done everything else very well. I won't mention their name for now, but they seemed remarkably unconcerned about this. Their reaction was "Hmmmm, that's interesting, I don't know why the databases aren't being saved."

I am copying files off a USB hard drive right now. It will take hours, and it is 1 AM in California, so I am going to sleep. If I am able to locate any copy of the database it will be good, but it seems very likely to me the CPanel full site backup has been failing to save databases this whole time.

Thanks, but they're all slow. The files are 12 gb each.

Yes. I have the files that were uploaded, but they take some effort to identify because they are just randomly named with no extensions. The application is reinstalled and I can set everything back, but the data in the system is gone. I know, when I realized what had happened I was shocked and devastated. Now you guys are all feeling that. I am looking through the backup archives, but since the most recent two did not contain databases, it seems likely CPanel just never saved them. If anyone can recommend a fast .tar.gz viewer, I'd appreciate it. I'm using WinRAR to view them and it's really slow.

I should, but the full backups aren't full backups. They are all missing the databases, even though they are supposed to include them. Otherwise this would be no big deal. All developers' accounts have been reinstated. Email support at leadwerks dot com if you cannot log into your account using your registration key as the password (you can change this to whatever you want).

It's really my fault. For something this important, I should have assumed the backup system would fail.

Your host is rejecting my emails. You need a valid registration key for your Werkspace account to be enabled. Please send me a private message on this forum if you have any other questions.

Uploaded newton.dll 2.22.

Although... Since the most complex controls have to be created from scratch to get them to do what I want, it would be fairly simple to code the simpler ones like buttons, and have complete control of the color scheme...

It will use the native GUI on each OS. If you do not like that, your complaint is with your OS, and you should get a Mac. Seriously though, back in the XP days I thought for sure the next logical step would be more customization so you can make dark themes that actually look good, and allow each window to control its own colors, but then Steve Ballmer came along and blinged the OS up.

What about packets that may be lost or not arrive in order?

The editor already detects changes to all asset files in real-time and will reload them automatically.

Last week I compiled the engine into a DLL and a static lib. That was pretty painless, and I have the project set up so it's easy to switch back and forth. I still haven't got Code::Blocks compiling right, which I will need for the Linux build. It can't seem to find any libs, but it's not too important yet. After altering the behavior of the MaxGUI canvas slightly, I was able to load the engine DLL in BlitzMax and display 3D rendering on a windowed application. It's very easy to do this in LE3: gadget:Byte Ptr = CreateWindowsCustomGadget( QueryGadget(canvas,QUERY_HWND) ) context:Byte Ptr = CreateContext( gadget ) Or with C: Gadget* gadget = CreateWindowsCustomGadget( HWND hwnd ); Context* context = CreateContext( gadget ); The editor is taking shape, though it is still very early. It feels like a cross between Visual Studio and Valve Hammer Editor (Worldcraft) which are both programs I like a lot. I knew from the beginning the only acceptable way to display assets would be a draggable, multi-select treeview with icons. For the scene hierarchy, I wanted checkboxes and icons. I looked at ways to hack the Windows treeviews and I looked at wxWidgets, and didn't find anything suitable that would work on all platforms. At last resort, I started writing my own custom control on a graphics window, and I'm getting surprisingly good results with that. The behavior is about 60% functional now, and it's faster than the Windows tree view because it's completely hardware accelerated. The only problem is that the FreeType text does not match the Windows GUI font 100% completely, even though it's using the same font and size. I'll see if there's anything I can do to make it match more closely. The reason I am spending so much time on this tree control is because drag and drop is used everywhere in the new editor. You can drag a texture onto a material, drag a material onto a model, rearrange nodes in the scene hierarchy, and even move files around on your hard drive. So it's not surprising if some customization is needed to support this functionality. Knowing the kinds of things people want to do like copy all used assets into a folder ("Publish") and import a bunch of models they downloaded off the internets, it's kind of fun to design interfaces to make development easier. My goal for the LE3 editor is to have more of an established official procedure for everything, along with extensive documentation. I've gotten lots of feedback from some fantastic artists, so I know what will help them get a large project done faster. That's all for now. I've got a lot to do!

Newton can probably get about 3 times speed improvement on a quad core. BlitzMax won't work with Newton multithreading, due to the use of callbacks. I've done networked physics wth good results, all calculated on the server. It is not necessary for the clients to all process physics separately, for shared physics objects. The problems I see with Newton are the lack of scaled matrices, soft bodies, and cloth. I've seen that PAL lib, but you'll notice there's no support for vehicles or anything advanced. I don't think it's possible to design a general physics API without ignoring advanced features of each system. My preference is probably PhysX, simply because NVidia has put a lot of marketing effort into the name, and that makes the algorithms the best by default.

It's a case of accuracy versus performance. The Bullet boxes slide forward at the base and the entire stack collapses. The Newton stack collapses from the top, and a stable base is left over. Most physics libraries can't handle stable stacking of very many objects. If your game is "dodge 500 falling boxes" then I can see how the first would be better, but I tend to favor stable interactions of simple things like doors and jointed machines. We'll probably switch to PhysX or Bullet, but you will see errors in simple behavior, and you will have to deal with stability issues you take for granted right now.

Sorry about that.

Ah ****. I don't have any way of restoring that, other than reverting the database to the last backup.

How annoying. I got rid of them all.

The scene was posted on the forum a while ago.

If you want to convert the models, I can contact Rick and he will probably be interested in selling a pack for LE.

The physics is being implemented as an abstract physics driver class as well. I have worked in great depth with Newton, and have done some work with PhysX. I do not know how feasible it is to implement an abstract command set because of fundamental difference in the way the different libraries work. I'm sure it would work well for rigid bodies and simple things, but I won't know how comparable more complex things are until I start working with them. I only want to provide official support for one physics library. If other people want to do their own, that's an option. Bullet has good features and seems to have better cross-platform support than PhysX. PhysX has GPU acceleration on NVidia cards right now, and brand recognition. Newton is the best for basic rigid bodies, but it seems like progress in its development has stopped. I'll have to research them more before I make a decision.

It just has an apple on the back side. So does the mouse, so they match now. The green light is my Android phone plugged into it.

When I saw specs for the graphics card they are using in the new iMacs, I knew it was time for Leadwerks to come to Mac. Steam for Mac also recently came out, so the time seems right for Mac gaming. Of course, some guy blew up the Roseville Galleria, so the Apple store was closed. I ordered the 27" iMac with a 3.2 ghz dual core processor and upgraded the graphics card to an ATI 5750. Here's what they sent me: The computer case/monitor (it's all one piece) is a solid piece of aluminum that doesn't bend or crackle when you pick it up, like most PC equipment. It's very nice to have a solid geometric shape with such stability. The keyboard looks weird at first, but I got used to typing on the low flat keys very quickly. The mouse has a touch surface instead of a mouse wheel, which works well for scrolling pages, but doesn't work at all for switching weapons in a game. The shape of the mouse is not very ergonomic, and I don't think I will be able to use it for extended periods of time unless I figure out a better way to hold it. The mouse and keyboard are both wireless. In fact, I have a computer with speakers, mouse, keyboard, camera, and internet, and only one cord is coming out of it, for power. It definitely cuts down on space and mess. The monitor is the most beautiful I have ever seen. It's 27 inches with a native resolution of 2560x1440. At that resolution, you can't even see the individual pixels. The desktop background looks like a photograph because you can't see pixels. I have a black and white photo in the background and I can see individual grains of sand on a beach. It's really incredible. Unfortunately, the OS has not adjusted to this fine resolution. There is no way to adjust the font size for the whole interface, so if you have the monitor set at its native resolution you will be looking at text that would be about a size 6 or 7 on a 1920x1080 monitor of the same physical size. You can lower the resolution, but then text gets slightly blurred. A few programs like Xcode and Safari let you adjust some of the text sizes, so that is what I am getting by with for now. This giant image is squeezed onto a 27" monitor: The speakers embedded in the monitor (that I didn't even know existed) are surprisingly good. I sort of got used to my bass-heavy Altec Lansing speakers with bad shielding and a constant buzz. It's nice to have good clear speakers and no subwoofer to trip over. The ATI 5750 has 720 stream processors (equivalent to about 144 NVidia stream processors) but I was apprehensive about performance because it is a mobile card. Source engine games ran great with max settings at the monitor's native resolution of 2560x1440. Remember, this is running in native OSX, not Windows with boot camp: I wanted to see how a more demanding engine would do, so I installed Windows 7 on a separate partition and ran Crysis. I was surprised to see the game running with max settings at about 18 frames per second, at the monitor's massive resolution. Of course, lowering the screen resolution improved performance. So that was not bad at all. I spent some time with the Mac developer tool Xcode. It's about the same as Visual Studio. It uses GCC to compile, which cuts the ten minute build time in Visual Studio down to about a minute. I could get the same results on Windows using Code::Blocks so that's not really a Mac thing, but it's nice to work with. I am pleased to say that Leadwerks Engine 3 is now compiling for Windows and MacOS. The Mac version has no graphics or GUI yet, but it compiles without any errors, and that is a big achievement. Linux should be easy now, since it's a lot more like Mac than Mac is like Windows. I also tried out the iPhone SDK and was pleased to see the iPhone emulator starts up almost instantly. By contrast, the Android SDK took me about 45 minutes to install the first time, and it took ten minutes for the emulator to start. So my conclusion on Mac is that I am very pleased with just about every aspect of them. You could reasonably get away with only having an iMac for development, because it allows you to make games for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iPhone. I may make MacOS my main operating system, although I have to keep some other machines around for compatibility testing. It's taking some extra time to get the cross-platform support for Leadwerks Engine 3 in from the beginning, but I think a couple extra weeks spent now will be well worth it in the long run. Soon enough the code will be platform-agnostic, meaning I can just work with my own code, instead of trying to figure out somebody's else's designs. I picked up Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 last week in a Steam Halloween sale. I'm starting with the first one, and I absolutely love it. I've always liked co-op play since Duke Nukem, and there hasn't been nearly enough of it available. I also love zombie movies, so Left 4 Dead is right up my alley.

heh, that's what happens when you don't include the C files in the project.