Josh

You're welcome! I hope to go much further. The community deserves credit, too. We have a lot of talent and a positive attitude around here.

Why would you expect the first program to show your image onscreen? Call DrawImage() in between rendering and Flip().

Not at the moment, but I will add more control with command line switches.

The Simul demo just produces a black screen.

Not sure what you mean by "work". It will collapse animated meshes, and then they won't be animated anymore.

You don't have to, but you can. In the future, this will be a silent part of the importation process in the editor. I'll add some more options and control, and you can integrate it into your exporter, if you like.

I'm very interested in your stuff, and I am keeping an eye on this for ideas.

File Name: GMF Optimizer File Submitter: Josh File Submitted: 18 Apr 2010 File Updated: 05 Sep 2011 File Category: Tools This utility loads a GMF file, collapses it into an optimized mesh with the fewest number of surfaces possible, and precalculates Newton raycast data. Version 2.32 will be able to load Newton raycast data straight from a GMF file. This will eliminate the pause that occurs the first time a raycast is performed on a mesh. To process a GMF file, drag it into the executable. To process a directory of files, place the executable in the folder and run it with no command line parameters. You don't have to worry about missing material files, because the program just processes the raw data, and no construction of the actual 3D objects is performed. Click here to download this file

Day/night cycles are something I have thought about for a long time. There's several possible approaches to simulating these, but it wasn't until today that I decided which is best. Here are some options I considered: 1. Shader-based skies with particle clouds. This is the method Crysis employs. A subsurface scattering shader creates the sky background. The mathematics are pretty complex, but the results for an empty blue sky look great. Particle clouds are used to place sparse clouds in the sky. Pros: Clear skies look great. Cons: Not very good for overcast skies, clouds look worse than a skybox, expensive to render. 2. Animated skyboxes. The idea is to animate a looping sequence of skybox animations for a 24-hour cycle, and interpolate between the nearest two frames at all times. Pros: Potentially very high quality results, with a low cost of rendering. Cons: Long rendering times to generate skybox textures, no ability to tweak and adjust skies. The solution I finally arrived at is similar to the day/night cycles in STALKER: Call of Pripyat. A skybox with uniform lighting is used, so that it is not apparent from which direction the sunlight should be coming. The ambient light level, directional light color, fog, and skybox color are adjusted according to a set of colors for a 24-hour cycle. A large sun corona can be used to simulate the sun moving across the sky, and the directional light angle can be synced with the sun. Pros: Adjustable and dynamic, easy to add new skyboxes, low cost to render. Skyboxes can be changed to alter weather. Cons: Skyboxes with a distinct direction of lighting won't look good. Here are some of my results using this method: Of course, you are still free to implement any method you choose, but I am pretty satisfied with this approach for my own work, and I will make a scripted entity available to control these settings.

If you can do it and sound serious and foreboding, that would be awesome! Unfortunately my Russian is a bit rusty. And by rusty I mean non-existent.

Are the player and bugs both extended from a root "actor" class?

If you're changing the matrix around in the shader, this will cause problems because the data the GPU renders is not similar to what the CPU deals with. Add some vertices around the shape to encapsulate what you think the largest AABB will be.

It's easier if you separate the animation into separate sequences. Then you don't have to worry about the frame numbers.

If any Russian speakers are interested in doing some voice acting, I could use a short audio clip of you speaking. It will be used in a YouTube movie, and I'll list your name in the credits. The text is a line from Tarkovsky's film Stalker: It needs to be spoken in Russian without stuttering, and without any background noise. If you'd like to participate, just let me know.

Check it out here.

There is a 64-bit Newton DLL in the Newton SDK. I don't know if it will fix the problem, but it's worth trying. The current Newton version 2.19 will not work with Leadwerks 2.31. 2.32 will use the latest Newton. The "troughs" in the terrain really bring attention to the low resolution grid you are using. If those were smoothed out, the user wouldn't be able to tell at all how spaced out the tiles are. The ambient light should be bluish, and the sunlight slight orange. It looks like you are using pure white/gray. The thick bar right across the middle of the screen is annoying. You specs might be realistic, but it isn't realistic for the pilot to be viewing everything through a cut out rectangle two feet from their face, so you need to compensate for the limited field of view. Some of the LOD changes appear too close to the camera. Version 2.32 will help a lot with the efficiency of your vegetation rendering. For the helicopter blades, I suggest using an alpha-blended material that simulates motion blur, and turning the rotors at a slower rate. Right now they are flashing on and off, and while it might be realistic, it will call attention to screen tearing and generally create an unpleasant experience.

I haven't done anything to that, but the highlighted words are all contained in ui/commands.txt.

If each of those security cameras is performing another render, I hope you are using EntityCulled() to only update them when the corresponding screen is in view, and use occlusion culling on the screen mesh!

This will be included in version 2.32. The main editor even gives debug info on crashes that occur during a Lua script execution.

It depends on a lot of things. What's moving through the scene? How often do lights get their shadows redrawn? 2.31 has a lot of new features that you can adjust to optimize lights based on how you expect them to behave.

There is no mechanism to execute an arbitrary Lua script, other than using the Lua command set yourself to do so. There is a command to retrieve the handle of the global lua state the engine uses for script execution, and this can be used with the native Lua command set in a C++ project.

It's a chicken and egg problem. I think it's unrealistic to think that the market is driven entirely by consumer choices. Proprietary platforms are profitable, and people aren't usually given a choice to get a computer with decent hardware at a reasonable price. The hardware manufacturers have also done a really good job of obsfucating their specs so that no one even knows which CPU or GPU is faster. In a market where consumers make choices by comparing clock speed or RAM amount to make choices, hiding the hardware specs is the worst thing they could do. There's no reason Fry's can't put a four year old GEForce 8800 in every mid-range computer they sell. They could probably get them at a really cheap price, but instead they use a low-end GEForce 200 which might cost the same or even more.

Here's some more information on physics in a streaming world: http://newtondynamics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5775&sid=8e824c924606bbadb2150c247f85df86

I like our SSDO better. You can see a weird shadow on the front of the right column.

It sounds like they want two contradictory things. Leadwerks running on an Intel integrated chip isn't going to look any better than whatever you are using now. Why bother upgrading to anything?