Rick

Is there a way in LE3 to get a fog like effect in the distance? Models way in the distance jitter when I'm moving around so would be nice to have a fog at a certain distance to avoid seeing it.

Cool, thanks Mack. This should be a pretty easy change because it sounded like in LE 3 the frame loops around if it's > the max frame count.

I'm using the lua animation manager script and notice some weird stuff on some animations. It's like they were starting sort of in the middle or just not from the beginning. I removed the offset in the script but I get the same problem. The first parameter name is called time, but the description says frame. http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/documentation/_/command-reference/entity/entitysetanimationframe-r141 I assume each sequence has a starting frame of 0 and goes to however long the animation is. If we pass an animation frame that is beyond the max frame count of said seq it'll loop over. So really the current way the animation manager works with the formula: frame = currenttime * animation.speed It never forces the animations to start on the first frame. It could start on any frame. This creates strange artifacts because I would expect a walk animation or strafe animation to always start on the first frame when I transition to them. The longer the animation the more noticeable this issue would be. Am I missing something with doing it this way because it doesn't really seem all that acceptable as a method of doing animations.

I don't think a support contract would work. Josh would have to hire someone to do it and less people would get the support contract vs upgrading (someone would just start a community forum if this one was only available to support contracts) so he'd be making less money and now have to pay someone else (because he can't do support AND development on his own. Especially at the level of a real support contract would require vs just a forum). It's also potentially the cheapest out of those listed. I say potentially because of UDK taking royalties, and free Unity makes you buy the full version after you make > $100,000 in a year from the game. You would have to buy the pro version on each platform. It is much cheaper than Unity Pro and all their mobile addons, and sounds like the full version of Shiva is $1500(?), so it's cheaper there also. The point being that LE is building towards being an amazing product (right now it's still good but you have to do some work arounds for some things to make it great and like you said development has to be focused on specific areas because it's just Josh doing it all) and paying $99 or so a year to get there will be cheaper in the long run than getting those other engines and upgrades they charge over the years and or paying royalties if one plans on trying to sell their game at some point. So then the question becomes can one make a product with LE and I think one can. The nice thing about Josh is that generally if you show your product is far along and you'll actually be releasing it, he's pretty good about helping you as much as he can. He can make certain bug fixes a priority over others to help your product. It's to his benefit to get games made with LE.

When my character is strafing and moving I want to rotate the hip bone by 45 degrees and the spine bone 15 degrees. So I find these bones and after the correct animation is played I do the rotation but the bones never rotate. It looks to me that the animation is overriding my bone rotation. How can I do this manual bone rotation while still playing animations?

I would think everything would be like this then? Why would my other model be fine?

I resized my character model to 6 feet 0 inches. I would expect that height to line up almost exactly with the character controller as that would be a "good" average height for a character, but the character controller (when you do show physics) is taller than I'd expect. The character controller seems to be about 7 feet tall! I guess I would expect the resize option to make about 6 feet as tall as the character controller in an average humanoid.

This is a strange one. I'm using the swat character from Dexsoft. I imported and texture in LE editor. I dragged the character into my scene and all looks fine. I put a camera in the scene so it can see this character. I run the game and my character looks like he forgot to drink his V8. He's leaning to the right. No scripts or anything. I go back to the editor and in the editor he's perfectly upright again. I close LE and reopen it and now even in the editor he's leaning to the right. This is very odd. I have a zombie model in the game and it's not like this. Now it sounds like it's something with the model and I'll look at it in Dexsoft, but why would the first time putting it in the editor show it perfectly upright, but in game and when I reopen the editor it shows it tilted? I've pulled this model and exported it from UU3D again (and it's perfectly upright in UU3D. I'm exporting to gmf), but no matter what this character is tilted when I run the game and if I reopen the scene in LE. Something in LE is causing this thing to tilt. When I open it in the model editor it's upright.

I just picked one because nobody else was . My experience is zero with this one or any other wiki. I was just trying to get the ball rolling.

Will check that out. I wasn't aware anyone could make changes to that. Thanks!

It sounded like we were able to make a community wiki. I didn't see anyone else following up on that so thought I'd give it a try. I made a wiki here: http://leadwerks.wikidot.com/ It should be wide open. I haven't done any formatting or anything, but would love if anyone is interested to start providing ideas, tutorials, snippets, whatever. Maybe put the link in your sig so it doesn't get forgotten and more people see it.

The terrain doesn't get rendered when camera:SetProjectionMode(2) Also an different bug around this is that in Lua Camera.Orthographic causes an error saying "Error in SetProjectionMode". Passing the value 2 works in this case though.

Looks like we can do it via http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/documentation/_/command-reference/camera/camerasetprojectionmode-r204. I'll have to test it out but I can't see a way to get this perspective in the editor. Seems like it would be easier to design in the view you want the final game to look in to avoid switching from running to designing. Maybe an option in the editor?

Are we able to do an isometric view that has no depth (objects farther away aren't smaller) but using 3D? It sounds like it's technically possible but can LE do this? I would like to use the advantages of using 3D but visually have it look like a 2D isometric game where there is no depth to the screen.

Anyone able to point me in a direction on how to blur just a portion of the top and bottom of the screen via a shader to give this effect http://tiltshiftmaker.com/ ?

I'm just pointing out how some software companies seem to do business. They pick a price point for their product and they want to stay around that price point so the price doesn't just keep climbing, making it out of reach for new users eventually (this is a good thing for the consumer). This statement seems reasonable does it not? So the question becomes how do you do that then. I'm giving my opinions on who, what, when, where, why. If I'm fine with paying $99/yr for upgrades, and I'm OK with giving new users a little break to grow the community, then my experience with the software isn't hindered in any way. I'm hearing people say they are OK with $99/yr upgrades, but become not OK because of what new users are paying for? 1 year later those new users are in our same boat. I bet the new user was grateful the product price stayed the same when they first bought it, but then get angry when the new users get that price too? I'm open to hearing how others would tackle this. Dan wants to charge new users an extra $99 each year to the original price. I don't think that's a winning strategy to keep getting new users because at some point you take yourself out of the price range of too many people. How would you handle this?

Was anything decided on where the wiki would go? Has anyone done anything around it yet? The only downer would be having a web service to pull this data so other apps could use it. Not sure if any wiki software will do this.

Because like in cars what was once a feature today is a standard or not a feature (maybe trend goes away) tomorrow. Josh is charging us for the new features he codes not the old features he's coded, which seems clear given the same price between 3.0 and 3.1. If I recall correctly Unity is basically always $1500 between new versions. They pick a price point and stick to it no matter how many features they have. I mean we'd be paying like $1000 for Windows if we always pay for the features they coded in the past and are still in the product. They don't totally scrap the entirely old code. They reuse features/code from previous products in their upgrades yet the price point is always around the same (of course inflation and all that has to be included). It's all about a price point vs current effort. Old features don't hold their value, especially in the game industry where things move really fast. However, old features can again become popular which will raise their value again. This is what happened with low end renderer's when the mobile market became big. Suddenly the new high end renderer's everyone had won't work on these mobile devices so they had to go backwards and suddenly low end renderer's became popular again so people could make games on mobile devices! So then it becomes a feature (again) and you can charge more for it. That's slowly fading again though because of how insanely fast the mobile devices are increasing in power. So that value is dropping again.

So you want them to pay more? How will this change your experience with the software? If anything this will hurt the community as we'll get fewer people. So new 3.1 users pay $299? Then 3.2 users pay $399?, etc to the point where no new users are coming because it's out of their price range. How does that cycle stop? That's the part that I'm not following you. Old features eventually die out. You paid for that feature at the time and the other person didn't. As much as people don't want to look at an older renderer as a feature it is/was. It allows us to hit more hardware than before which equates to more customers.

I guess I read that in that he's just telling us when each platform order will be worked on and what order they will be available. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I read that. Promotional pricing isn't because the product is older. New products/services still get promotional pricing to get new customers to use it. I'll admit this is mostly on the services side though in other industries. Assuming mobile isn't included in all of this (pending clarification from Josh), we got the software for $199 and now pay $99 per upgrade. New people get the software for $199 and now pay $99 per upgrade going forward. The newest users will always get the deal. You were a new user at some point so at that point you got the deal. This cycle has to start at some point. He can't keep adding each upgrade cost to the new user price. It'll get way to high for a new user and we'll get no new users. The community won't grow and the product will die. He can't not charge for upgrades and only rely on new customers because he'll lose money and not be able to run his business. You always have to have repeat business. I'm not sure what you want to happen. Do you want new users to pay $299 so it's "fair" to the 3.0 users? Do you want 3.0 users to get a free upgrade to 3.1? That's basically free upgrades for life then which I don't think is a very smart business model in the video game engine business. Maybe state how you would want to see this happen instead of just saying what's currently happening is bogus?

I may be missing something but where does he say that mobile is included with this 3.1 new customer price? He says there won't be an upgrade cost for mobile from 3.0 to 3.1 but my assumption there is that a person would have to buy the 3.0 mobile first to get that free 3.1 upgrade for mobile. Maybe I'm wrong, but it would seem that's the logical thing to do in the mobile case. If you look at the pre-order upgrade it doesn't mention mobile at all: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/?app=nexus&showbanner=0 Businesses pretty regularly give new customers cheaper rates to try and get them using their service. Cable/dish/phone companies are a prime example of this. Josh is also giving beta testers a free upgrade, so he is rewarding who he deems the most loyal customers to Leadwerks. I think we figured out that it was $99 cheaper to be a new normal customer getting 3.1, which is the "new customer" deal one gets. However, if you always wait for the cheaper deal you'll never get anything and never make games that we all must seem to enjoy since we use it. Note, that on the next upgrade the 3.1 people will be complaining about the same thing, but we got 3.0 for $199. So when we were the new customers we didn't care (he was going to charge like a grand or something it was at first!) but when other new customers get the deal we care? http://www.ask.com/question/what-is-promotional-pricing I bought Windows 8 Pro for $35 when it first came out. If you buy it now it's like $199!

I agree cassius. The forum always dies when we know a new upgrade is coming.

OK, so I've made a .NET app (windows only atm) that uses their web service that queries the above site for tags of "Leadwerks". It lists the titles out and when you click on a title it shows the code. You can then click a button that'll copy the code into the clipboard for you to paste it into the Lua editor/wherever. Need to tweak it some but this should get the ball rolling. I don't have huge hopes for this because it's not built into the Lua editor and it uses a 3rd party site where anyone can post anything with a Leadwerks tag and it would show up here which for sure would get abused at some point, but maybe it'll show the benefit of it and Josh could consider implementing something like this directly into the Lua editor where the snippets are from the Leadwerks site so they can be better regulated/controlled. Will post more later.

There is a NavMesh class that has a FindPath() function. I would think this would be the return type from FindPath()? I'm not at my home PC but that would make sense to me.

@gamecreator I agree, but from my experience it's one of the closest in terms of a polish editor and great API that doesn't take royalties so that's why I used it.