Rick

It has no effect because start.map is loaded in the code. I made a post some time ago about how it should be the current map, but Josh was trying to make it easy on the newcomer to LE. I still think it should be the loaded map by default. The editor should be passing in the current map to the exe as a command line argument and then that gets loaded. If no command line argument (which would be the case when launched by the player) then it falls back to the "startup" map that we define in code. To switch when you are developing you must change it in App.lua. Switching while playing the same is different and require a little more work.

But that's sure to hurt the immediate sales numbers for those games. We live in a world where your first day sales numbers makes a statement. I would be shocked if Valve took that risk. HL 3 starting out exclusively for SteamOS would kill their starting sales numbers.

I think if you make a new Lua project, then open up the VS solution and look at the code in there you can find a way to do this as.

Don't do that then

You can, but you have to pay full price. The discounted price for LE2 owners is done.

Right now the renderer for the engine is the old version. Josh is working on the new renderer right now which will be in the next version which should be around Christmas time. The reason it's the old version is because of mobile and other low end devices. When it's all said and done your game will possibly be able to be played on a wide array of hardware with minimal work by us to support that functionality.

And this is just the start...

I say go external. I've used Allegro before and the external docs were way better and updated more often and had more examples for game related stuff, which I think is something we would all like to see more of. It's nice to know what a function is and does, but it's also nice to see some examples of more game related tutorials/examples. Maybe in the code examples functions becomes links back to the offical docs here? That would probably be ideal. Not sure how hard that would be to have it automatically do though.

So we have until the end of Oct right?

I'm going 100% editor/lua scripts with this. You enter a building by clicking it's door. This makes your character walk over to the door (it's click to move at this time), open it, and then after the door opens the script attached to the door was configured to accept all the different floors that should be hidden. This is filled in at design time from the editor. All items on a floor were parented to that floor and will also be hidden. Stairs will have billboard like icons by them. 1 for up 1 for down if both directions are capable. Click the up icon for example will walk over to the stairs and go up to a defined point on top of the stairs. Once the player hits a trigger on the stairs, that trigger will define what floor should be shown. It knows the direction (higher floor shown for going up, higher floor hidden for going down) based on the billboard icon you clicked. The only thing at this time will be the NPC's and handling what floor they are on. These aren't really predefined as the NPC's are somewhat randomly moving around the map the entire time. They will also use a style of the billboards to move up and down the stairs. If one exists in a given AABB around them they'll have an x% chance to go up and/or down. This is if idle mind you. If in chase mode they'll follow the character. The up/down stairs logic or entering building can "attach" them as a child of that floor, and maybe if I do start with them in a building I can assign them the floor they are on. So we make a variety of buildings configured as prefabs and just plop them down. Combined with my shader that allows for multiple textures for the same material I should be able to get a good variety of styles/colors at a cheap cost. This is all prototype at the moment of course.

Find the mat file and open it in notepad and paste it here.

Did you ever release that shader shadmar? Would love to use that.

Note that it's up to use to try and code in cross-platform way with C++. We also have to add files to each project manually. So if you're coding the entire game in Windows using VS you'd do whatever you would normally, but when you're ready to test on Mac you'd open up the xcode project that LE created for you automatically, manually add the files you have in your VS project and then build. No changes assuming your C++ code is cross-platform to start with. This is one reason I'm becoming a Lua fan as you don't have to change anything for any project when using Lua! Of course when you want to take advantage of platform specific functionality (specifically on mobile) then you have to go into the projects and add it. I'm thinking things like in game purchase code or advertisement code.

Would be kind of cool to get a sphere type world, or at least simulate it and wrap around zones.

Can we have external wikis on how to use LE? I always thought people needed to be developers on this website to see the docs (since the new site anyway, before the old wiki days)? Maybe not but I thought it was a form of making it harder for people who pirate the software to work with it since they wouldn't have access to any docs on it.

@shadmar, Yeah, I'm thinking no matter what, if I want the NPC's to continue working as normal no matter what floor they are on, ie they could "hear" me and come running down to my floor, or be doing actions on other non-visible floors, I would have to deal with that. I do want the non drawn floors to exist and function as normal, but just not draw them in certain situations so they don't block the players view. I think I'll have billboards by stairs that you click and it'll move the player to a spot up or down the stairs on the next level, and be how determining what floor to draw happens. @YouGroove Yeah, The Sims is a good way to think of my needs. It's almost exactly like that.

Nope, I want instant visual transition. When you are outside a house you see it's roof. When you open the door the roof and any upper floors goes invisible and you now see the inside and can walk around by clicking on the floor. That style of walking through a neighborhood is what I'm going for. I don't like the idea of loading a new map for each interior at all for this game. I would question having the "outside" still updating with NPC's too. Are you sure Skyrim had this? Did enemies that were chasing you outside a building chase you inside a building after the interior was loaded? I didn't play Skyrim all that much.

A layering system in my situation would have to be per building which might defeat the purpose of a layer system? It would have to be this way because you could be inside the 5th floor of 1 building but see other buildings around it, and I wouldn't want to see inside those buildings so it's not a global layer system. I'm going to use area triggers to determine per building what to draw or not. I don't like using show/hide because those methods cause certain things to happen in LE.

Good examples flexman. In my situation I'm making a prototype with a top/down style game where you can enter buildings that have more than 1 level/floor. The higher levels need to not be shown so as to not obstruct your view of your player, but there will be NPC's/enemies on levels that still need to update their logic and move around. Like you mentioned if I simply hide the floor the floor models and physics would be lost making the NPC's/enemies fall down. If I hide the NPC's/enemies I'm sure I lose the controller functionality of moving them around and such, which they still need to update their logic when not shown. Nothing like being able to avoid an enemy simply by just going back down the stairs and making their logic stop updating so they stop chasing you. Not very realistic. So I figured running the logic all the time but simply not drawing them via a shader, so I can turn it on/off at run-time, would be the way to go for my given situation. The NPC's and floor stuff will all be instanced so I wouldn't be able to simply set their materials to invisible as that would make other instances invisible as well which isn't what I want. Combining this functionality with my instance texture shader should allow me to have a ton variety of NPC's on screen and a very detailed world in terms of buildings, which I plan too have, without any major frame drop

So there is an invisible material, but since instances share materials I need another way to not draw a certain instance of a given model. Is there any way a shader could provide this ability? I would want it to still have collision but just not be drawn.

If you want this to be looked at make a simple demo for Josh to try out. He doesn't want to be screwing around making levels. I know it sucks doing extra work but it'll get looked at faster and help Josh out.

Lua stuff for LE 2.x are outdated, but if you are a Lua fan then LE 3 is for sure for you. To me it sounds like what you listed above LE 3 can do for you.

If I remember correctly the same LE function in Lua had the same issue. For lua I just use the built-in Lua random functions. I have to imagine srand() works on Android and even iOS though?

Should be yeah. I know some poeple where doing this in LE2.

I have Win 8.1 Pro and it's giving me the issue. It happens at the same point every time when the editor is loading. So it is loading a bunch of shaders and materials before that. I would think you can see what comes after this DrawImage.shader and that should lead to a clue.