Rick

I'm the same way Andy. I code all day at work also, and have 2 kids and 3 dogs! I sat down with my wife and made a plan and treated it like a business. I allocated a budget (buying models and stuff) & allocated time (I worked 4 hours sat/sun in the morning where my wife would watch the kids). I found doing it this way helped out a lot for my family. My wife knew the expectations and so she wasn't surprised at the time/money, and I was more motivated in those 4 hours sat/sun to get stuff done. I also estimated my end date and made a task list that would take me to the end date, which also helped me stick to the tasks needed when I was working on it, instead of letting scope creep happen.

The good news is I keep seeing good game ideas from you! You are gaining a lot of experience by doing what you are doing. When I made My Whacky Moles I had to talk to myself every day and motivate myself to finish it. It's clearly a very simple game, which makes it hard to focus on because your mind just keeps expanding to more complex stuff, and it would have been easy to just scrap it, but I would say finishing a game, any game, is really important for experience. Keep at it man, you're a talented guy.

Isn't it amazingly hard to keep ones attention on developing 1 game long enough.

So my machine isn't as powerful as Aggror's BUT: LE2: I get a solid 45fps and it's smooth for about 30 seconds. Eventually, it bogs down to 3 fps or so and gets very choppy. This is after hundreds of boxes have fallen though. LE3: It takes literally 3 seconds before the entire thing freezes on me. Right when a couple start hitting the ground all hell breaks loose. I hope this is a clear example as to the horrible physics performance between the 2 engines.

I'm not checking/updating anything physics related manually. LE handles all that behind the scenes.

That's pretty neat. I bet we could make scripts to use in LE's flowgraph to do some of this functionality. If anything it could act as a prototype for Josh to check out and see if it's something he'd like to do himself.

The physics performance is so bad when compared to LE 2 that I feel like I'm stuck. In my little challenge scene I'm getting 10-20fps which makes the controller zoom around sometimes and normal speed others. I'm flying through large CSG objects even. How can the performance be this bad in LE3 vs LE2? I have the exact same PC and it's so much worse with way more unreliable physics. I just don't get it, but I feel like something has to be done with this.

Because the physics performance is so poor, I end up with getting 15fps in my little scene, which makes my character move fast then slow then fast etc, and I'm still able to go through the CSG objects I put around these models. This physics performance is horrible compared to LE 2. This is insane.

There are some in Documentation->Tutorials

@Athos I do have swept on but still doesn't seem to work. @knocks I can't model worth anything, even basic stuff in almost any modelling package, but I think I'll use the CSG in the engine and get basic shapes around the dungeon models for collision. I can then save them as prefabs so the model and csg will always be together when I place them. It's just very tedious and boring

I figured if both the player and everything else had swept enabled it would be "double" protection from going through I just tested with the room not having it and the player having swept enabled and I was still able to go through, but thanks for the tip. I'll remove it from all my walls and see how performance is.

I noticed the same issue. In my case I had a child emitter so wasn't sure if that's what caused it when I released the parent.

@mumbles I had swept on just the walls and not the player but I just tried on player also and I still go through walls. The movement of the player is the basic 1 or 0 * game speed * move speed variable.

@YouGroove I would argue this is a challenge, meaning you are supposed to challenge yourself to go beyond your comfort zone and see what you can make. I think following the theme can be pretty "loose" which should still open the door for pretty much any game type. Also, does it really matter if one decided to not participate 2 weeks before or 2 days before? Either way in the end they would be choosing to not participate, which would be a shame

So the models I purchased for my game week competition have no backfaces (is that how you'd describe that?). Anything you can't see, the model doesn't have. This makes it very very "thin", which I'm guessing if I make the physics shape based on the mesh is why people can pass through if going fast enough. My question is, given the above, what are my options? If I use convex option when creating physics shape it's just a big square box and doesn't allow for going inside the little indented areas of the walls. Manually creating colliders would be error prone and a pain. Do I even have any best case options?

I did, but not that user friendly and probably a simple fix.

I deleted a bunch of projects via the project manager. Now every time I open up LE 3 editor I get dialog boxes saying "Failed to load project [projectpath].werk". I think there is a disconnect between deleting projects from the project manager and Leadwerks.cfg getting updated to remove those projects.

And you did Tools->Calculate Normals from the model editor in LE?

land.script.block = 5 for functions land.script:MyFunction()

Can we turn it back on when the game is stopped from the editor?

Thought I'd share my experience like Aggror did. First I'd like to say that it's a bummer that only 11 people voted so far. It's not a very big sample size and I hope many more will vote in the next day. I'm open to leaving the poll open for longer to let more people try the games available. Maybe over the weekend or so as people might have more time then. I'm also bummed out that only Aggror and myself have exe's to try. Was hoping for a better turnout and if he and I win it's a little awkward since we were providing the Steam prices. Physics I'm with Aggror on this one. There is for sure something wrong with the Physics. Everything about my game ran very slow for me. It was very frustrating to test the game each time with the poor physics performance. This needs to be looked at. There is no way I should be getting -20 fps on my little game where if I did the same in LE 2 I was getting 100+. Scripting I used pure Lua for my game and I'd say it was a love hate relationship. I loved already having the structure of entity scripts and the flowgraph integration, but there were many bugs that were very frustrating. As Aggror pointed out if you work in Lua enough in the game engine you'll eventually see that the script tab will show other script properties than what you know it should have. I would also create scripts by right clicking in the Scripts folder and using the menu and I noticed if I made more than a couple scripts that way it would end up overwriting the filename of the previous script instead of the newly created file. Very frustrating and would force me to just go into the file system and fix things that way. That being said, I love working with the flowgraph. I used a couple scripts I placed in the Assets section a few months ago without issue. I connected my scene loaded script to my sound script to start the creepy music you hear at the start. When a frostball collides with the fire, the fire triggers an onPutOut event that I hooked up to the fire particles to stop playing the emitter, hooked up to the smoke emitter to play it, and to the key model to enable it to be picked up. I wanted to play a sizzle sound like the fire was being put out, but I couldn't find the sound effect, but it would have taken about 15 seconds to set that up. What I disliked about the flowgraph is when I modify the scripts that are exposed to the flowgraph the connections are removed. Very frustrating as I'd forget this after making a change, run the game only to notice nothing happening. I had a fairly simple flowgraph but my scene was also very small. Even with a normal size level the flowgraph could get somewhat big, and remember what was connected to what would be very frustrating. This has to be fixed to be considered usable in any real game. Security Since I used purchased models I had to password protect them. Seems I was the first to give this a try in Leadwerks 3. I'll say that it leaves something to be desired when you need to package the game up. I had to manually make zip files from the folders in the base directory. You can't include the base folders, but only the stuff inside of it. You then name the zip file the same as the folder. However, the editor will not read zip files, so for development you need your normal folders then you have to do this zip method. I moved the base folders out and left the zip files hoping to make an install package that would include the zip files, but no such luck on my part which is why the game is in a rar file instead of an installer. A more user friendly approach would be either to have the engine read password protected zip files, or to have the publish option zip/password protect the base folders automatically for us and only place in the package so that your development environment stays untouched. Because I opened the project without the base folders and just the zip files, and I promise you I didn't save anything once I saw that it didn't work right, the project seems to be corrupt now. I'll spend some more time this weekend trying to get it to work as I'd like to expand on the game. Overall Like others I didn't have as much time as I wanted. What you see with my game is probably 8-10 hours of work where a good deal was spent on learning the physics of opening the door (which sometimes crashes still. would be nice to have PhysicsMove() function for stuff like this) and the particle editor (as it seemed I needed to modify the text mat file with a property that isn't in the material editor. how was I supposed to know that ). I had much more planned that included enemies that had some strategy in killing, and 1 more bigger puzzle. However, the ability to create the gameplay interactions to give the game some life was really easy and efficient. For anything physics based though I think LE 3 has a little ways to go yet, and I hope the performance can be worked out.

@YouGroove Yeah, I could show what I did. It's not that bad really. I used a couple of the scripts I posted in the asset store. Namely the Scene Loaded script, sound script, and particle starter script. I want to expand on this game more but my attention is turning back towards LCP 2.0 now that our level designer is back .

I can't see your picture but that would make sense from what I'm seeing as the starting room is all 1 model and I noticed I could only get the 2 front torches and the fire to show up. I tried adding 2 torches at the back wall and it didnt' work. The good thing is the hallway is made up on many of the same models so I should be good to light that up some more! Thanks

@shadmar, use the right mouse button (frostball) to put out the fire, to activate getting the key. You can sort of see the key inside the fire but of course it's too hot to get without putting it out first! This is all done from the flowgraph which was really easy and nice to work with to get this effect.

@Pixel I played around with the spec a lot trying to get a good feel for it. To little and it just looked flat to much and you get what it is now. I guess I don't have much of an eye for what looks great when it comes to that. The collision is because I created the phys files from the models, and the models have no back faces or anything so I get the impress the physics shapes are very thin. I might have to set all of them to sweep collision or something. Will have to play around with it. Thanks for the feedback and trying the games! So is it just Aggror and myself submitting then?