Rick

@Furbolg, would you be able to download a new updater exe and replace your with it? http://www.good-vs-bad.com/patches/TheWorldUpdater.rar It adds 2 messages boxes when you run it. The first one shows your file version and the second one shows the result from the web service. Could you post exactly what both say please? Thanks for helping!

@Furbolg, does it just sit at checking for updates... or does it eventually say it's update to date and allow you to press the play button? Might give me some idea on what it going on or where to look.

I guess because it seemed to work for him before I just can't think of a reason it wouldn't work for him again. I have a separate installation of this on my machine and that's where it worked so in that respect I was acting more as a user than developer

Even when you run it as admin? It worked for me so I would expect it would work for everyone given they have the permissions or run as admin.

OK this has been updated. I didn't do the manifest (because that's the launcher program and would require a new setup for that). You should see 4 more DLL's in your base folder. 2 MS Visual C redistribs and 2 for OpenAL. That should solve the OpenAL problem. I uninstalled my OpenAL, verified the program fails because of that, then placed these 2 DLL's in the dir and now the app runs. You should also notice the default cursor has some red on it now. That's a test to making a change in a pak file. Next will be to actually implement my player needs and their visuals.

I really really want Zaphos to get his 3D characters and accessories going because that would make RPG with crafting very viable. That terrain is gridded out, if you will. I did have plans on letting players "buy" land tile by tile. With this land they could build walls to make their homes and craft other things. They would also be able to attack anything anytime, but they would only be powerful if they met thier needs of food, water, rest, spirit. This would be online. I think I'm still leaning towards that. I just want to try and get a community going and see how it plays out. I hate levels in RPG's. Once you get to the top there is nothing more. Then the level cap gets increased more and more. I prefer to make the player always keep up a certain amount of well-being instead. When all your needs are met then you are at your strongest. When needs start to slip you get weaker. When you start teh game your overall well-being is low. You have to build up your food, drinking, rest (with housing not actual sleeping), spirit, entertainment. All those combined make up your overall well-being which make your more powerful. Clans can form to combine their resources which are used in each members well-being, but they always have this goal of keeping it up. You never get to max level and stop like in most RPG's. Even when a person is not logged in they would be using resources (probably less though). I think this will create a more real economy and a real fight for resources. It'll also bring people together. In short it's more like real life. The key will be to balancing how much time in the game goes to the well-being and how much to battles and other things.

Yeah, I change the mouse based on picking with the models themsevles, which proves to be troublesome with trees and bushes with many gaps in them. Might have to make a rectangle body around them and pick that instead to ease the changing. I don't really know what this will become yet. I really like that camera view in games with the off scale of things. I was leaning towards more of a building game, but not 100% sold on anything yet. I might just let it evolve and see what happens

I'll give http://www.aneef.net...n-managed-code/ a try tonight so that it prompts for permission when the app starts. yeah it's so bad. Tonight I'm going to make an update for this where I add 4 dll's. 2 for visual studio C++ runtimes and 2 for openAL in the directory. Also going to change that crappy mouse cursor some since that's in a password protected pak file. This should be a good test to make sure those updates work correctly. I'm not sure who all kept this installed but if you could keep it installed for a day or 2 and help me make sure those updates work correctly that would be very helpful.

Thanks Furbolg. I guess at the least it would be nice if a prompt comes up for Clackdor to grant access. I'll have to look at how to tell Win 7 to do that. I would have thought it would do it automatically. My guess is in his case it was in an endless loop of trying to download, then failing, then checking again if the version if current, and retrying to download, rinse and repeat.

I've always been surprised LE doesn't have a Blit type function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_blit

Do most games require this sort of thing if they download things? If they don't I'd really like to not require admin if possible. I wouldn't have thought a simple downloading of data would require admin. @Clackdor, where did you install the launcher app?

Very odd. So the application was able to make the web service call to get the filename. I simply then use the WebClient object to download the file asynchronously. That's all .NET stuff so not sure why it wouldn't be downloading it. hmmm Also, if a couple of you would be able to leave it installed for a day or 2, then I'll make an update and see if it updated the files correctly.

Clackdor, if you take that path that it shows (it should show the whole thing) and put it in your browser, does it let you download it that way?

@gamecreator, ah good call. Do I really need an install for that or a DLL in that directory only? In my C:Program FilesOpenAL dir it just has a oalinst.exe in there so if there is a DLL not sure where it puts it. I'd prefer to just add the dll in the dir personally. On that note I forgot the msvc dll(s) also. It'll give me a chance to test the updating feature as I should be able to just make a new rar version and it should put those DLL's in that dir.

Wondering if anyone can help test this out. It works from start to end for me. .NET 4.0 is required as the launcher/updater uses it. I'm creating a game that has an auto updater with it in hopes that I can build the game over time while still allowing people to play along as I build it. The setup file for the game updater/launcher can be found http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files/file/316-the-world-updater/ . The above will only install a .NET launcher program. For those wanting to know exactly how this works I'll explain: The launcher program looks for a version.txt file in the base directory to get the clients current version. If that file doesn't exist the version use is 0. The launcher then calls a web service passing in the clients version. The web service will query a database table to get the next version greater than the clients version. This will return the http path to the rar file. The launcher then downloads the rar file to the game directory and extracts the files to a temp directory which it'll create and delete when it's finished. It will then loop through the temp directory and merge the files to the games base directory. For pak files it'll actually open the pak files up and find the same pak files in the games directory and update/add them. This means when I make updates I can add only the new files or updated files to existing pak files and they'll be added/updated instead of having to send the entire pak file with no changes to some of the files inside it each time. These are all password protected as well. The process repeats until no new versions are returned from the web service. Note for uninstall. The launcher has an uninstall which will only uninstall the launcher program and it's files and not any of the files that were added by the launcher/updater program for the game itself. For those you can just delete all the files or the entire folder to uninstall it. I still need to work on a way for the uninstaller to delete files that were added after the fact. Using Inno Setup for this.

The thing that stands out to me is those trees in your inspiration picture are much larger than the trees in your scene. Scaling them to be larger can help fill out your scene. Also you notice some trees that spider web out right from the ground and have leaves really close to the ground. You can see that on the left hand side of your inspiration picture clearly. That helps fill out the scene too. I would think more leaves than trunk and branches should help since leaves on most tree models are pretty close to what billboards are.

Assetsdata.pak Bah, didn't even think of that. Spoiled by abstract I guess. Thanks.

My game path is /TheWorld/TheWorld.exe I have assets in /TheWorld/Assets/ I'm trying to zip up and password protect my assets in groups because I've made an auto updater and seeing as how assets are the biggest files I don't want to simply update one giant asset file. I'd refer to only update the ones I changed. So I'm testing this out with some cursors I've made. I had a /TheWorld/Assets/Cursors folder. I zipped this up, password protected it, changed to cursors.pak so now I have /TheWorld/Assets/cursors.pak. This doesn't work and errors out when loading one of the textures in it. If cursors.pak is at the games base directory /TheWorld/ it works, but I don't want it there. I'd prefer it be in the Asset folder. How would I do that? I kind of figured since when using abstract::cursor.dds to load and it finds it no matter where it is under the folders the exe is in, that pak files would work the same way.

I do yeah. But that other thread is case in point on how some/most people approach learning new things. They don't feel comfortable and so stick with what they know. Everyone does that sometimes with some things in their life. Human nature I suppose.

For the Lua people I've precompiled a DLL that can be used in LE http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files/file/302-sqlite-for-les-lua/ It's similar to the above syntax with Ken with a slightly different way to do select statements and loop through the results. The only con I can think of is you must know SQL. It's not a strong con but for someone who doesn't know SQL it'll be a barrier. Much like in the other post, people who don't know SQL will probably be intimidated and possibly not use it with the fear that it'll maybe take to long to learn SQL.

I've used TinyXML and it works well too. If you don't know SQL then for sure stick with XML. I would recommend learning SQL at some point for any programmer because it's very handy in a million different ways. It's very powerful stuff and would serve you well in any corporate setting you may find yourself in. I can almost promise you once you learn it, you'll most likely never go back though It's that good, powerful, easy, & fun!

http://stackoverflow...-for-a-database The entire this is interesting to read, but look at the very last question. The thing that stands out the most about the last post is that the programmer doesn't know if the way he was parsing XML was the fastest way or not. The nice thing with using SQLite is that the file I/O is done for you in the fastest way it could be so you don't have to care about that stuff. There are lots of good points about both but I would ask is speed really that big of an issue? If reading your data from XML took 2 seconds vs say 2.3 via SQLite, will that sell you on using XML? I feel SQLite's benefits are far more than XML's for game data, but I know SQL. If you don't know SQL you might not see it that way. As some in that post have pointed out (correct in a sense), XML is basically designed to transfer data between systems in a uniform way. For animations, it's just hardcoded in your program and any tweaks you want to make requires recompiling. It can just be more efficient if all that is defined outside your app.

Stored in SQLite. Read in when loading the scene which creates a class instance for that model and looped through adding Animation instances to a map for each animation.

Ah those are great examples. I can see now that it helps things not get washed out. Very nice Lazlo!

So you load the skeleton model. The load the axe. Then position and parent the axe to the skeleton and you then don't see the axe?