Rick

See I don't think that has to do with the amount of programmers they have, I think it has to do with the amount of processes they put in place to reduce the risk of someone releasing code that screws their program up. When they had 100 customers they could afford to screw up. When they have 100,000 customers, screw ups cost you more as it kills your reputation. They probably have to do change controls, then 3 people have to approve, a code check has to happen, then instead of making new releases every day they wait and package them together because nothing pisses people off more than having updates every single day because changes are it'll break something for you. These things are what you do when you are a big company to reduce risk and what you don't have to do when you aren't. That has nothing to do with the amount of programmers you have. Interestingly enough the "advantage" a small team or company has is that they have to take more risks to make it big. So their advantage is they can "afford" to go out of business which is kind of strange

Cool. Please don't get discouraged if not many buy this model because the skeleton is a pretty specific need. The real value will come when you have humans that have all these features of mounting and add-on 3D equipment that we can mix and match. That's when I'll start buying and guessing many others. Humans are just in more games than skeletons ya know Keep up the good work!

I think the design is very critical in an LE game where you have multiple people because part of that design would need to be the interactions between components. Start a project where you, NA, Master, & Max make a game and only give a vague design and tasks and combining all that code will most likely be a nightmare. But have a detailed design doc where you describe the functionality for a specific task and the interaction interfaces that task needs to expose/consume and you'll have a much better chance at success. I've actually thought of experimenting with that. I want to make a simple pong game and I would just make a detailed document broken out by task and detail how each task would be consumed and what it should expose and then as people on the forums to do these task. I would break the tasks out to be very small so it would only take someone maybe a couple hours. Then I would assemble the pieces to make the game. I think it would be an interesting experiment to test exactly what Josh is saying. If I have 10 different programmers would they really be tripping over each other? The game would be like Pong or Tetris or something simple.

It should be the same as LuaJIT. Josh just stores it as char* I think but casting it should work.

Did you try giving an absolute path to the script? Not sure if Lua uses relative paths. The .c and .h files is the Lua source. You can either do what you did and make the dll's or you can just include the source directly into your own exe.

They are saying this is like 60K lines of code. I think most people here wouldn't duplicate that and give it away for free ya know.

Did Josh ever decide on the water he liked?

The exciting part is that the demo will work for 5 mins every time before shutting down. I bet once you know it could run in LE you'd be drooling for it and save up

Why not save as gmf from UU3D? Make sure your materials are correct. There is a special shader to use for animations if my memory serves me right.

I think this is just your personality of wanting control of things. Nothing really wrong with that it's just the way some people are. If you didn't know programming, because say you were just a designer, you would just have to take the code someone gave you and see if it worked. If it did you'd take it at it's value and just move on. Because you are a programmer you let your curiosity get to you and start digging in and looking at the code in which takes time. Then you might actually find a bug or an issue and address it, which takes time. All that, or you could have just taken it at it's face value and moved on with your product. I don't see that as a undeniable fact personally. The amount and accuracy of planning greatly makes this fluctuate. It will be true for an unorganized group but for a very well organized group with a very detailed plan it won't be. In fact more people can make a person more productive because you can bounce ideas off each other and come up with a solution to a problem that you alone might not have been able to solve at all.

Has anyone tried to implement http://sundog-soft.com/sds/features/ocean-and-water-rendering-with-triton/ in LE?

Taking a guess at this, but you'll probably have to call that function inside your 1 model script and do different logic inside this 1 model script based on what current LOD is displayed. You can do this in the Update() function since it gets called each frame.

I don't think the number of programmers and them stepping on toes is why this is happening. Big companies have more to lose if someone screws up big time. There are more people dependent on that company and there generally is more money involved. This often comes with a bunch of processes to minimize risks. Does Josh have to send out a change control document and get 5 different approvals before he can have his change packaged and implemented by another team where he has to document step by step the change because he can't make it in production? (this is what I have to do at a large company today) Most likely not. He most likely just makes the change himself and pushes it into prod with some testing. Process like this kill big companies from being nibble, but it protects them from making massive mistakes. It greatly minimizes their risks. If a programmer at Facebook right now just pushed a change into prod himself and screwed up it would tarnish Facebook forever and possibly cause them users, but I promise you when they first started out and nobody knew about them that's what they were doing. Once they got massive, they had to change to avoid that risk. So now they just let small companies take that risk for them and buy them out when they are far enough along with their risk taking project. Small companies will always outmaneuver large companies and they always have but it's because they can afford, and often have to, take that risk to survive. I also think bigger teams can work, BUT it requires the person who is holding everyone together to not be a programmer, or an artist, or a designer. It requires them to be a manager. Now ask yourself how many people who want to get into the gaming field say they want to be a manager in the gaming world? 0, that's how many It doesn't work (not saying it couldn't) because the skills required to make it work just aren't there. I don't mean any disrespect, it's simply a different take on the situation. I agree with the overall message just not some of the reasoning to get there.

Making video games and all that is involved with doing so takes a very, very long time. The most experienced people here have been doing so for many many years all while having family and full-time jobs, and all that comes with life and most have never finished a game yet. There isn't much to be supportive about because in life you'll never have enough time to do all that you want and there isn't much you can do about that. This is true when you are 18 and will be true when you are 60. Just prioritize the things you really want to do and go after them. If you truly want a multi-threaded loading feature then you can either do it yourself as Pixel mentioned or wait until LE3. Not trying to be mean or anything, this is just the reality. Pick and choose what's really important to you.

Oh, someone uses my Pi stuff On the jump animation, I've seen it where it's broken out into 3 animations and the programmers control it. start jump, falling, landing. This would allow different jumping heights and not require any sort of timing. WoW does it this way and jumping looks very nice. Just an idea.

Are you doing this in 2D? You only have a and b. I would expect 2 x, y, z for position and rotation. Given you really need x, y, z use BitStreams. In fact use BitStreams no matter what. It's what's recommended. It also has WriteVector() and ReadVector() function build into it to write x, y, z and read x, y, z values. http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/manual/bitstreams.html

Welcome to the life

If you are willing to put together some textures you think would look good I'll change it up and post pictures online of them to see what people think. I'm not sure how I would make a campaign mode for this since it's just battles. Do Chess games have campaign mode? I'm open to ideas but I can't think of how I would do it.

Thanks YouGroove. I've been heavy at work on the networking side which on the client side involves login screen & lobby. I'd say I'm probably 75% complete with that. I'm still torn on the board. The chess board image keeps things simple and clean which I like, but I realize it's not much to look at. The game isn't about the scenery at all so not sure if I want to do much with that to distract the player. I'll have to see what people say when I open it up for testing.

Woot!

It's the kids table!! Man I was scratching my head as to why the line was still being drawn even after I removed it. I have to remove it from the kids table also!

I use LuaJIT-1.1.6 You can just include the source files into your C++ project.

If at any time you want to mix LE's lua_State variable you will need to use LuaJIT (because that's what LE uses) or you'll have issues. If you don't plan on mixing then you can use whatever version you want, but I'd use the latest.

Has anyone used Josh's Lua GUI? I'm looking at the ListView control and it hurts my mind trying to understand the way he structured it. The view has a line table, which has a column table (I'm good at this point), which columns have a linetext table? Not following the reasoning with that as the linetext table seems to store text in all columns. I would think you'd just have text for each column for that line and not a table of text for every line inside the column table. Anyway, I'm trying to make a method to delete a specific line if the column has a certain value. I can get it to delete (sort of), but the deleted line still has an alt color and I can select it. When I return the lines table count of the view it only says 1 so not sure what's up. This is probably a long shot but it's really bugging me. My code function ListView:RemoveLine(column, value) -- loop through lines checking to find a value to match in the column param local id = -1 for k, v in pairs(self.lines) do if v:GetColumnText(column) == value then id = v.id -- loop through columns in this line and delete them for index, value in ipairs(v.columns) do table.remove(value.linetext, id) --value.linetext = {} end end end -- remove the line also if id ~= -1 then table.remove(self.lines, id) end end

I'd recommend Lua script personally. The current engine supports it, and the new engine will really push it. Coming from a modding community a scripting language might be easier for you and doesn't require any special IDE or setup. LE2 was created in bmax. The new LE3D is being created in C++.