Rick

Personally it's probably been 2 years since I've used any other engine so I can't remember the exact details of them, but in general I know if a few I would need to get direction vectors for movement or for pointing something at something else. Finding distances was left up to me. I simply remember having to do math with the engines I've tried, and with LE I can make an entire game without having to do any math myself at all. Truevision comes to mind for some reason on being bigger on math, but I can't recall the details and I don't really want to relive that library again.

I find LE easier to program in than other engines that use their own scripting languages. I'm not a big fan of having to learn some proprietary language that won't help my programming skills outside of that engine. This is why I gravitate towards engines that are C/C++. The fact that is supports so many other languages is a bonus also, but personally I only use C/C++ and Lua. 2 very industry standard languages. I generally won't touch an engine that implements it's own language because I view it as a waste of time. That's just my view though.

I didn't say Visual Studio

You can do the same with some C++ compilers and LE.

Look at those Blitz people sticking together. Thick as thieves they are.

Yeah, that's what I figured.

I like it. Very original Resident Evilish http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEVuHIKbcY&feature=related I want to know what designer thought having that ticking clock was a good idea

Looks good Tillman. How did you setup the camera logic? Looks like you have a few predefined camera locations when the player is at a certain location? Kind of a cool style.

What are you all storing off? Just the position or other info?

I agree, but I assume one could load once and draw many times to reduce the memory footprint. For us to do it, we would most likely have to get into OpenGL code. Not trying to over simplify it because I'm sure it's a huge pain to get right.

Very true. I assume a person could write their own using what LE provides? In my mind I'm thinking this custom terrain system would be more for someone wanting to create some sort of MMO that allows them to load segments of their world as they go. Most MMO's aren't heavily populated with vegetation tot he degree that the current system does it, so it skipped my mind.

I think it would be easier to make all your landscape segments in a different program as a 2D image and then make a program that stitches these images together and then create a customer landscape class that reads 1 image file and makes a plane to mimic that image as the terrain. Trying to get the editor to do this would be a mess. The downside to this is that you lose editing the terrain in the editor. You could probably add that functionality but it could end up being messy. I think there are generic terrain editing programs out there that allow you to edit in real-time and can output an image file that LE can then read in and use. You would have to create our own LE custom reader for this since you would want to read in multiple terrain files and create planes based off these.

lol, I can only assume you are trying to be funny. So I guess I'll laugh.

You can do that today with LE if you wish also. It's just a plane like any other so you can do altering commands on it. I think the only reason you can have 1 terrain is because Josh wasn't sure how to implement multiple terrains in the editor and the welding and such. I think he figures the one giant terrain is good enough.

Yeah if one wanted to make their own terrain system from planes they could. That's a good point. Might be a pain to mold the custom terrain plane in the editor though, and you wouldn't want to do this in a modeling program as an infinite plane could take awhile that way. But this is a very valid idea. Could make a terrain thingoid that is basically a plane. I guess one could even make the mouse adjust the plane height and such. Would need some form of system to weld the edges together though also. Only after being loaded the first time. The first load of an object makes a noticeable delay. That's not true at all. My character models cause a noticeable pause when loading for the first time. It's only ms after it's been loaded once already.

puki, it says you joined on Nov 24th and yet in the last few days you have hit this forum like a rocket with what seems to be demands and complaints. What am I missing here?

You can only have 1 landscape loaded at a time with LE. It it huge, but the fact that you can only have 5 textures over the entire thing is a problem, but it's not one anyone has really ran into yet because most people here can't populate that much landscape with relevant stuff anyway. This is almost true. You would have to pre load whatever could be loaded so as to not cause the game to pause while it's loading something new. I wouldn't say infinite though. As state you would have to pre load every single asset in your game to achieve that, and even then the terrain is an issue currently because you can only have 1 loaded at a time and any loading would cause a pause in the game.

I'm also working on getting CEGUI working with LE. I have it working, but trying to make it easier because at its current state I'm sure no one here would use it.

Yeah, I'll tell that to my company and see how it goes over

**** flows downhill as they say. Assembly->C/C++->C#->VB.NET->BMax->Lua There will always be language snobs (I am probably viewed as one since I boast C++ here whenever the topic comes up), but it seems to me some arguments are valid and some aren't. The C# is better than VB.NET argument is certainly not valid. All .NET languages are created equal in the end. The front side is just syntax and means very little so how anyone thinks that's a valid argument is beyond me. My argument with C/C++ is that in the game world it's the standard. It's generally provides you with the ability to do things in the fastest and most efficient way possible. So to me it only makes sense to use it As a side note I've been using VB.NET professionally for 8 years now. I love .NET!

StringToVec3() isn't a lua function. Lua is just a language, what you are mostly using here is a library that Josh created from the Lua language. That's an important distinction because it can help you understand how things work. They keywords like function, if, then, end, do, etc. and the ability to make variables and such is the Lua language. Using those one can make a library that is specific to their needs (in this case the LE engine). I just remember someone posting this Lua example script he had and he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. It's because they weren't understanding the difference between Lua the language and a library made with Lua.

Just load the textures and use DrawImage(). It handles transparency and all the stuff you need really.

I just can't see most of the people who have LE now dishing out $1k for a new version no matter how many features it has. I think he would be trading customers. He would lose the beginners/small indies looking to make their first game to maybe established indies. My wife would kill me if she knew I dropped $1k on a game engine, are you kidding me! Those smaller platforms like iPhone or Android are much easier to develop games on. Most of the time they have gaming in mind and support well defined/diverse graphic API's. It would be cheaper for someone to just use what comes with the device. I think I would feel find of cheated if 2.0 ended support and 3.0 cost $1k. I guess I kind of though as LE as something in my price range and it would kind of suck if it went out of my price range. Anyway, that's in the future. For now I guess I'll have fun with it.

I've used XNA before. It basically comes as a project type for Visual Studio. XNA is it's own engine API. You write your game using this XNA API. Never ask a programmer if something is possible, because anything is possible. The short answer is it would basically be a complete rewrite of the game. XNA does things very different than LE. XNA has this whole design time/run time resource support to it that makes it kind of different from most engines I've worked with.

So Assassin's Greed 2 is pretty cool. The controls are kind of hard to get used to. I feel like it could have better control of your character. It's kind of slow though. I'm just some guy running around doing "missions" right now. Not killing anyone. Oh, and I had no idea about the beginning. The whole premise is kind of strange.