Rick

But that's the point. Visual Studio Shell is Visual Studio. It's the shell of Visual Studio so it provides most of the functionality already. You can just customize it to no end. IMHO (and obviously many others) there is no better IDE than Visual Studio. I don't want to get into the discussion of resources and what should or shouldn't be worked on. This is just an idea and by putting it out there maybe some people will play around with it. I know I will. Just wanted to get the idea out there.

So I've wanted to create a drag and drop Visual Studio integrated GUI (and probably still will). I've started research on how I can do this, when I come across Visual Studio Shell. This gives you the ability to have the look and feel of Visual Studio but still allows for a huge amount of customization. You can have this as it's own stand alone VS style IDE. I was just thinking it might be cool if LE had it's own IDE. I don't know about BMax, but with this Visual Studio Shell you can support any language you like (you have to do the work though). You can have custom menus & windows. It seems like you get all the benefits of VS (compiler, debugger, etc). I need to do more research and mess around with it more, but it would be pretty cool if LE was able to have it's own IDE that supported all the different languages LE supports today and has a few more custom features to LE. The good part about this is that all the hard work of making an IDE is already done for you with Visual Studio Shell. You just add some customization and brand it. The best part seems to be that it's free.

That's fine, I work in .NET all day long at work. From what I can see you are adding LE functions to be called in one thread and actually calling them in the LE thread. If so that's not really getting the benefits from multi-threading.

Because it's so much easier to create basic shapes in 3DWS than to even look at Blender

Could you explain this more? I'm not following, because that really wouldn't be getting the entire benefit from multi-threading since the LE thread is still making all the calls.

Maybe I'm missing something but you are passing a Vec3 into GetPosition(). GetPosition() doesn't expect a Vec3 does it?

I think this would need to be in the feature request section because I'm pretty sure the editor is doing this, and if the editor is doing this the editor code would need to be changed.Other than that it's copy/paste from the template.lua.

I think this would be ideal because the bone structure for humans are basically all the same (or can be made the same per game). Would be nice to just be able to pick these motion capture files and assign which one you want per model via code. That way I could add a human model to my scene and just assign the motion capture animations I want that character to have.

This is actually one of the better arguments for supporting Mac & Linux. Those 2 groups are starving so much games that they are probably willing to give native games a chance, even if they aren't the best. Although the Linux people would probably want it for free B)

That's not really accurate. If you go the XNA route it doesn't cost you $10k. The XNA route is the indie route. If you try to go the professional route and use DX then it would be $10k. The XNA route was created for indie programmers.

Instancing is what LE does right now with a model. When you call LoadModel() on the same model it creates an instance (which means it ends up sharing the material you paint on it). So if you LoadModel() on the same model 5 times and paint 1 of them the others will be painted as well. You knew that.

Whisper you know it's not that easy He'll soon be here asking why when he paints different textures on the same model instances they all have the last texture he painted But, yeah instead of welding the human bodies together with different armor you can attach an armor model to bones and parent them. So now when what bone moves the armor moves with it.

Yeah I think XBox is better at Indie games than PS, but I think you need to use their XNA dev kit.

Every model that has a script has a Physics tab in the properties. You can see the collision types defined there. You can define your own manually in a script with EntityType().

I think how that works is that the network thread is thread safe so that you can access that data in your LE thread. That's how it works with RakNet at least.

For my need I wish to have everything in lua for this little community project. I'm sure it's slower but probably not a big show stopper unless you have other complex code also like AI.

Oh I see. I have to be honest there are very few times that I actually use the model loaded from the editor. Most of the things that require some sort of functionality I make a thingoid and then have a scale option as a property and that works great! Yeah, that's what I was pointing out that the function isn't available. Wouldn't you still need to loop through every entity though to check the AABB?

That doesn't happen to me. Maybe it's how you are doing it

I don't think that works in lua though. That's the problem. I don't think these function callback LE commands work in lua. That's the problem with the collisions anyway.

Might be able to do AABB checks also.

Thanks. I'm kind of just waiting for a character model from Kevin Tillman. He had one for me but sold it on me >< so he said he would create another one for me It's kind of like a dungeon puzzle game. Collect colored keys to open colored doors. Solve puzzles with switches and stuff like that. Reach the gold door to advance to the next level. My idea is to release this first version with the basic stuff and see if the lua community can make some more thingoids to add to the gameplay. I was thinking this could be a community project that people can just take and add to. Since everything is a thingoid an not in the main lua code it makes things very plug and play. When adding these thingoids it's not even programming. It's like piecing together a puzzle in itself though with the targets and such that you set. I'll post a screenshot of in editor mode and you'll probably freak out

You can "hack" this in. If collisions from bodies created in lua code worked it would be much better but I worked around that. If collisions worked you could have a thingoid create a body and "resize" that body from a property in code. I say resize but since you can't resize bodies and have them work right you would just be recreating the body each time you change the size of it. Then have the body follow the thingoid editor model to place it. Don't give it a mass and it'll stay there and register collision. Again, this would work all fine and great IF you have a way to know about collisions from bodies created in lua code. Currently there is no way. Collisions are only called from models that were loaded from the editor on start up. I've asked for this many times because it adds so much more functionality. In the mean time I've got a way around this, BUT it's not ideal. What I'm currently doing for a Use Switch and Distance Switch is using EntityDistance() between the character and the thingoid. This creates more of a radius setup than a rectangle so there can be issues around, BUT it works well. I also have a Keyboard Thingoid that is attached to my Character thingoid. The Keyboard thingoid has a Use key property that let's you assign any key to act as the Use key. When the game starts up the Keyboard thingoid loops through all objects in the scene and saves off all Use Switch thingoids in a table local to the Keyboard Thingoid. Then when the Use key is pressed it loops through this list of Use Switches and checks EntityDistance(). If within x distance the Keyboard thingoid calls a function of the Use Switch. That in turns sends an "activate" message to all target index, which I have like Rotation Trigger, Position Trigger, etc. I also have Distance Switch. What I do here is save off all these to the Character on startup. Then in the Character Update() I loop through this list each cycle and check the EntityDistance() from the character to the Distance Switch. Each Distance Switch has a distance value and this is the value to determines when to start something if the character is less than. To give a visual of the Distance Switch I create a cylinder and give a semi-transparent texture to it. When in editing mode this is visible but in game mode it's hidden. Changing the distance property changes the size of the cylinder so you can see the radius that would effect it. When then character is inside this radius the Switch method is called, which will send an "activate" message to all the thingoids attached. Once of these could be a sound trigger. In a week or so I'll be releasing a game to the community that shows all of this. I've created a game with levers and rotation triggers, a basic inventory system and all done with thingoids. Right now you collect a key that has a name. For example key.blue. Then I have a Use Switch by a door. There is a rotation trigger attached to both the switch and the door. The use switch has a criteria that the inventory must have the key.blue item in order to trigger. When you have this key it calls the switches Use() method which in turn sends "activate" messages to all it's targets. In this case there is only one (the door). The rotation trigger gets this message and rotates the door (based on properties set) to open it. I do the same thing for a level and a bridge. In that case there are 2 targets. One to rotate the level and one to rotate the bridge. It's pretty cool! The only thing that sucks is that because of the lack of collisions with bodies created in lua code, I have to use EntityDistance() for all this stuff. Which is slower because it's calling it every frame instead of getting a collision callback.

The sound zones is a cool idea, but is kind of a pain in the arse to setup because you have to create all these zones in your level. The mat filew ould probably be the easiest, BUT on terrain where you have different blended textures I'm not sure if that would work.

lol

And just shy under what, 5+ years later on some of those games? And it took the Mac to get on Intel I think also to make things like this easier. Honestly I don't think anyone thinks it "shouldn't" run on Macs, I think it's more of a what's the point? The market share is small. LE would be better off working on consoles before Macs. If we allow fanboys then we should allow haters to balance it out right? Life is about balance. Also am I missing something about your sig? You are a big Mac fan but your sig doesn't say anything about a mac computer. What's up with that?