Rick

Look into kbhit(); It's a c++ non blocking method to tell when a key was hit. It should be cross platform also. You can use this to only loop through the array when a key is hit. http://www.cprogramming.com/fod/kbhit.html My bad, this isn't crossplatform. You would have to find the other platform equivalents and use a define when compiling it. I would think BMax would have something like what you are asking for since it's cross platform, but maybe Josh isn't exposing it.

Yeah I understand. I did the same thing that mimics the .NET way. The KeyPress() event is fired for printable keys and the KeyDown/KeyUp events are for all keys and pass to it the VK_ key. Which in this case would be the KEY_ keys. So what I did was call GetChar() and if the value was >= 32 I would fire the KeyPress event passing in the result from GetChar(). Then I created an array of all the KEY_ values (which is pretty easy because most are in sequence). Then looped through this array to see if KeyDown() on any. When it was I sent the value to the event.

I seem to remember that GetChar() only returned printable keys. Why don't you want to have to know what key is pressed? I can understand if you are printing the key to screen or something but KEY_UP can't be printed to screen so you would need to check for it anyway, so then why not use KeyHit()/KeyDown()?

Is the code small enough that you could show us. I wouldn't think it would matter to use 1 or 2 cameras though. I did something like this for a player HUD. Where I would place the camera directly in front of the player, place an inverted cube around the player and camera to give a black background, then render that to a buffer and draw it screen using DrawImage(). It would when snap back to where it was. I didn't notice any drop in FPS with that.

I'm still not sold just because Valve is porting some games. How many years after these games have been released did it take them to port? This almost sounds more like PR than anything else. Maybe get some more Mac users on Steam or something.

Maybe that's the secret. We need to not post so much on the forums. Seems those people are the people who are closer to finishing a game.

In my defense, I live by the idea that there are no dumb questions and for those posts don't apologize. If anything, saying it's a bug is a way to surely get quick responses from people who want to prove you wrong I welcome that because if it's not a bug it means I don't have to make a work around for it then. I love making mistakes. That's a great way to learn! I'm pretty sure everyone thinks it's Naught Alien, and it kind of sounds like he's hitting the PS3.

I'll remember that the next time I see a feature request from you. I've read the old forums and still do searches on there and I see plenty of posts where you do just that. So I can only assume you aren't included in that 'us'. Everyone does this. There are bugs and missing features all over the place. Does the picking diameter work yet? If not people have to hack around it if they want a larger diameter by maybe making multiple picks in different locations bunched together. You wouldn't call that a hack/work around to a feature that isn't working? I sure would. Don't try to put yourself up on a pedestal by saying you've never had to hack around a bug or missing feature to get something to work. It's just not realistic.

That is funny, but the game also isn't released yet. People complain about these missing features or bugs because it means we have to create our own "hacks". If you get enough of these "hacks" in a game it can start to make bugs appear. Just getting a game released means very little if the game is bug ridden or bad. So let's not pat ourselves on the back just yet. (I have a better saying for that but I'll keep it clean) In the same breath, us developers do need to learn how to work around missing features and bugs to get anything completed and just hope we did it correctly so there aren't any killer bugs that pop up.

What you refer to as "wasting resources", means cash in pocket for Josh, when he gets a flood of new developers who want to make games for the iPhone or older more casual games. The important thing to take from this is the idea that Josh feels that LE is ready for expanding. That's a good sign for us all, and we should all be happy about that because that means resources.

The entire game engine business is based around "what ifs". Everything is just potential. If you ask me, he's financially better off supporting lower end systems than higher end systems. In the indie world more people make games for lower end systems than higher. I imagine Josh is not getting customers left and right because of the high end requirements, while Unity is getting customers left and right because you can make stuff on the iPhone. You have to think of it this way. The more customers Josh can get the mroe money he'll have to make things better. If it takes lower the system specs (while still keeping the ability to be high end) to do that, then I say go for it.

They have a term for this. I wish I could remember what it's called. It describes that way of thinking and people use that all the time in debates. Like when some people argue against gay marriage. They say, where will it stop? Can we marry animals next? I'm not saying you are saying that, but it's the same idea that they go to what the average person would consider to far, like in your Atari example. I know you said that trying to prove a point, but there is a logical cut off of the legacy systems that will be supported.

This is great news for us all! I just hope you are able to keep the price reasonable. Those people are vampires

No they didn't. They realized the benefit of being a 1 stop shop and went out and made deals with food vendors to get food in their stores. Eventually they cut deals to make their own brands. They expanded some of their stores to handle this. Growing up you would never dream of buying food in these stores. Now? It's great! I love it. I go to Target all the time to buy both food and clothing and electronics. Basically all my money on that stuff goes to them each month. I love it because it's still cheap and convenient, and they love it because they get all my money I think the real concern you guys have is that Josh does this basically alone and if he spends time on this it means he's not spending time on some other bug fix. I get that and it's very valid. If Josh wants to do all this stuff I think he'll get to a point where he has to make a deal with the devil and get venture capital to hire people.

Think of it in these terms. Remember years ago when you went to K-mart or Walmart or Target and they didn't sell food? You could get TV's, and clothes and toys and other various non edible items. One day someone said, "Hey, you should sell food too!". Now you might say, pick the right store that fits your needs. There are already grocery stores, go there. There is no need for these places to sell food also. And you are right, there isn't a need for them to sell food. But because they did, they are making millions of more dollars. They became the one stop shopping place and people love it. The people requesting older hardware to work just want LE to be the one stop gaming engine that fits all your needs, and if you build it, they will pay. If I could develop high end or low end games using 1 engine that is easy to use, then it's easier on me because I don't have to learn multiple engines (I have little time anyway, like everyone else). I'll be more loyal to Leadwerks and therefore more willing to dish out more cash. My potential market is now bigger which is great!

That's would be the problem though. Right now no one can make their first billion from casual games using LE because those casual gamers don't have the graphics card to pay for the game to make someone rich, which means they then can't buy all their customers new graphics cards. Chicken and the egg situation then. I guess my point is that most of us are more hardcore gamers and often forget that there is a large market still for the casual gamer, even in 3D land. If one engine handled them both, then yay!

Again, I think people get lost in the visuals of LE and that's all they think about. LE is more than just visually appealing. The API is one of the easiest to work with that I (and many others) have ever seen. So by doing this he will attract more programmers. Those programmers who want to make somewhat casual games in 3D but not have the high end requirements. For example as a side project I'm making a collapse game. Does it need to be in 3D? No, but because it is it allows me to do some cool effects much easier than a 2D engine which adds a twist to the game and possible lets it stand out from the other collapse games. For example in my version I have 4 sides of blocks. Each side is like it's own game of collapse but they are all going at the same time. So you must rotate the board constantly to keep destroying blocks. I could use a different engine but LE is so must easier to work with than any other engine I've used before. The market for a game like this isn't the hardcore gamer that has a high end graphics card, it's the casual gamer that needs basic 3D stuff. The more I'm able to do different kinds of games in LE and have a wider audience the more likely I'm staying with LE and not looking anywhere else. The more I do that the better I get at working with LE and teh better games I can make. Just saying, these are valid requests. These casual games are making billions a year also. There is a market for them.

Yeah, I guess I was thinking if someone wanted to use 1 feature of version A and not another of the same version. This comes down to more than just the shader model doesn't it? There are other features that OpenGL has in different version right? I'm just thinking in DX where there are different hardware features in the library that you can use depending on the graphics card, which is why they allow you to query the card to see what it's capable of doing.

The "average" person buying that $100 "average" netbook isn't worried about playing 3D games. So I think you're fine there. You won't be able to win those people over. It's the "average" 3D gamer that you need to win over. This group group has realistic expectations of what a $100 netbook can do and what a $100 graphics card should be able to run. You sound like that Google exec. "In 3 years desktops will be dead." It's not happening for gamers, and those are the people you are trying to reach.

This almost sounds like we would have to define what we want to use in the material file? Is that programmable? If these defines can't be done in code then I think that wouldn't be a very robust system.

Nobody said it was going to be easy or exciting My personal preference on this would to not support older stuff anymore. Instead but these in now for the current versions. Then when the engine upgrades to new versions just add if defines statements as you go. In a couple years time everyone will be happy and todays tech will be "old", but at least LE will support "old" tech going forward. With each year the complaing of supporting old tech dies a little more.

I think as long as it's easy to programmatically switch between features people won't complain at all. I think ideally we would be able to query the graphics card and see what kind of features it can support, and then setup the game according to that everyone will be happy. When I was getting into DX a long time ago I know this was how they did it to determine if something had to be software supported or hardware supported. The ability to query the graphics card would be helpful.

I feel like Josh sometimes forgets this. It seems he gets so caught up in the visuals that he forgets that one of the biggest (in my view) pluses that Leadwerks has is that it's easy to program with. That should be part of it's promotion. Get amazing visuals with little to no math and a clean and easy API. The math statement alone would probably get him a ton of people coming over here. Entity programming is 100% easier than straight math. I would recommend any programmer new to 3D to start with Leadwerks because it makes making games fun and not just 1 giant math problem.

I think what people do is use 1 camera. Position it in the top down view each frame, but render what it sees to a different buffer. Then bring it back to the 3rd person. Now you can draw that other buff on the screen. So you'd be rendering the world twice each iteration. Once to the top/down buffer and then the normal on to the gbuffer that gets flipped onto the screen.

I think the people asking for that expect that it won't look as good. I'm guessing it's the programmers who ask for this more than the artists. Programmers use Leadwerks because it's easy to code with. It's very straight forward and requires little to no advanced math. The fact that it looks so good is just a bonus. Personally I wouldn't care if it looked like any other indie engine out there. I've tried almost all of them and Leadwerks is the easiest to program in. That's why I like it and I'm guessing I'm not alone.