Rick

This might be a good option for you Chiblue. If you aren't familiar with worlds and how they work, everything you create goes inside a world. So you can create a world, set it to active, then create these planes and such and position them at the given distance to the camera, which the world could have it's own camera also if I remember correctly. Now in that world you can make these textured planes always face the camera and move the camera to get the right closeness that looks good. I believe you then have to make it so the camera doesn't clear and then you can render that world on top of your game world to get the user interface. This does create a nice separation, but I'm not sure how mouse input works with that. Max probably knows.

You would still be wasting disk space. If you are making a copy of a model on disk then you are basically copying and pasting that model many times over and then loading the newly pasted model. Which means while the game is running you are wasting disk space. Even in the case the game crashes and the code that deletes all these copied models doesn't get a chance to run, you are wasting disk space. Sure at load you can first clear out a certain directory where you placed all these to compensate for the game crashing and not being able to clean up all those temp models, but that's still a very horrible solution. Do you know of a game that does this? It's just a bad solution to the problem. Plus when dealing with something like an MMO, you don't know how many copies you will need because it would all depend on how many players are on screen at one time at any given moment in the game. You wouldn't want to undershoot that number because doing this on the fly would cause a 2-3 second lag in your game, even if you do the copying and pasting in another thread, you have to load this new instance and since LE doesn't support threading, that load of a new instance takes 2-3 seconds and would freeze your game. Given this limitation I think the best approach to date is the shader method Nio made. This is because when new players enter your screen loading them is instant with no delay because you are loading the model that is already loaded and only making another instance of it. Then you select which index to use. This of course has other limitations in the amount of combinations you can have (if your texture sizes aren't insanely large that is), but at least there is no pause in your game when you need to load a new character.

I do the same thing, but I either use notepad to do some coding for an idea I have, or if it doesn't require graphics I'll generally just open up VS and use that to test out the idea. I have coded over Remote Desktop for basic GUI programs but for work, but I couldn't imagine doing it for an LE project at all. I'd rather stick to my notepad and just email the code to my personal email to test at home

Really? I use remote desktop everyday and how could anyone develop anything somewhat graphics intensive using it? It's horribly slow.

Ah ok. Just kind of stinks that it has to wash some detail out.

np Mumbles, I was just lost. The topic was asking one thing but as I read the posts it didn't seem like that's what was being answered. Just confused me and I thought I was missing something.

Really? The detail gets washed out on the right though. For example you can hardly see the steps on that back plate on the right. Also the muscles on the left arm is more defined on the left where again it's washed out on the right. The only place it looks more realistic on the right is where the feet meet the terrain I think. This is why I'm not an artist though. I can't see why making things brighter and washed out makes it look more realistic. I also can't stand the blurring effect every new game seems to have these days. It hurts my eyes because nothing is ever sharp and in focus even at short distances.

Oh, must have been another poster I saw you post that. tcmodder, don't miss out on the good stuff man. Register!

Add to all that the community game project Josh started. That should take a nice chunk of time away from all those other things.

lol, is this like the 100th time you told this guy to do this? Do you ever think he will?

What one is supposed to be better in those 2 images? I find the left one looks better, but not sure what GI does. On the right one it seems like you lose what looks like shadowing and detail seems to kind of fade out.

I think the biggest thing LE has for it is the easy API. It's the easiest API I've ever used. As a programmer even if the graphics quality wasn't as good as it is, I'd still use it simply because the API is so easy compared to the others I've used. Entity programming is the only way to go and LE implements it very well.

It could still be open source for people who have under 2.3 but not much use I guess.

By looking at your sig it seems you are an artist first and maybe a coder/scripter second? Not sure but just guessing. From my experience with talking to coders, and I'm in that boat as I've purchased Torque about a year ago, they generally dislike TorqueScript. I'm in that boat as well, but that's just a preference I guess. I'm not a fan of engines making up their own scripting language when Lua is basically a standard.

I don't think it's a flame at all. Seemed very fair in my view. I agree he won't be able to compete, but I think he can get more programmers than Torque (probably not Unity though), because using their scripting language is basically a joke. It's such a mess it's unbelievable. The programmers that want to start with their own main function and create their game from scratch would be better off with LE all the way, because it gives you that freedom. I think what happens is that the non programmers are more drawn to Torque because it looks like you can plug and play stuff, but then the programmers are drawn towards people making games (designers & artists) so they don't have much choice but to follow them to Torque.

Didn't the latest update have something about spotlights in it? I thought there was something about some setting to either make the shadows move automatically or not? I know there was something about lights though, just can't remember, but it might be a good place to start.

This is the frustrating part of it all. I think most everyone here has questioned the tasks that Josh has chosen to work on instead of some of the tasks that most of the community deem a requirement. There are many "quick wins" out there and yet Josh starts a community project for what looks like would take 9+ months at least. I understand some of these quick wins aren't exciting but it's these little things that start getting people upset.

LE is by far the best engine I've worked with but I'm a programmer and not an artist. I personally think artists are almost better off either teaming up with a programmer to work on game engines or are better off modding existing games as they can generally just change up the art and do little tweaking of an existing game. Coding a game is a very large task as is making the art assets. To try to do both for any decent size game is near impossible. That being said this community is by far the most diverse community I've seen in terms of artists & programmers. Most of the time it's all programmers with few artists but since this engine is top of the line graphically we see a ton of artists. As far as we know it's just 1 or maybe 2. Mr Josh seems to be the main guy but he does hire out for some things. I think you'll be amazed at how involved Josh is with the community but given it's just basically him updates/fixes come (in my view) slowly.

I agree. My issue generally comes around gaps in the engine. There are a million different ways to hack around something but I personally hate hacking this engine when a simple 1/2 day fix in the engine would fix it, but the only reason it doesn't get put into the engine is because Josh is the only person working on the engine and he spreads himself thin. This is almost always what happens to me with LE: 1. Come up with game idea. 2. Sketch the major systems out. 3. Get some basic crappy programmer art graphics in place. 4. Start coding only to find a gap in the engine. 5. Complain on the forums about the gap. 6. Someone give a hacky work around solution. 7. Sit on the issue thinking about it for days. 8. Refuse to do the hack because I can't bring myself personally to accept it. 9. Quit project. I'm really working on myself to just do the hack and forget about it. To not dwell on the fact that the hack to fill in the gaps sucks, but to just do it. I'm still complaining about it because at least it can get out there and maybe someday get fixed.

The comment tag is generally what makes the code look horrible.

Because when it comes from the creator they would expect it to be in every language and not just one. There are people that don't wish to use lua and up until now 99% of every command was available to all languages. This would be going away from the norm of how things were done that's all. I'm sure you can see how the people who don't want to use lua would be upset. If it was from anyone else they wouldn't mind, but when the engine creator does it, they sort of expect certain things. I can only assume the reason it's lua only is because Josh is using this for the game he's making though. Also a straight up conversion might not be 100% possible since lua is so relaxed on many things that programming languages aren't, so it could get tricky. Anyway, it looks good.

Not sure what you did but this works for me. I guess my point was that most of the time the constructors allow creation/loading of things. So if you wanted to follow the .NET framework way of things like this it would make sense to do this as well. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace WindowsApplication4 { public partial class Form1 : Form { public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Bitmap bmp; bmp = new Bitmap("C:\\Test.bmp"); } } }

I think ground units need to have good abilities for taking out vehicles to balance things out. Rocket Launchers etc.

Download http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=107 This will have a drop down box with the version you want to download starting at 2.3 and so far has 2.31.

2.30 to 2.31 doesn't cost anything.