Rick

I know you're laid up Josh, but any info on if we are right that the editor doesn't have networking commands and if not do you plan on giving the editor networking commands in the short future? I have plans for networking objects that I'd love to test out.

If you are able to get this working I'd be very interested in seeing how you did it because I could help create an object in lua for the Sandbox that we can just drag into our scenes and get this effect. If you use a plane created from LE we could make this very dynamic and Editor friendly.

If it's a puddle of water I would just create a plane and apply a water texture and maybe a shader that made the puddle move around like a puddle. With a puddle I wouldn't imagine you would need reflection really unless it's a huge puddle and you really want realism.

If it's like a swimming pool, you could probably make your own with a water shader applied to the top of the water "cube" to get waves (maybe something like the leaf waving shader). You would then have to code the underwater postprocessing effect but I'm guessing it's not that hard. Just check if the camera is inside the "cube" of water and if so give a underwater post processor effect that is like water to the screen.

What I got from that video that I thought was cool was that they removed the leafs from the tree when the camera got close. That would really help visibility of your character.

Wow, good luck with that. Back problems can take a long time to heal.

Fund & Asset are correct, but like Lumooja said it's probably best to keep it simple. Who knows, maybe a 5 year old will be playing your game and he probably won't know asset.

Where would you do that though? I think that would have to happen at a level where you can swap in a texture then draw model x so it's on the screen with texture 1, then swap in a different texture, then draw model y, etc. If we could do that then there wouldn't be a need to use an atlas at all. You could just swap textures before drawing. At a code level ideally you'd be able to "save" what material file per instance to use. Then when the instance is drawn it would do the swapping of what mat file you assigned it, then draw that model. Continue on with all instances. So something like: mat1 = LoadMaterial("red_shirt.mat") mat2 = LoadMaterial("blue_shirt.mat") model1 = LoadModel("mymodel.gmf") model2 = LoadModel("mymodel.gmf") PaintEntity(model1, mat1) PaintEntity(model2, mat2) So internally the engine would need to save off that model1 needs mat1 and model2 needs mat2 so when it comes time to draw these models, even though they would be the same instance, it would swap the materials then draw. I like the idea, but I'm thinking it would need to be internal to the engine.

So basically the same idea that was shooting around with instanced models, but for terrains. Yeah, I don't see why not. You would be a god if you got that working.

I think instancing works great for scenery, and even the shader part would help with tree's and rocks and stuff to give different looks, but when it comes to characters I think is where it hits some road blocks. This is probably one of the reasons you don't see 200+ characters on the screen at one time very often in games, and if you do they are probably pretty much the same looks because of instancing and texture limitations. I'm guessing this is probably great for an RTS where groups of units all look the same.

Thanks for looking into this Niosop. If it's that much of a pain and still has restrictions like only 4 parts of the body that you can do that, I'll stop worrying about it and hope that Josh will one day put in a way to handle this that is more flexible.

I didn't. With the error I assume it was stopping at that code, but it just wasn't informing me about this stopping until I left game mode.

That's actually where I was calling it from. In my Update() method I have an if statement which tells me if I'm in game mode or edit mode. Inside that statement I have another if statement which will branch off only once to do some init code when in game mode, since there isn't really another way to do that it seems. When I run in game mode no error happens, but when I exit game mode is when the lua editor pops up with the error above.

If this is the case this is why when all this lua stuff first came out I was confused as to why there was an editor.exe and engine.exe. The editor should be able to turn into just running the game. This would correct the issue with having the 2 exe's getting out of sync and/or different syntax. Josh, any chance the editor can get networking commands? This would make debugging networking issues so much faster. Plus, I'm working on a networking object.

I did that also with the same result.

Then I'd say given the 256 resolution parameter then yes 256 textures is a solid number, but still a limitation.

I agree that it is, but it's still limiting compared to the other that isn't. I also have to wonder if you start limiting graphic cards when you start getting so high in 1 texture size. I'm not sure if every graphics card that can run LE can make a texture size that large or not.

I get this error on CreateHost() in the editor: attempt to call global 'CreateHost' (a nil value) Here is my call: object.host = CreateHost(0, object.port, object.playerCount) Even if my parameters were messed up it seems like the function CreateHost is nil from the editor. Is there some require I need? I also synced and still got this error.

I saw your original post, and it takes character to edit it to what you did. I'm sorry if I come off as saying everything is broken. Generally when I see something wrong I post about it, and yes sometimes it is my fault, but that's what forums are for. To work things out. I'll try to be more aware of my posts.

I think this method of having the client do physics locally and send it's position & rotation back to the server to send to everyone would work really well. It offloads the physics of just that clients character to their machine freeing up the server because it doesn't need to do any physics. The client machine isn't really doing a ton of work because it's only doing physics for it's own character and not all the others. The client also gets instant feedback from moving around which is ideal. The only issue with this is when the client wants to do something that affects another client through physics. In this case it would require the round trip of going to the server and telling the server to tell this client to do this physics action on itself, and then back to the server with the position and back to the client who started the action. Might be a slight delay there. Also a hacker could stop the physics message from acting on it's client, but that's what server checks are for.

If I didn't write server validation above I certainly meant to. Thanks for reminding me!

I was simply responding to what you guys were talking about and stating why it doesn't work that way in certain situations. No need to get all pissy man, damn.

Let's look at that a different way. Let's say you have 4 different textures you can have on a model. Let's say, pants area, shirt area, waist area, and gloves. Each area has it's own texture and with what Josh is saying you could have around 16 "pants" on 1 texture. Or 16 "shirts" on another texture. An MMO could have a few hundred different pant styles or shirt styles. It's not about the different combinations you can make with all the different texture parts of a model, it's about how many textures can I have for the shirt texture, or the pant texture. Generally in RPG's you make gear match. Let's say in an MMORPG there is an armor set called Rick's Might. It comes with a chest texture, pants texture, waist texture, and gloves texture. So that chest texture is taking up 1 slot of the 16 in my 1 texture file. That only leaves me with 15 more chest textures for that model. In an MMO you'd have more options than 16 chest textures and you'd need them because the odds you'll have 16 of the same character model on screen at once is likely and has to be handled.

That's exactly how they do it (and I have a model like this that I gave Nio to try and figure out how to do the shader way), BUT that still doesn't leave enough possible textures by doing it the shader way. Like he was saying you could probably have 200 or something possibilities. It's a limit that doesn't need to be there. You might say 200 is enough but huge MMO's could easily have more than that for shirts, pants, belts etc.

1. In CreateHost() the last parameter is player count. Is there any API restrictions on this number that this can be? Is there a way to accept any amount of players? Like if I pass 0 will it accept any number who try to connect? 2. I see DisconnectHost() but it takes a Peer parameter so I assume that's for the clients. How does the server shutdown? Is there a command for that or when the main loop end it just stops? How would this work in the editor. If I make a server object where when I do "run game" from the editor is where it CreatesHost(), I assume that host will just stay open listening. I would like to do some kind of server stop listening in the Free() event. 3. Also how does host:WaitEvent(1) work? The parameter looks like a timeout according to the wiki. Does that mean it'll block for 1/100 of a second ^. Can you pass 0 and have it still work? 4. What's the flow of event id's when client tries to connect to server. I see EVENT_CONNECT is an event id type. Does that mean client received that it did in fact connect to server or server saying a client has connected? Or both? Or what?