Rick

I can't seem to get the physics to work with a controller that I create in code. What am I missing? The controller is created and positioned at the object location, but I'm expecting it to drop to the terrain but it floats in the air. The color of the controller is red and the physics button is on Play. function class:CreateObject(model) local object=self.super:CreateObject(model) object.controller = CreateController(height, radius, step, slope) EntityType(object.controller, 1) object.controller:SetPosition(object.model:GetPosition()) end Now I know SetPosition() stops physics, but it only gets called once in the create so after that initial setting of the position shouldn't it then play the physics?

Thanks!

What is the function to get the Vec3 from settings in the editor and apply it to LE functions? I can't remember and can't seem to find an object that does it.

That's an interesting way of doing it. I wonder if every model in the game is like this though. I was under the impression that static objects weren't listed in the DB. I'd be interested in seeing the query performance with this also, but it sounds like a decent idea.

I think the thought is that looping through every single object in a huge world to find the distance of that object to the player could get expensive. With unlimited terrains you could have a million + objects and every cycle looping through them to see if they are within a range is way to expensive. By breaking down into zones you help reduce the amount of looping to check distances to know what zone to load, which will in turn load all the objects in that zone. If you had 100 zones of the max size terrain full of stuff, it's cheaper to loop 100 times to figure out what zone to load (and the objects in that zone), than looping through the million some objects in the entire game world.

The standard I'm going with right now is prefixing my objects with Pi, which is the first 2 characters of my last name. It's kind of like a brand. Since anyone can create objects there needs to be a way to know what object is from what creator. Like a namespace if you will.

Yeah I guess it is kind of like GameLib, but pure lua based. My goal is to provide objects that require no programming and you just plug and play into the editor.

Thought I'd give a post on some objects I have in the works. I'm thinking in terms of objects that provide real functionality and not just simple models objects. Here is a list of what I'm currently working on. I'm also always on the lookout for more useful objects to make complete games with. 3rd Person Camera Object - Give it a target and this will provide 3rd person controls for you on that target. - You can rotate around the target & rotate the object itself - You can provide an offset of where you want the camera to point on the object - You can set min/max zoom and sencetivities Character Object - Set the model setting with a gmf file to make it use that model - Creates a controller and allows you to set the height/radius of the controller - Allows you to set the collision type of the controller - Setting to place a name tag over the model (comes with offset settings that can include dynamic height) Character Controls Object - Give this a Character object as it's target and this will allow you to set controls to move that Character. - Gives settings for keyboard movement of Forward, Backward, Strafe Left, Strafe Right, Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Duck, & Jump With the 3 objects above it makes it a snap to get a moving character with 3rd person camera controls in your scene with zero programming required. Future Objects ============== AICharacter Object - Target to a Character object to give it AI Day/Night Object - Allows a bunch of settings to give a day/night cycle to your atmosphere Inventory Object - Gives a configurable inventory system to a Character object I'd be open to hearing people's thoughts or ideas for other objects that would help them in making their game.

I think you need a way to allow us to have every region loaded at once. Something like a server mode. The servers for online games generally has everything loaded (which is why they need some heavy stats). If you think about an MMO server, it has to have everything loaded because anybody could be anywhere at anytime. If the server has everything loaded then the client doesn't need to worry about anything. The server would send the updates to the client when they get a certain scene loaded. So if your friend changes something on a scene you don't have loaded the server knows about it because it has it loaded, and the next time you load that scene it would update your machine with the current state of things. In short I think the server needs to know everything all the time. It must have every zone loaded at once.

Is there any other way to get the grid object than from within InitDialog? If there is we could make more dynamic settings.

Oh he is running just this one script and not running the game mode. Yeah, running one object script by itself isn't how you go about it.

So looking at the bug, what effect are you after with multiple directional lights? To me it seems like there was only ever meant to be 1 directional light in a scene. Do you have an example of the effect you are after with multiple directional lights vs only 1? Also, I can't imagine this would be a show stopper right now. You can still continue developing and I can only assume your game is about a year out from being complete. With a near complete game, your bug issues will hold a ton of weight with Josh. My comments were not meant as insults. They were said from experience. The problem with comments like the ones I said were that anyone younger than a certain age will view them as insults and anyone older than a certain age will view them as truth. That's the problem with the age discussion. It's like your parents telling you something that you think you know more about. Then one day you realize where your parents were coming from. This only comes with age because you have to experience it to realize it. You experience certain things with age. It's not meant as an insult, but as advise.

The comment regarding your team was also regarding everyone who is trying to get into the independent game development business. The odds of your team, and everyone else trying to make some money off games, are very slim. Your team has about the same odds as the rest of us as even completing a game. Therefore, the bugs you find are just as important as the bugs anyone else finds. The excuse of being a "1 man team" does work perfectly fine. Josh does not make very much money from LE and hiring out people to fix things costs money. If he hired out to fix his bugs he's eating away at his profit margin, which would make even doing LE pointless for him. Because LE costs $200 and he doesn't have all that many customers to sustain a living from it (from what I can see), he can't afford to hire people to work on it. The community can help out only so much without seeing LE's source, but he can't give that out because someone could just steal it and call it their own and he would lose customers. Bug fixes will be slow because Josh only charges $200 for the engine. Many people have reported bugs that haven't been fixed yet. They all think their bug is the most important. Most realize if what they report is a real bug Josh will get to it eventually. I'm also not talking on behalf of Josh. I made it clear that these are my views and not the views of Josh. I can't speak for him and I'm not. These are my comments and mine alone. I'm sorry if I offended anyone, but these are the realities. From everything I've read about the game industry, it's a cutthroat business and we all need to take criticism because there is a ton of it out there. If you think I was harsh, just wait until your paying customers get their hands on your game, if it even gets that far. Again, that's not a slam on you, it's a reality of the business.

Sadly, you still do have more time to yourself than you will when you have your own family. You also seem to have some anger issue from that post. It's just best to keep a cool head and do as much helping for Josh as you can. Getting angry doesn't help anyone solve problems. That's all I'm saying. Put yourself in Josh's shoes once and you might have a different view.

Because he probably browses the board sometimes as a break from what he's doing. I can only assume the only way you would be happy is if Josh gave you a detailed plan of each task he's doing or plans on doing. You've been in the community long enough to know Josh does what he thinks is best for business. That's what's making him money. Now I'm sure Josh does care about Ryan Wenke, head of Vex, but he also has more people shouting loudly for documentation. Good documentation can get people in the door because so many other engines have poor documentation. Me, personally, I'm not saying Josh is thinking this way, I wouldn't be worrying to much about Ryan Wenke because from what I can see he and his team look to be just another high school team wanting to make it big in games which is as long a shot as any of us. He has good artists though I'll give him that.

When do you get this error? Do you get it when you save the script and only 1 time after every save of the script?

Prove me wrong about what? I know you are smart Tyler, but there are things in life that you only learn from experience. You should watch some of these genius movies out there were the kid learns that being smart doesn't mean you know everything. It means knowing that you don't. So for 2 months there were bugs reported that didn't get fixed. Let's take a look at what has happened over the last 2 months. First on the personal side, Thanksgiving & Christmas. This takes time away to spend with family. Now pending what Josh has going on that could mean a ton of time. Is his family located somewhere else? Does he have any kids anywhere? This time of year also means financial stress for many people. Have you estimated how much Josh really makes from LE? I have, and it's not very much from what I can see. I have to assume he either has a ton of money from something else, lives pretty poorly, or has a full time job and does this on the side, which means he has even less time. On a professional side, he just came out with this new Lua implementation where he didn't really know anything about Lua not that long ago. Because of what some people where pointing out he rewrote the multi-state Lua configuration to a single state. He has a ton of documentation to do. He created this new site for us. The things Josh has done from what LE makes money wise are amazing if you ask me. You want to talk about age? At 15 you have more time to yourself than you realize. The stresses in your live aren't nearly what they will be when you are on our own, or even worse, you are responsible for a child/wife. Being smart at any age has very little to do with anything. Balancing your life when you have way more responsibilities is when things get tricky. That is why someone older than you might have a hard time swallowing things when you talk about the "real world". So again, all this means, that because there are bugs sitting for 2 months, or even 6 months isn't anything to get pissed about. Go find a bug that MS created and see how long it takes for them to fix it for you. Josh is doing a great job for a 1 man crew and LE is the best engine I have seen in years of searching for the price that you get. You will be much better off simply reporting the bug with prove in the tracker and Josh will get to it when he can.

Wouldn't you run into a problem of the script not being called then if you do that? A good example would be my 3rd person camera object. I don't need a model for it, but I must have a script being called because there is code in the Update() function that gives functionality.

My guess is because it's easier if they have models. The editor can just do a mouse pick against a model to select it. Sure lights and such have position, rotation, & scale, but if they don't have a model how would you select them with your mouse in the editor? It obviously could be done, but it would most likely require something outside of the LE commands and something more about the editor program. Currently it's really easy to allow mouse selecting since there is a model associated with it a simple mouse picking works. So think about how would you go about allowing mouse selecting of something inside LE that didn't have a 3D mesh. I don't care if these entities have models in them during development of the scene, but when the game runs all these entities should have a setting that the framewerk uses to determine if it should remove the mesh or not. I feel like the scripts should be tied to entities and not models. That would take that restriction away, but then you still have the mouse positioning issue to fix.

You'll have to show your code and then we may be able to see what's happening.

Tyler, as Josh is pointing out I'm guessing, sometimes your criticism is kind of extreme and hard to swallow. I've been in the "real world" of programming for 8+ years now, and guessing Josh has as well, so it's hard to swallow things like that when they come from someone who just got into high school and hasn't been in the "real world" yet. In the "real world" LE is a very competitive game engine. It's run by 1 person who hires help out sometimes. I think you'll soon find out that in the "real world", things are rarely perfect because of restrictions and timelines that happen in the "real world". So my whole point of this was to maybe help you see how you can better make criticisms that are read more friendly and seen as more useful.

Josh is right about MS not spending time on the crossplatform part, but what they did do was open .NET specs so anyone can create it on any platform. MS won't do this themselves for obvious reasons, but it was smart to open it up so someone else could create .NET on other platforms, which they are doing.

To me it seems the only reason it has a gmf is so you can move it in scene via the editor/Sandbox.

I can't even begin to imagine how big of a pain this would be.

Does this have animations in it?