Rick

They are the same, but I think the Steam one will have the Workshop integrated into it.

The "copy" you are making is actually an instance (unless I've missed something). Instances share the same material, which means if you apply 1 material to 1 of the "copies" they will all change. There are ways via code to make a 100% unique copy (they don't share verts, materials, anything). There is also a way to make a "soft" copy where they share the verts but not the material.

@YouGroove I agree but today the editor just doesn't do that. The decision of what to do when you drag a model into the scene would best be made before it actually shows up (because the editor is using the engine to load the model too) so a checkbox on each entity might not work as it would have to show up first (pick a default loading way) and then based on what you check on that entity, change and reload, which is a little awkward. Maybe a prompt on each addition of a model to ask what you want (because there are really 3 options). Again, this could get annoying and be a pain in the workflow. I'm not really sure what the best method would be. A global checkbox that is used when you drag a model into the scene? The reason LE doesn't have this is because this was all new to 3.0. Prior to 3.0 we didn't have a choice. Everything was instanced and we had to deal with it.

This doesn't work at design time. The editor, by default, seems to use instancing at design time. You would have to either do as josk said and make copies (sort of ugly), or put placeholder pivots (or whatever) and attach a script that maybe has a property that is the prefab/model to use, and in the Start() function load the model yourself in a fashion that allows a unique set of materials (or completely new instance).

Cool! Yeah, I think the question is, do you release the LE project or the published LE exe. We have no way to protect the assets today it seems and most of my assets are purchased. However, this limits the executable to that platform, where the LE project could be imported by any platform (I would think) and could be ran from LE, but then you are giving all source files, which if you purchase models/sounds/etc you can't do. I'm not a Linux guy (and just not all that interested in it at this time), so if someone posts a Linux game I won't be trying it so I can't vote on it.

I actually like the recurring approach because it becomes less of an event and just a normal monthly thing that happens in the community putting less pressure on people. If they miss one, then they can try again next month. No big deal. I would like the consistency of a monthly game. There will be months where nobody does anything, but no biggie. @YouGroove, if you like I can lead this up. I don't think it'll take much time to set things up. We can hash out the recurring rules here and it'll basically be a copy/paste each month of those in a post. Then at the end of the month it's making a poll and let people vote. Then declare a winner.

So each month people submit a mini game for that months voting and the results of the vote determine the mini game for that month? Then I assume once submitted (win or lose) that same game can't be submitted again for prior months? I like the idea. Maybe a constant monthly, no pressure no (real) reward, would be interesting.

@Kavex The IDE built in is for Lua only. If you want to do C++ as far as I'm aware you need VS 2013.

Doing monthly tasks that we vote on would mean monthly updates, which is why a subscription would work well for an engine that isn't 100% established, from the engines standpoint. It means more people will keep the subscription to get the frequent features/bug fixes. Then it comes down to the bug fixes which I still think some of you have your head in the sand view on. I mean CryEngine and UE4 are going to be doing bug fixes as well and people are paying monthly for those. My idea is the same thing payment wise (the net result is the same), but it gives the majority of users more control over what they want that month.

@gamecreator you seemed to have added royalties into the mix here. I think most agree that's a bad idea. So then $100 every 10 months or so or $10/mo. Might be a cool idea to give an option like Unity. Note that I don't ever think Josh will do this but it's fun to think about

Have you ever played an MMO? That's basically what they are doing lol It's hard to tell Josh that when it sounds like Linux has made him many times more money than mobile.

That's the best part about the system. When the bug list gets big do you think nobody would allocate a sprint for bug fixes? Of course they would. Also, you are paying for bug fixes in any software. If it took people's time to do something then it's inside the cost of the software. Do you think companies are just nice and give you free working hours? Just because it's not a list item on the bill doesn't mean you aren't paying for it. Don't be naive. Are LE bugs fixed when they are found right now? No they aren't. Some bugs have been around for a long time. At least this new way would allow the majority to rule when the bugs are out of control and to allocate their money to take care of them. At least this way bugs would get a good solid amount of attention and Josh isn't scrambling to try and catch up to something he said he's do 6 month ago and we feel like bug fixes are rushed and sometimes don't get fixed when he thinks they are fixed. It doesn't matter if everyone agrees. The majority agrees and so the majority are happy, which is a good thing. Your sprint may not win 1 month but may win in another month. So you feel happy and understand that it's a fair system.

Well, if you were paying a subscription then you wouldn't have paid your initial lump sum for the engine (in theory). So then if we all decided what Josh should work on each month then there is zero time to do bug fixes because he'd always be working on a value added task that we decided on. Bugs happen and that's just the reality of the situation. If they started to build up and enough people deemed they needed to be fixed then they would decide to allocate a month to fix them. I'm thinking in a scrum methodology where Josh would make a list of tasks and make them about a month long (3 weeks dev 1 week test). Every single month (minus vacation) we would decide the direction of the engine from our money allocation, which means there is no time for bug fixes unless we define that "sprint"/month as a bug fix. We are all paying for bug fixes or lack of features now anyway. Josh has a dev cycle that he wants to stick too. So if he doesn't get to something because he's fixing bugs then we lack features but still pay the cycle upgrades price. At least with this system the users decide what we get (Josh lays out the list), but there would be no question about what the users want. I think once all platforms are there this would work. Missing platforms hurts this because you might never get to said platform if your current user base doesn't care about it, but you don't have any representation from the unsupported platform because those users aren't using your engine because you don't support the platform.

That's not 100% true. When 3.2 comes out it'll cost money and all those Linux people (or most) will upgrade. Pretty much all these engines have exhausted their user bases so paid upgrades or monthly charges is how they keep making money. I would actually like to see a monthly subscription for LE but I know some people don't like those. I'd rather dish out $5 - $10/mo instead of $100-$200 an upgrade. If the sub happened I wonder if allowing people to allocate their portion to certain tasks each month would be something that would work. Josh could lay out a list of features/bugs or whatever and we could all say how much we would allocate our funds too and the one that has the most money would get worked on for that month. This is sort of like a bunch of mini Kickstarters. I love thinking about alternative business models. I mean with the model above it would basically be like us hiring Josh as a consultant to make the game engine the majority want. How cool would that be

This doesn't have anything to do with the demand. I'm asking why is the demand low when clearly the mobile market in general is pumping out more games than the PC market each day? Why aren't the mobile devs interesting in LE as an engine is the question. This isn't correct. Unity took venture capitalist money which has nothing to do with the income. Investors saw potential and so they gave Unity a ton of money in which they went out and hired all their people to cover all their bases in game development (including mobile). So their hiring people to do work wasn't directly tied to the income their work was bringing in. Josh had a chance to do this at one point but decided not too. I don't blame him for it as you generally lose control of your company when you go the venture capitalist route, but it does have advantages. Namely, that you can afford to take a hit now and take your gains later (which is the game with mobile as people generally develop the game on the PC first before buying a mobile license).

The performance/features of what mobile was in LE 3.0 is basically where LE 3.1 is right now on the PC, so I don't buy the performance/feature reason. As with PC Josh fixed performance issues on mobile after release. There was no Kickstarter for mobile so no direct comparison can be done between the Linux kickstarter and a non-existent mobile kickstarter. There is no doubt LE got on the Linux game development bandwagon at the perfect time. Could it simply be timing for mobile? Was LE just too late to the mobile game?

But he's only "best" at it because he's been doing it for many years. There was an LE 1 a long time ago. I think Josh did pretty damn good on mobile for just learning it at that time for the first time. He did bring the ease of LE to the mobile platform. I don't think the platform really matters here in terms of what Josh is good at. Josh can bring LE to any platform, which he's shown. It's all about the numbers and mobile just didn't bring them in. It had nothing to do with what he's good at or not IMO. Clearly, more games are released on mobile every day than for the PC or consoles combined. So there is still a question of why didn't LE mobile work? Why/how is every other engine able to make mobile versions and make money on them? The numbers are the numbers and it didn't work so it's hard to say LE should do mobile, but I am interested in why it didn't work.

Honestly, if you would have done a Kickstarter for mobile back when making 3.0 I think your stance would be different today because you would have had the money up front from supporters, or it would have shown the demand wasn't there if it really wasn't there. Either way, it would have been a better experience today for everyone. This does show the importance on us developers side to create frameworks for our game logic that is a layer above the engine we use so we can reuse our logic code between engines because there is a void of a 1 stop game engine that doesn't cost thousands of dollars or charge royalties or is complicated as all hell.

I don't know about other people but I use Leadwerks because it's entity based programming and it's the easiest 3D API I've ever worked with. This is what keeps me with Leadwerks. Every time I use another engine I'm reminded of this.

Any solution would have to be something Josh isn't himself doing, because that's the issue. This takes time away from Josh doing other things. I think at some level Josh feels he's the only one who can do certain things in his engine. I don't 100% agree with that, but I think the point is Josh would have to explain so much detail of what would need to be done that he maybe feels he might as well do it himself, which takes his time away from other things. I don't agree with this as explaining what needs to be done and actually doing it are 2 very different time requirements. Let's think about how much this would really cost though. $100-200 would probably get you 1-3 hours of a contractors time in Cali (where Josh lives). Josh would have to spend some of that time explaining the issue and the contractor would have to spend a long time figuring out the engine. Then they would have to actually fix and test. So each bug fix could possibly take a contractor a couple days after the initial time learning the engine. That could equal about $2000 or so per fix for Josh to hire out. It would be interesting to see how many people who want mobile would be willing to pay for something like this (if Josh would even go for it which I doubt). Maybe find 100 people willing to pay $20 for each bug fix? I think this would be an interesting model for creating a game engine from scratch actually

The numbers that Josh saw would suggest otherwise.

Does this help? http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/9229-installing-leadwerks-for-linux/

Ubuntu is the supported Linux version from what I know. You will be best served to try on there first.

I think the difference is that the Linux demand already gave Leadwerks money in the Kickstarter where that wasn't the case for mobile. Also like we've both agreed on, for mobile you don't buy that license (mostly) until you have something already on the PC. That's not the same for Linux because there are crazy Linux fans out there that want their entire development of the game to be on Linux (which is what LE is giving them).

Wasn't 64bit an extended Kickstarter that didn't get reached?