nick.ace

@Josh I'm really happy to hear that those top 5 will be making it! I'm happy with a lot of the new features introduce this year! Haha good luck with vehicle AI! It is a TON of work. If you ever want to look at my scripts I'll gladly release them to you if you think it'll save you some time as I'll be working on the vehicle AI of my game for the next few weeks (I would release them to the community now, but the setup work is a bit involved). Of course, you'll probably implement it much better than me!

I didn't mean to offend or anything, sorry if I came in off that way. I have worked projects, in industry as well as in college, of various sizes including huge programs before not in a game dev setting. And I've been programming for 8-9 years with many different languages and such. Anyway, there are certainly applications that would benefit from more local variables, but global variables also have the advantage of being centralized in one file/location. I absolutely hate when values are passed in through half a dozen classes before being usable, it becomes unwieldy at times. Maybe you like that due to the scalability, but a lot of games don't feature simplistic UI driven interactions. Also, there is a bit of overhead with passing variables that global variables eliminate. Of course, there are situations where global variables can cause issues such as with threading, but as long as you don't just instantiate globals throughout your code, global variables can actually be a good thing because they can be easier to track.

I've heard this a bunch, but why shouldn't they be used? The only reason I can think of is ambiguity of global and local variables with the same names, but other than that, I can't think of a reason why they are bad.

Also, those two commands aren't really that difficult haha. They literally do what they say

Yeah, but that's in relation to the price and energy efficiency that it has. I've been pleased with the performance of the card considering that it has a ridiculously low power consumption rate. My processor to be honest is probably more of a bottleneck. I guess related to this: How many vehicles can be supported by Leadwerks? Was the vehicle class designed for dozens of vehicles or just a few?

I have a 2GB GeForce 750ti, which I know isn't super high performance, but I wouldn't expect this to cause trouble with 2GB of video RAM. That being said, I'll look into it a little more. I just wasn't sure if this is to be expected or not.

Yeah, so each model is between 5k to 10k, and they only have one texture each, no bones, and the textures are 2k. Each material has three maps attached (a cubemap, a specular mask, and a diffuse). They also have wheels, but the wheel meshes are all the same, regardless of the body model, so that shouldn't do anything wrong. I can post a short video later to show the dip. It seems odd because I wouldn't expect that type of performance decrease. I should also note that I am using a custom shader, but that shader is also used for the test with the 6 uniform cars.

So, I was trying to find out why my game's framerate wasn't the best, and I came across an unexpected discovery. When I have 6 separate car models in game, the framerate plummets. However, if I use the same car model, the framerate is more reasonable. Anyway, I was just wondering, is this supposed to happen? I mean I only have 6 AI cars currently, but the performance seems a bit low. The FPS drops about 75% (like from 40 fps to 10 fps or something like that) once all 6 models are added.

Wow, now I feel stupid. Thanks so much for pointing this out!

One thing that sort of drives me up the wall (due to the fact that I use dozens of pivots), is that you can't directly select a child of a mesh by clicking on it. You have to find the mesh in the scene tab and then go through each child to find it. I think it would be easier to have some sort of selection such as Alt-LMB to select just the child.

Wow, that literally looks straight out of a AAA game! I agree with Guppy with the specular maps since parts look too since parts look like plastic. Also, I would maybe add more detail to the backpack and shoes (like higher res textures) because from behind, the character's detail level is a bit inconsistent, although this might be the overuse of specularity. I really like the face, jeans, and the hands (yep that's a weird criticism haha). But his hands seem to have amazing geometry (although the whole model really does but the hands are particularly impressive). Good job! Keep it up!

@Aggror: I tried that, and it works to some extent, but when you use a mesh with multiple textures, the textures start cutting through each other. With the character I'm using, the person starts to look like a zombie. @Genebris and Guppy: That looks like it should work. Thanks! I'll test later today. Edit: I tested it, but the game crawls after that. I think I'm just going to take a much simpler route with prerendered images of the characters since this would be quicker and easier to implement.

I'm trying to get a 3D character to display on top of the screen as part of the HUD (so unaffected by anything in the scene as if it's it's own scene). How could I achieve this effect?

Ok, I don't really know what's going on then. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Your best bet is to either file a bug report or speak to Josh directly, which might be more appropriate here since you don't seem to know what is causing this and it seems like an isolated case since I haven't heard of this before. Edit: What graphics card are you using btw?

I don't really know what is going on then. What system are you using? Is this a Linux or a Windows version?

What do you mean? If you are talking about no collisions, then you need to specify a shape (such as Polymesh) under the physics tab. See here (look under Scene section): http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/tutorials/_/editor/introduction-to-leadwerks-editor-r97

No problem! The way I showed is how to make an .exe of your game (so you can distribute it pretty much anywhere, not just Steam).

Yes, you publish on Steam (either through the Leadwerks workshop or through the Greenlight program). Leadwerks offers password-protected zip files. Under File->Project Manager press Publish. Then, a dialogue comes up with a radio box that says "Encrypt Files." If you press this, then the files get encrypted.

Haha, no worries, things like this slip by me too often as well!

Super cool! I've always felt that hitboxes were a pain to make, but this should definitely help. If you select convex decomposition, will the actual geometry be ignored for raycasts and such?

Here are some suggestions as to why this may not work (yes the first suggestion is kind of obvious, but just want to check, and if it isn't obvious, then there should be clearer documentation on this): You need to hold your mouse over the perspective window while doing this You have a full-screen shader that shouldn't be a full-screen shader What does your project look like? Could you maybe post a screenshot? If it's just a blank project, then you can just say that.

Welcome to the community! For you first question, you can look around the world you create by holding down the right mouse button and moving your mouse in the perspective view. As far as orbiting (looking at a 3D point while moving around it), I don't think this is possible automatically, although I might be wrong. I would avoid using debug mode whenever possible. People seem to get confused for when to use it. I think that's its main purpose is to allow for exceptions to occur and not end the program (essentially exception handling), so I would avoid using it for right now. It also runs very slow. If you do need to use it in the future for some reason, please file a bug report and post relevant assets (like code) so that Josh can better diagnose this. As far as I know, I haven't seen this error before, but it may be glitch, or it might be an issue with the code, it's too hard to tell.

@Rick Oh I was unaware of that! Well, regardless, I still love these random cool little features that keep getting added since they really set this engine apart from others! I've never seen something like this before, but, like I said, it'll be really useful!

Haha, I feel that sometimes you just add things because they're cool. I'm not complaining though! This tool looks super useful, especially with the project I'm working on right now!

You can always try the demo on Steam just to make sure. That's probably the best way to test it!