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I'm proud to announce the release of the first Leadwerks Games Bundle. Start building your own games with Leadwerks Engine and discover indie titles created by developers just like you. This bundle includes Leadwerks Game Engine, along with three games created with Leadwerks, and a generous discount. Unleash your creativity and embark on an exciting journey into game development with Leadwerks Engine! This bundle includes the full-featured Leadwerks Game Engine alongside three exceptional games created using Leadwerks by fellow developers just like you. Dive into this world of imagination and innovation—build, play, and inspire others in the thriving community of indie game creators. Your adventure starts here! Cyclone Cyclone is a puzzling first-person action-platformer from the creator of the hit Portal modification, Blue Portals. Solve a series of perplexing puzzles by placing gravity-bending vortexes in the world. Launch objects, redirect projectiles, and fling yourself across the room to reach the exit! Salvationland Welcome to the future after the global flood. An exciting adventure awaits you as a young wanderer named Victor. Journey to the last city on Earth, whose fate rests solely in your hands. Defeat the elusive villain, destroy the sinister plans of the mysterious mayor, and become the liberating hero! FotoMuseo 3D Discover all the hidden secrets in this little 3D Interactive Exploration Adventure. Your task is simple, cross the Earthgate Portal and visit a Photographic EXPO in the FotoMuseo. Collect clues and unlock new areas with your investigations. You can pick up the Leadwerks Games Bundle on Steam now.

The latest update to Ultra Engine, version 0.9.7, introduces an all-new decals system, particle emitters, enhanced entity and material properties, and improved flowgraphs. New features and enhancement make it easier than ever to create performant games and simulations that look great and run smoothly. Decals A new decals system built on our clustered forward+ renderer allows you to display stains, graffiti, puddles, and other details to enhance the appearance of your scenes. Because they are rendered in a single pass, there are no z-fighting issues, and decals work great with transparent surfaces. Color, normals, metalness / roughness, and even light emission are all supported and blend seamlessly with PBR surfaces in your world. The new decal layer setting give you control over which objects decals will appear on. Particles Particle emitters make their first appearance in Ultra Engine 0.9.7, for simulating fire, smoke, and other special effects. Extended Entity and Material Properties Ultra Engine now allows per-entity control of emission color, texture offset, and texture scaling. Materials have a new auto-scrolling feature that can be used for easy animation of moving textures like conveyer belts, tank treads, and rivers. Enhanced Flowgraphs The flowgraph has been given a makeover with an updated appearance that is not only more beautiful, but more functional. Entity icons are shown next to the node titles to provide a quick visual cue about what type of object the node represents. Zooming with the mouse wheel has also been added to the interface, for faster navigation of complex scenes. And Much More... More than 30 bug fixes Updated to latest Steamworks 1.60. Animation hooks are improved and will more reliably be triggered when they are supposed to. Steam timer update slowed down from 30 hz to once per second, since freezing issue seems resolved. Lua string documentation updated. Materials can now be dragged from the asset browser onto a model in the model editor. Asset browser will emit WIDGETDROP events for windows and interfaces an item is dragged onto. Added animation properties in model editor. Added per-mesh "Update Normals" in model editor right-click popup menu. Shadow maps have been switched to bindless textures, instead of using array textures. Light::SetShadowmapSize() method is added. Improved compatibility with some cards. Added shadowmap size property in scene editor. Added SelectDevice.cpp to C++ project template. You should add this file to your VS project to ensure your game uses a Discrete card on machines with switchable graphics. GetMemoryUsage() is now accurate in debug builds. Model animation will now correctly take into account the speed value set in model files. Model editor animation speed property now uses float values so you can slow down an animation. Libzip and zlib sources are now compiled into engine instead of using an external static lib. Only the editor is updated at this time. New package class methods: Package::SetComment, Package::SetFileComment, Package::CountFiles, Package::GetFile. Added World::GetSpeed method. Updating Projects When the editor detects a project that was built using an older version of the engine, it will display the project manager at start. This allows you to sync your projects and receive important shader updates before loading them. If you need to access the previous version for any reason, it is still available as an archived branch. Please note that in 0.9.7, a new extra parameter was added to the Load and Save Component methods. Your custom C++ component overloads will not be called unless they include this parameter. Weeklong Deal You can get Ultra Engine on our website or on Steam. Use coupon code DREAM in our store for a discount this week. Got Leadwerks on Steam? Grab an extra discount with the Leadwerks to Ultra Engine Pro upgrade bundle. About Ultra Engine Ultra Engine was created to solve the problems we saw while working on virtual reality projects at NASA. We are developing game engine tools to provide order-of-magnitude faster performance for 3D and VR applications in entertainment, defense, and aerospace.

Ultra Engine 0.9.6 is here, with a new foliage system that replaces and improves the vegetation system used in Leadwerks. Whereas Leadwerks uses a geometry shader, Ultra uses a compute shader that provides more power and better performance. The most significant improvement is the inclusion of sublayers, which allow a mesh layer to use multiple variations to easily populate a scene with a variety of different objects, while spacing them out in a natural way. Imposters Imposters are also added, which allows high-poly meshes to be reduced to just a single quad when they are viewed from a distance. This feature can be used with or without the foliage system. A series of images are generated for color, normal, and metallic/roughness values, to provide an accurate representation of the object from any angle. Nature Starter Kit DLC The first DLC for Ultra Engine is the essential Nature Starter Kit, which provides trees, plants, and rocks for your outdoor environments. This free DLC is available for Ultra Engine Pro, Standard, and for the standalone version of the engine from our site. New Animation Tools The model editor interface has gained several new tools focused on improving support for animation. Animations can be loaded from external files, partial animation sequences can be extracted and added as a new sequence, and bind poses can be reset. Free Web Assets The new Asset Library provides an interface to install both DLCs, and to browse and download remote content from third-party providers. The first official integration is with AmbientCG.com, providing instant access to more than 2000 game-ready PBR materials. No-Limits Royalty-Free License for Game Developers We've revised our end user license agreement to remove all restrictions related to revenue or company size. (Restrictions on military and government usage still apply.) Buy Ultra and develop games freely with no additional costs or hidden fees. You can get Ultra Engine on our website or on Steam. Use coupon code SUMMER2024 in our store for a discount this week. This and so much more is ready to use in Ultra Engine 0.9.6: More than 100 bug fixes(!) Model file format updated, now supports LODs and colliders. Added cubemap IBL sampler. See "Scripts > Utilities > Cubemap to PBR" in the main menu. Shaders are now using correct sRGB > Linear > sRGB transform. Revised environment probes GI calculation, HDRI to cubemap tool no longer using OpenCL so it will work on all machines now. Translate tool in the 2D viewports now uses the selection bounding box to grab and move objects, instead of individual objects. Flowgraph editor initializes faster when you view it the first time. Project manager sync view much faster now. Added "Extract Animation", "Remove Animation", "Reset Bind Pose" and "Load Animation" tools in model editor. Drawing guidelines in 2D viewports now used dashed lines. Search in Asset Browser now acts like a filter for the folder you are in, with some pre-defined search terms provided. Added COMBOBOX_EDITABLE widget style. Revised terrain creation interface and workflow. Added back-face lighting material setting (good for foliage). Model Editor now shows default pose of animated models. Improvements to the glTF model loader. Added "Reset Transform" tool in Model Editor. Added "Generate Imposter" tool in Model Editor. Added "Load LOD" tool in Model Editor. Translate tool in 3D viewports now uses a conventional gizmo. Added viewport layout toolbar buttons. Added Load and Save buttons to World Settings window. User-defined groups are now supported in the Scene Browser. About Ultra Engine Ultra Engine was created to solve the problems we saw while working on virtual reality projects at NASA. We are developing game engine tools to provide order-of-magnitude faster performance for 3D and VR applications in entertainment, defense, and aerospace.

Ultra Engine 0.9.3 is here, with usability improvements, bug fixes, and new AI-powered features to make game development easier. You can get a discount now in our store or on Steam all week. "Futuristic Room" by Dennis Cliofis Object creation has been overhauled with a more visual approach that lets you easily select the object you want to add to the scene. You can also insert a new object into the scene tree, under the selected node, or in the scene root. A new component creation tool simplifies new component creation for C++ and Lua. A new smoked glass effect will appear behind some windows. Besides looking great, this provides additional visual cues about the transparency of an image or model. It's disabled by default, so just go to the Tools > Options menu and you'll see an option to enable this effect. AI-powered features are now available on the Steam build with support for text-to-image and seamless texture stitching. Additionally, more than 60 bug reports have been resolved since initial launch. New commands: Camera::SetOrder Camera::SetSweptCulling You can get a discount now in our store or on Steam all week. About Ultra Engine Ultra Engine was created to solve the problems we saw while working on virtual reality projects at NASA. We are developing game engine tools to provide order-of-magnitude faster performance for 3D and VR applications in entertainment, defense, and aerospace.

Ultra Engine unlocks the full power of your GPU to deliver up to 10x faster performance for your game. Ultra Engine is now available in Early Access, both in our store and on Steam. Use coupon code "LAUNCH" to receive a discount before January 1. Ultra Engine is a huge leap in technology that provides a new future-proof foundation, while keeping the strengths and general design philosophy we developed in Leadwerks. There were many major underlying changes made to create a better development platform for your games: Leadwerks Ultra Benefit Editor written in BlitzMax Editor written in C++ Better compatibility, extensions system x86 x64 More addressable memory Win32 / GTK / Cocoa Custom UI Consistent UI across platforms Raw pointers Shared pointers No invalid pointer errors ToLua C++/Lua binding Sol Support for shared pointers Blinn-Phong lighting PBR lighting Better graphical quality FBX asset pipeline glTF asset pipeline PBR materials Single-threaded Multi-threaded Faster performance OpenGL Vulkan Future-proofing 10x Faster Performance Have you ever tried to develop a game, only to have the framerate get slower and slower as you add more content and features? This is especially problematic in virtual reality because low framerates cause motion sickness and can make your game or experience unplayable. Ultra Engine is designed to achieve ultimate scalability and deliver blazingly fast performance as your game grows, with a revolutionary new Vulkan-based architecture that unlocks the full power of your GPU to deliver up to 10x faster performance. Code Games with C++ and Lua Ultra Engine provides an easy-to-learn programming API that can be used with Lua, integrated into Visual Studio Code. Documentation is extensive, with hundreds of code examples demonstrating how to use graphics, physics, raycasting, pathfinding, and other systems to build games and VR applications. Your game code runs on its own thread, so there's no performance penalty for using an interpreted language. Royalty-Free License What you create is yours to play, sell, or give away. You will never be charged royalties or install fees for any application you make. And because we only rely on free open-source middleware libraries, you never have to worry about purchasing expensive licenses from third parties. Physically-based materials Entity component system with multiple components per entity Scriptable editor with plugins system glTF model pipeline AI-powered texture generation Re-projected screen reflections Detailed asset inspection tools You can get Ultra Engine Early Access now. Use coupon code "LAUNCH" to receive a discount before the end of the year. Please see the development roadmap for detailed information about the software's current capabilities. Join us on Discord on Saturday December 23 at 6 PM GMT (10 AM PST) for a special live streaming event!

It looks like everything is in order. I updated the name of the item on your account, and when your current renewal period expires it will go back to the early access $7.99 price. There are controls on the product page to cancel renewals or pre-pay for a block, and it should be very easy to use. Please let me know if anything else needs adjusting.

I'm pleased to announce that Ultra Engine SDK Early Access is now available. Four years ago, I set out to solve the performance problems I was seeing while working on virtual reality projects at NASA. Ultra Engine is the product of a lot of intense research and development during which I invented a new architecture designed for the way modern graphics hardware works. The results exceeded my wildest expectations, providing Ultra Engine with order-of-magnitude faster rendering performance than Leadwerks or Unity. Cyber Samurai by Khoa Minh The initial release is a C++ programming SDK for WIndows that provides access to the all new Ultra Engine API. Similar to Leadwerks, but utilizing modern C++ features like smart pointers, the new API features native support for loading all proprietary Leadwerks formats, so you can easily pull your existing 3D content into the new engine with updated graphics and performance. In addition to being really fast, Ultra Engine provides a ton of new possibilities: The Khronos glTF file format is supported natively, providing an easy way to load thousands of game-ready 3D models. An entity component system provides a formal structure for adding modular game components, and even supports loading and saving of game states. A layer-less terrain system supports up to 256 different materials per terrain. The animation system has a lot of new possibilities you've never seen before, in addition to being incredibly fast. The engine even features documented support for the mythical brush entity, for constructive solid geometry and real-time slicing and dicing. The pathfinding system provides precise creation and control of navigation meshes. Plugins system with plugins for FreeImage, KTX2, and fast BC7 compression. Features that were not very well documented in Leadwerks are clearly laid out with examples, like render-to-texture. Here's a video that goes through some of the new capabilities: Continued Development We're just getting started! There's a lot more great technology on the way. Here are some of the main features in development: New visual editor with customizable extensions VR support Linux and Mac versions C# programming support Lua programming support Advanced global illumination and reflections Box2D physics Newton Dynamics 4 physics Ultra Engine will be licensed at $9.99 a month, with a 20% discount for early adopters. If you would like to join the Ultra Engine journey towards a better tomorrow with maximum efficiency, activate your plan and get started using your new secret weapon. See you on the forum!

@SpiderPigWhat browser are you using?

A few years ago, some folks at NASA asked for my help with some VR projects they were working on. They had switched to Leadwerks and were getting better performance with that, but it still wasn't fast enough for what they were trying to do. I flew from California out to Goddard Space Flight Center to meet with them. When I saw what NASA was doing with my software, my jaw hit the floor. Goddard Space Flight Center Rendering performance in VR is critical because if the framerate drops, it creates a discontinuity between what your visual and vestibular (sense of balance) systems perceive. This causes instant and severe motion sickness and can result in nausea, vomiting, and dizziness. The work NASA was doing with VR involved loading engineering CAD models with tens of millions of polygons and thousands of articulated sub-objects, and displaying them in VR. Naturally, the VR rendering performance for these types of models absolutely crawled. If we were making a VR game we would just optimize the models and design everything to fit within a polygon budget, but engineering requires complex models with many fine details. We couldn't just "optimize away" important details the engineers wanted to inspect in VR. NASA model of International Space Station I came away from that meeting thinking it was an impossible problem to solve, and I flew home to California. Over the next weeks I started thinking "I know this is impossible, but if it were possible, what would it look like?" This lead to the development of a new game engine designed specifically to maximize performance for VR. Today I am happy to reveal performance benchmarks of the new Ultra Engine compared to Leadwerks and Unity. These tests reveal different performance bottlenecks that can occur in real-time applications that would cause slow performance. Testing was performed on Windows 10 with an Nvidia GEForce 1080 GPU. Instanced Geometry Test In this test, a 3D grid of 32,768 instanced cubes is created. This evaluates how the renderer handles a large number of objects with CPU frustum culling enabled. Frustum culling on the CPU is important because it allows the engine to discard large parts of the scene from processing in the rendering loop. It also allows the engine to skip animation for offscreen objects. In this test, Ultra Engine outperforms both Leadwerks and Unity by 20x, with 95% GPU utilization: Animation Test In this test, 1024 animated characters are displayed. Each character has a unique skeleton and is animated independently with no instancing. In this test, Unity outperforms Leadwerks, but Ultra Engine is still more than 18x faster, with much higher GPU utilization: Lighting Test This test renders a scene made up of 1000 instanced boxes and 25 point lights. This provides a measure of how efficiently each engine handles the interaction between lights and objects, and simulates the lighting overhead of a complex scene. In this test the Leadwerks renderer has a significant performance advantage over Unity, but again Ultra Engine is much faster than either: Unique Geometry Test In this test 4096 unique (not instanced) boxes are created and drawn onscreen. This simulates a complex scene with many unique objects. Unity and Leadwerks both struggled to render this scene in real-time, but Ultra Engine ran at an astounding 6000+ frames per second: As you can see, a variety of scenarios that would cause the Unity or Leadwerks renderer to bottleneck run with absolutely no problems in Ultra Engine. This technology is being developed into a full game engine with a visual editor, complete with a plugins and extensions system. Ultra Engine will deliver order-of-magnitude faster performance, to eliminate motion sickness and lower hardware costs for VR applications, as well as general game development. There's no need to spend hours and days optimizing your game, because when you use Ultra Engine your game is already optimized. New editor work-in-progress If you're in Orlando the last week of November, stop by booth #2341 in the small business pavilion during the I/ITSEC 2021 expo to see a live demo of our game-changing new technology. If you would like to be notified when Ultra Engine becomes available, sign up for the mailing list. Update Benchmarks are now available for download.

Ultra App Kit 1.1 is now available on our website and on Steam. This free update brings cross-platform development to our fast resolution-independent GUI toolkit. To download the new installers, click on your account purchases. In addition to Windows, Mac and Linux are now supported, which means you can code once and compile everywhere to easily create cross-platform GUI applications. Builds on Linux use minimal dependencies and will work on virtually any distro without any additional libraries to install. This effectively solves the Linux user interface problem forever and provides us with a strong foundation on which to build new game development tools that look great and run everywhere. Ultra App Kit is gorgeous on macOS and works with both Intel-based Macs or running natively on Apple Silicon. Along with various small bug fixes, version 1.1 adds the following new commands: Display::ClientArea() returns an iVec4 defining the usable area inside the screen, minus any bars the OS uses. Widget::SetFontBold() allows you to display bold text on a widget. Command() allows easy interaction with the system console / terminal. You can get the standalone version now for just $1.99 a month, or get a Steam key for $19.99. Both versions will give you support to build GUI applications for Windows, Linux, and Mac: Updating Ultra App Kit 1.0 Projects The move to cross-platform and ARM support only requires small changes in your existing projects. In Visual Studio, right-click on the solution name and open the Properties editor. In the Linker > Input field, change "App Kit.lib" (release configuration) and "App Kit_d.lib" (debug) both to "AppKit.lib", with no spaces. In the release configuration, change the linker search path from "$(UltraEnginePath)\Libs\Win64" to "$(UltraEnginePath)\Library\Windows\x64\Release". In the debug configuration, change the linker search path from "$(UltraEnginePath)\Libs\Win64" to "$(UltraEnginePath)\Library\Windows\x64\Debug". If you are using a 32-bit build, repeat this process with the 32-bit platform selected, replacing "x64" with "x86". New projects will be generated with correct paths for linking to the engine library.

Built to power a new generation of game development tools, Ultra App Kit provides an easy-to-use C++ programming SDK for creating desktop GUI applications. Unlike other alternatives like Dear ImGui, the Ultra App Kit GUI renders in retained mode rather than immediate mode, and is specifically designed for desktop GUI applications. This makes applications snappy and responsive when resizing or refreshing a window. DPI scaling is baked into the design for resolution-independent graphics on any screen. The GUI can be combined with an embedded OpenGL viewport, or combined with a 3D game engine to make custom editors and game development tools. Check out the video tutorials and read the documentation to learn more. Ultra App Kit can be purchased in our store. API Design C++ shared pointers everywhere Extensible widgets system Extensive documentation with examples for each command UI Features Resolution independent for any DPI scale Load SVG vector images Set widget icons Change mouse cursor Custom color schemes stored in JSON files Supported Widgets Label Button (push, checkbox, radio, and toggle styles) ProgressBar TextField TextArea ComboBox ListBox Slider (scrollbar, trackbar, and stepper styles) Draggable multi-select TreeView Create your own custom widgets Additional Features File I/O File system watcher Memory allocation and management Image loading, saving, processing Package system for loading files from compressed / encrypted archives Plugin system Thread management String manipulation (split, search, conversion, etc.) Message boxes and file / folder requester