Davaris

It generates shadow and light maps, so the lighting is static but it is of a far higher quality, than you could get with dynamic lights. To me, the output looks like what you'd get with a ray tracer. So it depends on what your goals are with your app, if you want to pick up objects purelight has lit and throw them around the room, it would not work. LWs dynamic lights still works with it, but there are limitations. For instance if you are carrying a torch, the static lit object shadows will not move because they are pre-calculated. However the areas they already affect will change in brightness. So again, you have to think carefully about what your goals are and make the necessary trade offs. Some people create simple programs to show off architectural designs to clients. Purelight is the perfect app for this. Others want to make games where static lighting with a gorgeous ray traced look, makes their game look stunning. Purelight is perfect for this as well. Have a look a their demo vids on Youtube to see what I'm talking about.

I don't know if this comes under best practices, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting shaders to work, when I was first learning to use them. So I'd suggest a list of what frag and vert files work together, as well as a link to the wiki with a few more shader samples. I assume this is going to be a sticky topic right?

Nice.

>Or if you prefer, you can set the editor to always perform conversions automatically. Does that do a batch convert, or does it remember the individual conversion settings for each asset?

Yes! While I would like to see a couple of libraries added to the engine, I don't want to pay for what I have no use for. I also don't want Josh to be distracted with this kind of work and fall behind in the race for better graphics. The only thing Josh would need to decide if he chooses to go that way, is how it should be done. Should he hire people to write and maintain these plugins, or allow a community of plugin providers to spring up around LWs? If it was a community, then people would have to compete for customers and the standard (in theory) should be high.

Inheritance is fine as long as you don't fall into the deep inheritance trap.

Don't forget the female gamers, they like characters that seem alive and they are 51% of the population. Matt Chat 75: Interview with Megan Gaiser and Rob Riedl of Her Interactive

Clouds

Klepto has done a great job with day/night. daynightvideo.avi DayNightSunMoon (this one is very pretty) As for weather, I have seen people discuss how to do rain and if I remember correctly it can be done with shaders. Do a search on it. We already have a waypoint system. See Lumooja's game code. I've forgotten what its called.

Nice explanation Bill.

From what I've seen, people make animations of the mouth doing the basic vowel shapes and then a plugin detects what sound is being played and sends ids to represent the shapes. The other major issue, is you need to animate expressions for the face as well, which would be a lot of work. Anyway, I can't wait till someone figures out how to automate this kind of thing.

That makes a lot of sense.

That is your opinion and you are entitled to it. But Indies can be and are just as much professionals, as people in the big studios. If you want to make things for yourself, or for the art, then it's fine to do whatever you like. But if you want to make a living as an Indie and some people do, you have to understand, you don't work for your own pleasure, you work for the enjoyment of your players. So if they demand things and they do quite often, you have to listen to the ones that are the most profitable to listen to, or not sell much at all. Its all about choices and consequences.

If the players demand lip sync then it is essential. Though if it is difficult to do or very expensive, then I wouldn't bother with it as an Indie. Now what I would be interested in, is text to speech technology. However I have no idea what libraries are available, or how much they cost. At any rate, something like that could probably be integrated into LWs, by anyone who wants it.

Unity also supports JavaScript, and Boo. Boo is sort of like Python. Also the C# on Unity is cross platform Mono. I don't know what the new Unity engine will be like, but I hated looking at the old one. The other downside is the Unity Community is very big, so I found that sometimes you will get your questions answered and sometimes you will not. Also I found its not possible to get to know people in a crowd as big as that.