Phodex Games

@Yue Thanks for the feedback. Also consider to fill out this from, it helps me gathering more detailed feedback. Takes only a few minutes. You actually need a pretty good PC to run it smoothly. At least a low - medium end gaming pc. Running it on 12 FPS must be a pain :D. I will think about providing more languages, but first I will work on concepting a real game offering more gameplay depth. I have some cool ideas. Greetings to you as well

@Yue have fun!

Hi there, I am very proud to finally present "Bladequest - The First Chapter" to you, which I secretly worked on for quiet a while now. I want to introduce myself to you and my welcome present for you is Bladequest - TFC and should be considered only a sneak peek of what is to come, its more like an interactive presentation, than a final full polished game, so please keep that in mind while playing. There is much more to come! I want to build a community of dedicated gamers which share their ideas and likings with me to provide them just the best and most addictive games. Especially important for me is atmosphere and the player identification with the game and its characters. To tell me your likings and preferencescheck this out! Bladequest is meant to show you, what I am able to do and what could be possible. It is currently lacking some features and content, but we can build upon it, whatever we like! Join my email list to stay in touch, share ideas and craft an epic game together. Let’s do it! CHECK THIS OUT TO READ MORE AND DOWNLOAD!

First of all thank you for the feedback, really appreciate it To draw the weapon simply press "F" you can also change this in the options menu. But I guess I should add this in the tutorial. Yeah I already good some critiques on this that combat is a little bit easy and repetitive. I will definitely take your objections serious and work more on the combat for my next projects. Already have cool ideas like implementing ragdoll or making it able for the player to kick the enemies away from you. Glad you feel that way. As you seemed to enjoy the graphics and atmosphere the most, I guess I succeeded with my goal, as for me especially the atmosphere was very important. Stay tuned

Thanks man that means a lot to me! Hope everything will work as expected have fun . Tell me, if you encounter any errors.

Hi Guys, It has been very silent around Phodex Framework and my projects, but thats because I really focused on game development and nothing else. Posting stuff and creating content costs time and I was also very busy with studying. However as promised in my last entry I was working on an actual game. I tried to create a small, but quality experience including decent design, nice graphics and, at least for a one man indie game, complex game mechanics such as first person melee and range combat. If it is the yet best free Leadwerks game is up to you. You can try it out for FREE! About Bladequest Bladequest is my welcome gift for you and I really would like to share my knowledge and skill to create great games from your feedback and input! To do so, I need your help! That I can achieve a game you like to play, let me know what your likings are. To do so just participate in this survey! Bladequest is meant to show you, what I am able to do and what could be possible. It is currently lacking some features and content, but we can build upon it, whatever we like! Join my email list to stay in touch, share ideas and craft an epic game together. Let’s do it! Before working on Bladequest I worked on a project called Dreamdale, which I decided to cancel for the moment, as I want to go towards smaller games and Dreamdale turned out to be a pretty huge project. I most likely will use some of the ideas in one way or another. If you are interested in the project check it out here! What next? So after I recieved enough feedback about Bladequest and about your preferences, I can sit down and concept some ideas for cool games. I then will present them to you and we will step by step create an awesome game together. Learning from my former mistakes, I would also like to start small and slowly grow bigger, so better expect a smaller and simpler, but well-thought out game. I even though about mobile games, although I prefer developing for PC, but I will do anything I can to deliever just the best experience. Get Bladequest - TFC NOW! As always stay cool! Markus from Phodex

@Josh Thanks man that solved the problem

Hi, so the final version of my project is ready and I want to release it. It also works fine on my computer, will also test it in my laptop as well. But on my friends PC there are some problems. It crashes without any error when changing options in the game menu (as it is using a file read/write command accessing a lua data file inside the game directory). It works if he starts the game as administrator, but then the game crashes with an "programm not working" error message from windows, when loading the first gameplay map. This could also be fixed by setting "Always start as administrator" to true in the exe settings. But I cannot expect from the user that he enables admin mode by manual in order to play the game, can I? So how can I handle this issue? Should i just set the exe to "run as admin" by default and deliever this with my installer? Does this even work? Or does windows reset this, especially if the files are packed into an installer file. Or do I need any kind of security certificate for releasing software on windows? I have not much experience on this subject.

I recently found out that all this seems to get cause by the Time updating (one reason for the error seems to be stopping Time:Update() from getting called in the main loop), still I could not 100% fix this issue, still there is flickering, in the editor and ingame. I really want to fix it its literally the last thing I need to solve before the release version is finished.

I am personally using Notepad++, so you dont have that problem...

It seems that this gets caused if I do graphic changes ingame (for example adding/removing Post Effects). I therefore created a routine which resets the emitters (tried reset and pause/play), but still this happens. It even occurs with emitters without spritesheet, then there is no flicker, but the emitter bursts all particles at once which looks weird as well. Overall I have to say the emitters behave very unpredictable most of the time.

Hmm no that does not work unfortunately, I only activated it in hope it would fix the issue maybe, but its still there, even in editor atm. Its weird because sometimes it just works and I changed nothing, seems to be some kind of bug :(. Maybe I have to use fire without animated spritesheet now.

Hi I encountered a weird problem with my particle emitters using animated spritesheets. This is how it looks like: As you can see it does work normally in the editor but ingame it has this weird flickering. I also have this behavior in the editor sometimes. It seems to appear randomly. In the editor, the flickering can mostly be fixed by disabling and enabling the emitter or by decreasing the particle count to 1 and then increasing it again to 2: I think this problem appears when changing graphic settings, as sometimes ingame it also works. It even happens that one emitter of the same kind works and another not. The sprite sheet image settings: The Sprite sheet: Here the emitter settings: I tried the default and the smoothanimation shader for the emitter material. So what could cause this problem? This is one of the last bugs in my project and I would be gald to fix it soon Thanks for you input as always.

I fixed the problem on my own now. After disabling various things and doing the map change in main loop I could nail down the problem. It was caused by many diffrent sources and turned out to be pretty complex, still could fix it luckily. Thanks for all who posted, your information was helpful indeed.e

Hey its me again. I had a similar problem some time ago, but this time its diffrent and I still did not found a solid solution. So when I tried to load a new map like this, world:Clear() Map:Load("Map path") it just crashes, without any error or anything. After some testing and deleting diffrent stuff step by step I got a object reference count error. This is pretty frustrating :(. Well I know its due to my code, but sometimes I lack some bascis as I learnt the whole coding stuff by myself. I nailed down the problem by trial and error. It seems to be my AI/Characters and weapons equipped to the player and the AI, had no energy yet to do deeper research on this. I am just wondering how you generally deal with such an issue. I have this problem very often, if I want to release an object it just crashes (for example it is playing an animation atm, or used elsewhere in code), so I need to fiddle around, using self.entity:Hide(), or do some workarounds to prevents this. I know there is self.entity:AddRef(), but how to best use this to prevent my game from crashing? I am a little bit helpless and so close to the release, I need to fix this!

@macklebee Well that comes a litte bit too late , spend the whole last day and today to translate my whole system so it only uses import instead of dofile. Well fortunatley I could improve some stuff by doing that, but especially my save/load system suffered from not beeing able to load specific files. Still this information is very helpful thanks a lot

Ok after some more researched, I can consider this as solved. There was no memory leak in the demo level, and I found the issue in my own code. Sorry for the shock :D, thanks anyway the information helped me solve the problem.

@reepblue Thanks thats the information I needed :), but the problem now is that for some reason import does only work with pure string not put into a variable. But within my system I often used "dofile" to load self made data files, like sound profiles for various objects, which paths are stored in variables to be flexible. Is there any way you could do this? Otherwise I have some trouble

When I exported my project and started the exe file, just nothing happned, window doesnt even pop up. I nailed down the issue to some "dofile" commands I am calling inside my main. The error does not seam to be within the files I am calling. It seems to be "dofile" in general. Running in Admin mode did NOT solve the issue by the way. So I fear this does not work due to lua sandbox is enabled after exporting is it? It would greatly help me if there would be a way to avoid this, otherwise I have to re-design all my code so it does not need "dofile", which could get hard, especially with my save/load system.

Hmm I would not consider this as solved so quickly, because in my own project I experienced a drop from 60 to 40 and going down and it did not refresh, also when I am not wrong the 22 fps in the demo stayed and it was not just for a few seconds or so. Maybe I even messed up some screenshots, so the third one may be from another restart. The Problem is examining this problem takes some time. I am currently doing this. I will try System:GetMemoryUsage() and see if the memory goes up as well. I think I should put it to extreme and let it run for like an hour. I will respond again if I did that. I will also try running it in normal mode and just observe the fps without taking a look at memory. However, even if the demo level is alright, I still have to find the issue in my own project...

Hi, I am in the final stage of the development of my game and now its time to bring the performance to a decent level. So I did some research and found out that over the time my framerate begins to drop from 60 - 40, maybe even further did not try it out. The effect is not so drastical if I put my player into an empty scene with no other objects and scripts running, but still existant and noticable. The results of my research showed that the script memory increases from time to time. Garbage collection happens, but still the memory is getting higher and higher. Of course I though it was due to my code and I had generated a memory leak, but then, when I tried the leadwerks build in FPS Demo Level I got a little nervous when I encountered the same issue. I tried to create a more extreme situation and started the level in Debug Mode and left it alone for about 30 minutes. First it looked like this: After 30 minutes: After 40 minutes: When I took a closer look I saw that the Memory decreases, as the script memory increase, but for some reason that still meant an fps drop of about 8 frames. It recovers again over time. Also the memory usage went negativ? By the way I encounterd this behavior even on a empty map with only one camera... So several question come up to me, some specific to this problem some of more general nature. As I am very happy with the result of my project and it turned out very professional, I also want to provide a good performance for my audience, so I really would need some help, due to my limited knowledge in this sector, as I am no well trained sofware engineer :): 1. What does the memory usage & script memory usage actually say ? I guess Mem usage is fonts, textures, etc. but what exactly is script usage? Is it how much RAM my code is taking? 2. In which unit is the mem usage provided here? I would guess its in bytes? 2. I this memory leak normal, or should I call it memory shift, as it seems to shift memory to the script usage? 3. Can I overcome that memory leak and how, as it seems to negativly affect my framerate? 3. If someone knows guides or information about optimizing lua code performance wise and how to overcome code bottlenecks it would be kind if you could share this with me This is what I have already read and found: https://www.leadwerks.com/community/blogs/entry/1866-common-bottlenecks/ https://www.leadwerks.com/community/topic/13854-performance-question/?hl=performance https://www.leadwerks.com/community/topic/6369-memory-leak/ I encounterd some more problems, but I try to solve them by my self first, as I did not much research on them. I for example have some lights flickering or disappearing when it should not disappear, or my lightquality change during runtime still results in disabled lights. When I fail solving them you will hear from me again soon If you read so far I thank you very much and I really appreciate it, I hope I provided all needed information and all was clear to read and understand.

Actually i was too curios about the UI system that i started to play around with it . Its very interesting. Your tutorial is pretty helpful, as there is no other information, besides the documentation about it. You undestand that it will take a while till I understand all that code you send me, but its a great reference, really appreciate your help. Very nice of you :).

Thanks for the effort man unfortunately I have no idea of the Leadwerks GUI system. I use my very own system, because back in the day there was no GUI system for LW and I never had time or felt to learn it as my own was getting better and better. But I guess I would benefit to learn it, so that I understand how GUI in general works and what the conventions are. For now I guess I will stay with my old system, as the effort would be insane to first learn the whole GUI system and then rebuild it for my project, especially as I am in the final stage of the project. So I will just stay with my normal healthbars ^^ I guess. But next time I will definetly try it out! I saw you have a tutorial series about it maybe that helps, but the for GUI system there are not many good tutorials and information yet...

Hi, no I am just calling it once. I am currently building my options menu and therefore have a class handling the options the function looks like this: function SysControl:SetLightingQuality(quality) --this is exactly the same as I found in the fps demo level code, to set light quality world:SetLightQuality(quality) System:SetProperty("lightquality",quality) end But what I found out is that it seems to work if I set the light quality in the main.lua before the main loop starts. But actually I see no diffrence between the diffrent lightning levels, but I dont think that it is not working, I just think the quality difference is minimal, therefore it would be best to keep it on 0, isn't it? Maybe it has some more drastical effect if you have volumeric lighting and enviorment probes, but I havent tried that yet. I mean if this option does not affect the visuals of my scene then I am thinking about keeping it away anyway. I should also mention, that I have just a point light and NO directional light in my scene. EDIT: I did some closer research, and yes it actually works if I set the light quality before the main loop starts. But on runtime the lights still go off. I also works for the FPS level, I just did not notice as the difference on the shadows is not that huge...

Yeah I changed some stuff in the main lua, but the rendering & update stuff is untouched and default. If I start the Leadwerks FPS level it works, although i cannot really see a quality difference, but lights don't go off if I change the light quality in the game menu. @Josh In the editor it works just fine...