Mumbles

Definately, When the leadwerks 2.3 upgrade was available, I bought that with my limited money instead of the upgrade.

I think that's a bit much... Blitz and DB etc. They work in schools, for teaching basic level programming (although I couldn't even see programming being taught until the sixth form years). Leadwerks though, is not a programming language. It's primarily a graphical command set with support for audio and physical representation. I just can't see that being taught in schools, even at A-level. So for that reason, I can't see that opening up to schools would be a viable option. But hey, I'm not Josh, so I'm not going to tell him where he can and can't market his engine

You know what you should do Josh? Keep your current GLSL renderer, and for people who don't have SM 3.0 capable cards - implement a software renderer. They have the advantage of supporting -all- features, but of course, they are inherently slow because it's all done on the CPU. Then it would just as good as your current version, so for people who complain that it's too slow, they can already see what the engine is capable of. Tell them to upgrade, and then they will get the same visual quality, but at a much higher frame rate because the calculations are being performed on the much more efficient graphics card. For people trying to run the engine on netbooks or low-powered laptops. If they want something fast - and looking good, they're in cloud cuckoo land. I would not dream of playing Quake 4 on my netbook, so why should I expect something that is graphically superior* to work on it. To have Leadwerks working on a netbook at all would be a huge improvement to how it is now, however slow (referring to my idea of the software renderer again). If a person wants to play games on the move, you would buy a laptop that's designed to so, Toshiba's Qosmio range springs to mind. * Depending on available assets. Obiously, if I used my own assets, it would not look so good...

On the basis of upgrades. For those it involved, it appeared to be quite a troublesome process between 2.2 and 2.3. Eventually, I got the idea that due to complications the upgrade was no longer offered. Is 2.4 a paid upgrade? and if so, Is the upgrade only available for 2.3 devleopers, or is it open to all LE 2 developers. And will the upgrade process only be available temporarily? Likewise, is it realistic to ask the same question about LE 3? or is that still so far away that you have no idea about the upgrade process / prices?

It looks like the number of women here doubled in the last two days... Finally, I get some company besides (the constantly inactive) Annika...

In short, no: 2GB DDR3 for £40.33 (The exchange rate of the US dollar against the British pound, makes that worth about $60) So I can get 2GB DDR3 for less than they are charging you for 1GB... 2GB DDR3 for £42.30 4GB DDR3 for £81.99 (USD 125) $110 for 1GB is a bit of a ripoff, even for laptop memory... And do bear in mind, that we get ripped off here. If I wanted to buy a nice new GTX 480 for a desktop, I would have to pay about £450 locally. In the U.S. the same model is about 30% cheaper, finding a computer hardware company in the US that would ship to a UK home address though, not quite so easy...

Isn't that a 2.3 feature? (Just looking at isidisi's group)

I didn't say I thought it was just for entities. I meant I thought it used the entity messaging system as a way of transporting data around. But in any case, you knew the answer to the question. Have you been playing around with it. Or was it just part of your infinite knowledge?

Really? I thought it relied on the entity system...

Can't remember if my (old) laptop has a Radeon HD 3000 or 3100. It can can run LE - but very minimum settings in project wizard gives only 55fps. But the chip/card that you are looking at is most likely fine...

All the commands are listed there, but a bit of a gripe of mine is that when you click the "examples" link for most of the commands, it's just blank. But watching the video tutorials on the wiki front page mostly cures that. The only reason I refer to the wiki now is just to check the order of the parameters. Yes, the IDE will show me this, but the wiki page explains what each of the parameters means, so I'm more likely to give the correct variable for each parameter.

Wiki is viewable by all. The test to prove it is to log out first, then follow your own link...

Now, unlike the UML diagram, I can instantly see a use for the NSD. Maybe in years to come I'll start to find that UML really is a good thing, but not right now. Back to the original post though. At uni, we made UML diagrams in a package called Rational Rose, and if I had to do any at home as part of a project, i used the free community edition of Visual Paradigm...

When you go to uni, you'll find out, that's how you're meant to do it. You'll always get more marks for a system that doesn't work at all, but has a UML diagram. If you have something that partly works and has no UML diagram, then at uni level it will just get chucked in the bin. Even if it's practically perfect, but there's no evidence of design: you'll be told that you're supposed to build whatever your design proposes, rather than propose something you've already built. But now I'm finished at uni, for anything I need to build, a header file will do the job. In my mind, a UML diagram is comparable to a header file - It's just that non-programmers can't understand header files. They need some scribbly wibblies with pretty pictures to understand what you're prosing to build...

You have such a way of writing... I'm sure people weren't just drawn to the fattest package on offer... But adding to the point above Indeed true. As I prefer the reliable TCP for things like setting things like the client's name, handling client pings, setting your player ID, etc. But for the most part of the game (as in, the moving, attacking, etc.), I use the much faster UDP, and without any added reliability or packet sequencing. After all, TCP can already do this without passing its overheads up through all 7 OSI layers - and for anything that does use UDP most of it gets through without any problems anyway. TCP's "reliable" description gives UDP a bad name. I don't know if there's an official figure, but I'd say it feels like UDP delivers over 99% of it's packets correctly, first time. Indeed Quake 3 used UDP as it's communication protocol, and yet, you hardly got warped back to previous positions due to packets going missing. UT however employed a TCP model, and again, you didn't feel to get warped back to an old position after a severely delayed packet had arrived. Very different communication models, but to the casual player, no one ever noticed the difference. So, there's no right protocol to use, it's all down to personal preference. And using a third party library lets you do just that...

For the networking, it really depends on what language you are using. BlitzMax has it's own in built networking and C/C++ have a whole range of networking libraries available to use. (Some of them are totally free) But I wouldn't worry too much about networking right from the start. Best bet would be to first, have single player, playable demo of your project. This way, when you come to implement the multiplayer part - if you have to rely on a external library, and you don't understand it, you will probably find that more people are prepared to help you integrate it.

The only time I had any problems using fraps was when the video couldn't be compressed quicklyenough. Turning down the game's settings saw fraps recording drop down to just 2% CPU utilisation, and perfectly sync'd with the audio. Admittedly though, this wasn't with Windows 7, so it may be of no relevance at all...

Nah, just stop the war between Windows and Linux.... Direct it all on to the macs! Mike and his subs are going to be after me now...

I guess that settles it then... I'll go with 2.18 working towards swapping out the controller for an UpVector (despite the numerous warnings that they don't behave desirably). The graphic-less server and the playable client need to match, even if that means putting up with something that I know will be probably be the basis of many complaints...

I understand where you're coming from, as it's sad to see such a powerful platform wasted by so many people. Indeed most people now think of a PC as just an oversized typewriter and calculator both merged into a single machine. PCs are up to far more than just Word, Excel and maybe YouTube. Only ten years ago, games that pushed technology limits were being actively played by many on the PC. Whilst I was growing up, certainly where I lived, no one wanted a PlayStation. This was because if your parents came home with one, it basically translated as "I couldn't afford a real computer, so I bought you this instead..." However, growing up in a very rough and poor area, the majority of kids had playstations. Those with the consoles would eventually learn to love them after playing them for a while. I never had to use one, so now I just can't get my head around the control scheme especially for an FPS game (The right stick reacts very differently to a mouse). But that's the way the world's gone. Now I think you need something else to think (or rant) about, because at this rate you're going to end up shooting everyone you see with a console... Killing of 60+% Earth's total population, and sending up back into the stone age... All that will be left will be PC gamers (okay, that's not a bad thing), posh people ("oh oh - pardon me while I fly my aeroplane" Anyone recognise that quote?) and old people ("In my day, we didn't have these 'computer' things. The only way we could have fun was to wipe turds on people's front doors" - Apparently that did happen quite a lot, in the Victorian era that is...) But I'm sure you'll agree: like consoles or hate them, getting this to work on a PS3 is still quite an achievement, with quite a lot of hard work having gone into it.

Also, which version of Leadwerks is this? (2.0 or 2.3) Edit: Wait a minute - I didn't know the "members" group could access the programming boards...

I've now finally managed to get some meaningful data passed between 3 computers using winsock (using both TCP and UDP). The next step I would feel would be to have a Leadwerks program, residing on multiple machines, talking to each other. Now, we all know that you can't really use any of LE's commands without calling Graphics() first. This means I can't have my server verifying that objects are not flying through the walls. I therefore decided, that the best solution would be to make the dedicated server implement its own version of Newton (Preferably, the same version that my version of LE uses - to just avoid discrepancies). Indeed, once a small test of two cubes flying around together has been completed. Then it would be time to move on to my small scale q3 rip-off. This would then see my first project completed - and not before time too! [Line edit]Also, is it possible to obtain the code/pseudocode for the character controller used in 2.27 with without a full, cumbersome Leadwerks Source license, So that I actually can use character controllers later (without having to substitute them for something else). Or would this revealing too much of a trade secret to be allowed? (Typo substantially changed the viability of my request - of course I wasn't asking for a source license for free. I was asking if that small section of the engine was allowable without having to buy the enitre source, which I don't really need)

Directly, I don't think so. Closest I can think of is this: Parent Parent | | -- Child -- --joint-- -- Child -- (and just hide the child on the right)

If this is the case, that would make sense as to why the linker can't find the code definitions So I guess the solution for this issue is the usual: use a third party lib like RakNet Edit: Or, you could define it yourself... THost CreateHost(int ip, int port, int players) { printf("Thank you Mumbles, you made the linker error go away!\n"); return NULL; } Of course, you can't do any networking with that - but it should make the linker error away...

LNK2019 means that CreateHost has been declared, but the linker cannot find where that function is defined. As I don't use the Leadwerks networking commands, I wouldn't know what you would need to include to fix it