Mumbles

I'd like it, if nothing else, to prove that really, well designed games play much better on the PC than they do on consoles. Certainly where I come from, the 360 is more prevalent than the PS3, so having a PC:360 comparison would have more weight than one between PC:PS3 In the early years, it started out sort of like elitism. The consoles were for the poor people who couldn't afford a proper computer, and if your parents couldn't afford a console, no doubt you ended up with a gameboy - or a puzzle book. The focus seemed to shift away from 'being a cheap alternative' at around about the time the original xbox came out (or at least, that's how it feels to me). Until the first Halo game, PC games just had that superior feeling - better gameplay, better visuals and of course, customisability. Whilst the last of those points still doesn't really exist, The original Halo brought the quality of PC games to the masses of those that wanted a cheaper machine. Knowing that were so many of those cheaper machines out there, and also knowing that it really was possible to design something of quality for those masses, that's when I would suspect that developers really shifted their focus towards the console market. But for me, it's also somewhat personal, I've never really liked gamepads. How anyone could possibly play CoD 4 without the precision of mouselooking, I just don't know. We have two 360s in our house (because the 2 arguing little kids always wanted to use it at the same time - so we had to buy a second one). One of which became unused almost weeks after buying it. So, maybe if LE in the 360 is feasible, I'll be able to hijack the unused one. I've sort of moved away from my own point. 18 months after I'd bought cod4 for the PC, we now had a console copy too. It soon became obvious to me how the precision was solved - press and release LT, and the view will lock on to the nearest target within what appears to be like 30 degrees. Even with that, I just couldn't get my head around the two sticks at all, frequently, my view would just be chasing after the person I was trying to track - then I'd go too far, and have to correct it - and all the while there would be up and down movements I didn't want because the sticks were just so sensitive, even when the Y sensitivity was turned down. Then there was multiplayer, if anyone here wanted to play online, they'd have to pay Microsoft for the privilege - on top the ISP charges, so we never did. But knowing that the games were limited to 6v6 (in that particular game at least), in a peer-to-peer setup - and yet, by 1996 PC games were feeling the benefit of ditching that system of communications. I'll admit, you can watch a video of an xbox live game on youtube, and it doesn't appear to lag that much, and certainly not as bad as, probably over-exaggerated videos appear to show IW.Net being (in fact, most of those videos have, strangely, disappeared again). it would also be interesting if multiplayer was possible on the xbox... without using xbox live. Some games I've seen supporting 'System link' but is it actually possible to just use TCP and UDP directly? As in pit a 360 and a PC directly against each other. Obviously, if it was possible you'd probably want some sort of option to only allow clients on the same platform - but there may be some cases where you just want to play other people in your house, with a mixture of consoles and PCs - especially in co-op environment, I couldn't think of anything better. But at the same time, those in the PC would probably have far better visuals. I mean, can a console go up to 2560x1600? And do they support SM 4.0? Of course, this whole proposition assumes that it's possible to get a 360 talking to a PC on your local subnet. I suppose that Naughty Alien is in the best position of anyone on this forum to know if that's possible. That's my biggest reason for wanting to port to 360s, have a game that people can enjoy on any platform, co-operative or competitive - a game that would hopefully show that PC gaming is far from dead, possibly enjoyable, and move away from this idea of platform snobbery. So yes, I too would be in favour of having no more platform exclusive titles - especially from the bigger companies. Of course, at the present time, I'm in no position to build such a game, even if the platforms were able to communicate with each other.

The more like "good old times" it is, the more I prefer it. I not only prefer Office '03 to Office '07, But I also prefer Office 2000 to Office '03. But you don't need to tell me that I'm a little bit strange... I already know that

But my point in the first example was, if the system had known not to take routes going past sentry guns, it would probably have found a better route, and not have to abandon the path due it being dangerous. if the the time the path is abandoned, and a new route is figured out to the same target, presumably the path is going to be the same. After all, is there a way of telling such a system "I don't want that route, I want another one to the same destination"? I would have though the re-searching would just search again and find the same path. Think of how much memory it is going to need to remember "bad" routes that it's already tried and found to be unsuccessful... May not be much on its own, but how many "good" and "bad" paths can be remembered at a time? As soon as a bad route is forgotten, it can be rediscovered.

Traitor... I thought you were on my side... *sniff*

Then I'll start by ..trying.. to say why I don't think pathfinding is universal. (However, I'll never make it as a solicitor, as I'm not always brilliant at arguing my own case) Here goes: Pathfinding is just that, finding a route from A to B. Obstacle avoidance, projectile avoidance, or similar do not count in my mind, as they would be better summed up using the words "obstacle avoidance" or "threat avoidance" and you get the idea. So once a route is found, the character sticks with it, unless its 'intelligence' tells it abort the path. Example being: An NPC in some sort of war game is walking towards a designated point holding a weapon as weak as a water pistol, and not in any sort of armoured transport. Suddenly it sees a sentry gun ahead. Knowing that it would be suicidal to continue in this direction, it looks around briefly, and decides to go somewhere else. Sadly the one size fits all pathfinding had no way of knowing that a static gun emplacement should be avoided in this situation - it was up to the soldier to see the sentry gun, and act on that, thus deciding to plot a new path to somewhere else. How about a route being valid sometimes, and blatantly stupid at other times. Let's carry on with our same game that doesn't yet exist. Realising the battlefield is a dangerous place, our soldier has now hopped into a tank. Now our soldier has no fear about moving past machine guns since they are not going to inflict any damage. However, the route our algorithm found, tells our soldier to drive straight ahead .... into a river. Had the soldier have been on foot the route would have been valid, he could just swim across. Sadly tanks don't tend to float in water, so our poor soldier is wondering why his tank is stuck. I'm sure given enough time I could think up more examples if neceaasry. So whilst I'm agreeing that fathfinding is a key component, it has to integrate with the AI for it to work properly, and AI should never be an off the shelf product, therefore neither should pathfinding be.

That's a big one for me... But would such a proposal require some sort of license (subscription to the XNA creators club perhaps)? Definately agree with that one, but hopefully if this did get created, it would not need exceptional knowledge in 3ds to interact with it I'll take you up on that I think I'm going to be the first person to disagree with that one. Pathfinding in particular isn't necessarily one size fits all. Presumably this system would involve the use of A*? Personally, I would go with something that closely resembled Breadth-first search, but not identical because it does have a few minor hiccups. Hiding, and so on, I'm not against quite so much For the record, I would say that NPC behaviour is even more to unique to each project, and so definitely something that done be done individually.

Office 2007 will output pdf files directly. Whenever I get lecture notes at uni in pptx or docx, I just go on to their computers, load office, and export as pdf so I can view at home later. And I believe in the 'Save As' screen, *.odt is listed as a format too (That being the open office text format)

Perhaps export as PDF for those of us that don't have office 2007 or newer?

TGC are sometimes worryingly slow at sending out license keys. Took about 5 weeks to get my Leadwerks key from them and I only wish I was making that up. In my case, they said that it was a Leadwerks product, and so Josh would provide the key. Josh, however, had no record of payment, and obviously he wasn't just going to hand out a valid key to just any random person. Being ordered from TGC, he insisted they would send the key. Finally, after about 5 weeks Josh complained on my behalf - next day, TGC emailed the key... As 3dws is also a leadwerks product, lets hope you're not stuck in the same loop...

+1 for comic genius

Oh yeah... I just noticed GameSpy, and thought, 'that should work' Guilty of not reading the rest of the list...

The next version of Leadwerks will support OpenGL 4.0 straight out of the box, but there's no definite date for the release of that, basically "When its ready" As for your 'middleware' you shouldn't need a source license to integrate that with any of your Leadwerks projects. Of course I may be wrong, but I think you should be able to implement anything like that rather easily. High quality rendering should also be rather straight forward. High quality rendering, without complex coding in one of the strongest points about the engine...

Since a model is an extension of the body class, and models are entities -> Would freeing a model entity not also free its associated physics body?

After about five minutes, I couldn't watch any more. Seriously, how many permanent markers has she been sniffing?

I don't know about lua scripting, but you need to call UpdateAppTime() before AppSpeed() currently the world is not being updated because AppSpeed() will keep returning 0. Possibly the reason that no lights are showing is because the world is not updating. You may not need to update the world for lights to be created, but I'm fairly sure that the lights will not be calculated if the world is not updated - After all, with no world updates, the engine does not know the positions of the objects to be illuminated. Also, where are you creating your light? In the script? If it's not in your script, then you have no code to create a light there.

I know that in my own project (using C) it's fine. Maybe the problem is in the editor. But with being on 2.0, I don't have the editor, or lua. I also think that if it was a problem with the editor, Josh would have commented by now. He's normally very quick to respond when there is a problem with his code. I don't like seeing questions going unanswered, or problems going unsolved, and that's why I came into this thread, but I don't think there's any more I can do without having the editor or lua. I can only provide theories, so I just hope someone else knows what the issue is, and can help you solve it.

Basically, I'm saying the same as what Joh is syaing. Try re-ordering the code slightly. Can't promise it will work though... --Variables dx=0.0 dy=0.0 camerapitch=0.0 camerayaw=0.0 --put these outside the main loop. You are calculating the same thing over and over again. The value will never change gx=Round(GraphicsWidth()/2) gy=Round(GraphicsHeight()/2) --code missed out --main function while KeyHit(KEY_ESCAPE)==0 do --Camera look MousePosX=MouseX() MousePosY=MouseY() --For the rest of the loop, refer to these variable rather than re-checking the position dx=Curve((MousePosX-gx)/8.0,dx,3.0/AppSpeed()) dy=Curve((MousePosY-gy)/8.0,dy,3.0/AppSpeed()) --You now have the amount the mouse has moved by MoveMouse(gx,gy) camerapitch=camerapitch+dy camerayaw=camerayaw-dx camerapitch=math.min(camerapitch,75) camerapitch=math.max(camerapitch,-75) fw.main.camera:SetRotationf(camerapitch,camerayaw,0,1) --Check for mouse up or down mouseDifference=MousePosY-OldMousePosY OldMousePosY=MousePosY --But really, what is the difference between mouseDifference, and dy? --If there is no difference, then just say mouseDifference=y and remove the OldMousePosY line fw:Update() fw:Render() SetBlend(1) DrawText("currentY",0,20) DrawText(currentY,0,40) DrawText("centerY",0,60) DrawText(centerY,0,80) DrawText("mouseDifference",0,100) DrawText(mouseDifference,0,120) SetBlend(0) Flip(0) end That's not something I can help with...

Oh, I just noticed that you can't put an underline inside a code block - but you can see where I'm pointing to. What I'm saying is, I don't use framewerk, and both MouseX() and MouseY() both update normally, even when any mouse button is pressed. But I don't think that framewerk will be causing the problem either...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but with 2.0, and without Framewerk (the old spelling), MouseX() and MouseY() both update even when any mouse button is held down. Are you ever checking the mouse's position more than once? (If you are checking if LMB is down, look there first.) Example (in C): if(MouseDown(1) == 1) { //Do "stuff" - like firing weapons [u]CurrentY = MouseY();[/u] } centerY = MouseY(); fw:Update(); currentY = MouseY(); In this fake example, the underline will cause problems, because it will probably cause CurrentY and centerY to have the same value. if LMB is not held down, then the underline is skipped, and so the two values should be different. Check to see if you're doing anything similar in your code.

Indeed true, and assuming that you're going to be adding some clothes (instead of leaving her at page 3 standard), most of the criticisms will go away. But my point about proportions is that most people assume adult females to have a wasit:hip ratio of 7:10 (Except most will just say 0.7) That's simply not always true. In my case, I'm a UK size 8, with 32 inch hips, that would make my waist ... 22? Actually, no, it's 24. For adults, waist sizes under 24 are rare, no matter what the hip size. And they look wrong, if not disturbingly thin. If you pull the tape tight, you might occasionally get 23, but never any lower unless you've got anorexia or similar. My thought is that you might have read up the 0.7 ratio, and are sticking so close to it, that you're building someone with a severe eating disorder, without necessaryily realising it.

Chances are it's to do with 2.0 no longer being supported, thus a proxy server probably won't help... And basically, a proxy server is a "middle man" Instead of talking to the leadwerks server directly, your computer talks to the proxy server, who in turn, forwards your request on to the leadwerks server. When the leadwerks server responds back to the proxy, the proxy forwards the response on to your computer...

People without loads of programming experience will probably prefer it - it has nicer syntax if you're not familiar with the language. I remember Josh stated somewhere that he used to think it was a bit of a toy language until he tried it - then liked it so much, he integrated into the engine. I still think it's a bit of a gimmick, as so far I've just not needed it. I'm also not much of a scripter anyway - any scripting I want to do, I'll normally do it in bash or maybe perl, goes without saying that such scripting has nothing to do with my current top secret (a.k.a. ****) leadwerks project. Any scripting I need, I'll do with additional text files that go along side the media, and I'll make my program process those text files when the relevant resources are loaded. Sort of the same as .mat files. So while most might prefer it, I personally don't... Since learning the basics of OOP in uni, cpp is basically the only way forward in my mind, I can't see me going any other way

Oh dear... Somebody's been eating too many chow meins...

Well, with rocket science analysis. It would sound like you're a demo missing...

It can't import gmf ...But why would anyone need it to?