Canardia

transparency is same as foreground.

I have in the model's Lua script the LoadModel call which loads all transparent submodels to the main model. So it works transparently in Editor and in the game.

No, foreground.

I never actually understood how the angle bouncing logic works, it seems like a value which works when used directly between entity1.GetRotation() to entity2.SetRotation(), but all attempts to check for the value will fail. I think it should be changed to give a real angle from 0 to 359.999..., because people also think and speak in 0 to 359.999.... Nobody uses -180 to 0 or 0 to 180

I haven't tried, but I would think you need to create an identical directional light in the foreground world as in your normal world, and use the _specular shader for your transparent objects in the foreground world. You would need to disable all shadows, since they are already cast in the normal world.

I have no problems with transparent, a bit bluish tinted, windows in my game. I just move all windows to the transparency (foreground) world, and windows show all shadows and lights behind them, and also cumulate (you can still see through multiple stacked windows and the color adds correctly too)! Cumulative transparency is no problem in deferred rendering engines, you just need to do it right. In the mat file for windows I use blend=alpha, color=1,1,1,1, and the window texture has an alpha channel and is colored light blue. Framework must be used for rendering, because without it, you would have to rewrite it 1:1 with all the buffer and rendering logic, resulting in the same situation as using it.

I don't think you need to implement all LE features, as the XBOX and PS3 are basically like low-end PCs. You just need basic things, like models, physics, sounds. You can't have huge vegetation, since even CryENGINE3 can't do that on consoles, and you can't have full dynamic lights and shadows either, probably just a few lights with scissored shadows (no self shadowing of models). In addition you need to do the old school style game development on consoles, where you fake everything what the player doesn't need to know or see. In LE you can develop just as things really are, and save a lot of time by skipping the faking process.

Sounds good! B)

You still need Leadwerks to run the game on PC. Nobody will buy a game which is published only on XBOX or PS3. Red Dead Redemption did the mistake, and I didn't buy it, even though I own a PS3. I don't buy games which are not available on PC, because they are obviously more interested in destroying the PC gaming than making games.

It's good to have teens in the company, because by the time you finish a game with XNA they'll be 60 B)

Well, then you can find the shaders on Google. I just looked a bit and there seems to be some working examples.

Well, not the core XNA, but there is XNA Framework, XNA Game Studio 2.0, etc...

I don't think you need to care about shaders, since XNA has probably exactly the same features in their shaders: diffuse, bumpmap, specular, parallax, and all the postshaders.

With wrapper I meant a pure source code wrapper. So you can program in Leadwerks syntax, and it executes XNA commands. You can also use the same game source then in Leadwerks for PC and XBOX, which saves a lot of time, money and debugging.

Yes, C++ is the best language. There are also other languages which are popular, but I prefer C++ because it's the fastest and it exists on all platforms, which no other language does. Well, actually Fortran is faster, but it has much less standard libraries than C++, so it's quite difficult to work with it, and also the syntax is archaic.

I would use the new C++0x standard, which is implemented in VS2010 C++ and GNU C++. This allows for example the use of rvalue references (&&), which makes code much faster since it implements true moving of references (copying of pointers only), while in the old C++ they were faked by copying (move vs copy constructor). This gives especially a huge speed boost when working with vectors, maps and other STL containers. See also: http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=cplusplus&seqNum=480 and http://thbecker.net/articles/rvalue_references/section_01.html and of course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x#Rvalue_reference_and_move_semantics

Of course, because you have all your editable files in FBX or some other editable format. LE only uses a binary read only format (GMF), and you always need the original FBX file, else you can't edit the model.

You can do it like Naughty Alien did: write a wrapper for XNA which accepts LE commands. Assets should not be a problem since you have UU3D Pro.

But the player is moving, so the area around the player would need to be recalculated each time he moves. The 8192x8192 is precalculated and not raycasted during game play.

You need 67 million raycasts Well, but it doesn't really matter since you can do the precasting outside of the game, so the game only loads the heightmap.

Yeah, although it could be quite high, maybe 8192x8192 (=256MB), since you can prefender it and save/load from disk.

No, like I said, there would be a grid resolution, so basically like a heightmap resolution, which you can adjust when creating the rain class. Moving objects could also update the heightmap with a given frequency, so it would not be static.

Yes, objects which stopped moving are deleted, and also objects which fall under the ground (you can adjust the Y value). Today I came up with an idea which could improve the performance a lot: Not using physics, but doing a raycast matrix over the whole terrain and all objects on it with a given grid resolution. When raindrops fall below the matrix, they will be deleted. The below check has to take also the speed of the rain particle into consideration, so that it will be deleted if the next iteration would bring it below the matrix. That will do the same as physics, so raindrops don't get inside buildings. If raycasts are fast enough, then it might also work fully dynamic without a precalculated raycast heightmap.

It's not really a song, but only an example in Power Tutorial how to load a game music You can use it freely in any games you write!

LOL, now I watched it for the first time with headphones on, and hey, the song is from my Power Tutorial, which I made with my YAMAHA XS7 (just 4 patterns looping) Which means, the game is written using GameLib! Oh my god, this is so awesome! Double Rainbows woohooo! I really need to continue the Power Tutorial, if people can already make this great things with that little tutorial, plus combining a few more things from Josh's demo and LCP1.