ERK Games

Great news! We'll check the release as soon as it's available. We really hope that now that you've done a great job implementing the Flowgraph editor, you'll soon start working on realization a particle system. It's actually one of the few things we're currently missing to port our new game project to the Ultra Engine.

I'm not going to say anything bad right now, please understand my words correctly. BUT it seems to us that your current release strategy is wrong a bit. I don't think it needs to be clarified that an early release cannot be called 1.0 and not have at least minimally functioning modules for developing something not only based on code, but also on GUI and game levels, especially after more than four years of development. Especially considering the emphasis on the new interface that you are promoting. And especially considering that the Leadwerks engine was capable (and quite capable) of doing all this, and it was an old engine of the 7th generation of game consoles. So how is this radically different from another intermediate update for monthly subscribers? And who's the potential buyer of the new engine, if even the old engine, which has been neglected for several years, is hardly known outside of this forum? People simply won't accept an unfinished product, and on platforms like Steam, it's important to show the best right from the start of sales, even if it's early access. The strategy you have mentioned will mislead people, and if they buy Ultra, they will definitely refund it within half an hour. Remember the experience with Ultra App Kit, which had serious shortcomings from the start and even with the updates made, it was not accepted by the Steam community: it seems to me that you gained absolutely nothing from its publication and mixed audience reaction, and now the situation may repeat itself with an even more negative reaction, including from the old audience, do you understand what I mean? It won't be interesting to new users in its current form, and the old audience, includes us, will remain dissatisfied that they were made to wait for almost another year. By the way, you mentioned March 2024. That's a long time, considering that everything can change at any moment. With the level of functionality that you propose for 1.0, even our team that develops and releases games on Leadwerks (and respects you and your team), won't be able to switch to the new engine before that date (we planned to do it as soon as possible) - because it turns out that we won't be able to continue working on the game without at least having the flowgraph editor! And a Vulkan benchmark with a new interface is unlikely to help us create something worthy of audience attention. But... Apparently, there's nothing we can do about it 🌝 Alright, then I have one last question: do you plan to follow your previously announced plans and release a major update for Leadwerks? At least before March 2024, if the answer is "yes". Because this engine REALLY needs an update, and we have already submitted the main issues related to its functioning in a bug report about a year ago: And by the way: Leadwerks, if it had a completed form, would be perfect for legacy development and would be relevant in this niche for many years to come. It has amazing features and compromised system requirements. Some of us are working on projects on older laptops, and it's still quite usable, if not for the annoying problems described by us and many others in the bug report threads. It seems to us that it's too early to write it off and radically replace it with something that isn't yet ready - it should at least be brought to working condition before that, because at least it ALREADY has a fan base.

Can you please answer me: 1. Am I correct in understanding that you are planning to release a version called 1.0, which will have a minimally functioning engine, but modules for developing flowgraph scenes and particle emitters will be unavailable? 2. Will 1.0 also be released on Steam, or will it be an exclusive release for the website?

The implementation of Theora Video on Leadwerks was written by Niosop a long time ago, even for the 2.x versions of the engine. As practice and a HUGE number of tests and attempts have shown, it works quite unstably and requires significant additions as well as radical solutions to minimize crashes when playing videos (in particular, it requires low quality sound in the video file (96kbps recommended and 128kbps maximum) for more or less stable operation, and video resolutions no higher than 720p at 5000kbps (recommeded 720x576 for 16:9, which, you see, is rather low quality for 2023). Our first game on Leadwerks, SALVATIONLAND, uses a significantly improved Lua-based version of this implementation, but crashes still occur on certain hardware combinations. We were unable to identify their patterns or fix the C++ code, as Niosop didn't release the source code for the library. So, yes, I wouldn't recommend using this Theora implementation to ANY users of the engine. It's necessary to write video implementation from scratch, look for ways to do so. We're currently searching and have not yet found a solution. There was our attempt to attach some ffdshow components to the engine to launch full-screen video separately from the application process. Unfortunately, this caused a large number of problems and was a rather rough.