Road Kill Kenny

Well actually I only started coding in C++ about 3months ago. I am originally a graphic artist and have done way more graphic art than coding.... I do like programming and I do like art as well but my passion doesn't lie in the complexity of either. My passion lies in making games that are fun and doing it without taking shortcuts whether that means learning a bit more or not. Everyone seems to want to conquer the world without putting in a bit of effort.... I'm not trying to start a language war because thats not what this is about. I just think too many people assume that C++ is super hard when it really isn't and because of their assumption they never give it a go, eternally thinking that its really hard and impossible for them. Give me a few good reasons why C++ is significantly more difficult than any other porgramming language out there.... If its a case of simply not liking coding then I don't see the difference between any programming language.. if you want to make a decent game you have to code... or there has to be someone in you team that can code if thats the case... Yes you are right I don't have to pick one or the other and I don't necessarily plan to. I just don't get what all the fuss is about C++ apparently being "oh so hard". Peace

This is very very cool and rad

That is a good idea to. Do that as well to be safe

I don't understand why everyone thinks C++ is so difficult.... It seems like much of a muchness to me, I look and Lua and I'm like 'wtf' not because its hard but just because It's not what I'm used to. I think people tend to think that what they learned first or what they know is easier just because it's familiar. Not that I have anything against Lua or any other particular programming language but I just hear this statement a lot. Also how many 'game designer wannabies' know any particular programming language or even Lua for that matter? I personally never heard of Lua before I started looking at game engines. Our friend Nick that thaught Gary's Mod was better than LE springs to mind when I read 'game designer wannaby'. But then again even people like that brings more money to leadwerks which = better engine for everyone. BTW Josh.. will we be able to write scripts in C++ if we want to instead of Lua.. or is scripting a 'Lua only' thing for LE3D. I don't mind coding in Lua but just wanna know if we will have this option. Oh and +1 000 000 for the multiple brushes idea

Leadwerks physics (or rather Newton physics) is deterministic... meaning its 100% predictable and things will happen the same every time no matter what... So provided that all your bodies are symetrical along the z axis simply ensure that all your force's vectors have z at 0 and ensure everything starts at z=0. I don't think it is actually possible in this case for the z to change at all. I don't see why this wouldn't work as I have never had a random physics jump to an axis I haven't specified. It should stay perfectly spot on.. Guess the only way to find out is to give it a shot... A 'Make 2D' function probably wouldn't work imo because it sounds like your trying to make something that is essentially 3D but plays like a 2D game kinda like 'Valkyrie Profile' which is a 3D side Scroller.

If you load the mesh and the body at 0,0,0 and then parent it and then position the body and fire it you shouldn't have to rotate the mesh to be in line. Provided that the body and the mesh match.... But I would recommend what Josh said anyway, align to vector would be the best way to go

Well Metatron seems to have summed up what most likely the problem is.... However, As for models there isn't really much to it and you probably already know it: -lower poly = faster -lower texture size = faster -fewer entities = faster -fewer seams in your UV unwraping (a lot of people don't tend to know this one. The more seams you have... the more vertices you have in you UV's = more data = more processing time..) This goes for any engine or 3D application. Yes one may handle more of x type but the above four still holds true.

I also have another idea regarding making it more dynamic. From any collission u can get the position, velocity & normal of the collision I thaught what if I let the velocity to set the magnitude of the bone movement and then the normal vector to slightly alter the direction of the bone movement! If this works it will make way for more dynamic deformation as it will be different every time depending on the velocity & normals.. To make it even more realistic I could factOr in the mass of the two bodies into the equation.... Though this may be overkill.... Subject to testing I think

Anyway you want. Line pick raycast comes to mind. Then just get the position of the collision and move the bullet from the guns to the position that the raycast hit. Yeh the way I said the camera facing direction wasn't technically correct but I wrote that In a rush so yeh rather get the position of to propell towards using a raycast.

Well.. I haven't done it before in leadwerks myself but the concept is the same for any engine. Sorry if none of this makes sense. I'm tired. Player: 1. Player Controller 2. Attach camera to controller 3. code the mouse movement to for rotating the camera 4. code the wasd to move the controller foreward /back left /right Shooting: 2-ways: -Raycasting <-- personally I don't like this way -Bullet Body 1. On click -> create bullet with a body at the gun nozel 2. Apply velocity to the bullet body in the same direction as the camera is facing (or gun) Reloading: <-- On press 'R' 2. Check that ammo is not full 3. If not check how much ammo you need to fill the magazine (eg. cartridge size of 8 with only 3 bullets left = 8-3 = 5 bullets needed) 4. If the ammo you have in your 'pocket' is greater than 5 (what you need to fill the magazine. : Play Reload animation |||| cartridge ammo = 8, ||| ammo = ammo -5 ||| 5. else if the ammo you have in your pocket is less than 5 but more than 0 (say 3 ) : Play Reload animation |||cartridge ammo = cartridge ammo + ammo ||| ammo =0 (resulting in cartridge ammo being 6 and total ammo 0 6. else if the ammo you have in your pocket is 0 : notify the player that they cannot reload . simple Ammo Pickups:/u] These are really simple you just detect a collision between ammo box and player, get the entity from that and add the ammo to your stash according to what you collided with. Interchangable Weapons IDK how everyone else does it but I figured out a way in the last engine I was using. The idea should still work here. first I made a bunch of arrays that held all the stats for all of the weapons. It looked something like this. (This is just psuedo btw) std::string WeaponName["Colt 45", "Socom", "FAMAS", "12 Guage"]; std::string WeaponModel["Colt.gmf", "Socom.gmf", "FAMAS.gmf", "12 Guage.gmf"]; int WeaponRange[ 45, 50, 200, 25 ]; std::string WeaponDamage etc etc etc etc etc etc Then I made an integer variable called 'currentWeapon' which started at 0. When you press the button to switch weapon the currentWeapon variable changes and and loads the stats of the corresponding gun in the array. EG. currentWeapon = 2 would be the FAMAS & currentWeapon = 0 would be the Colt 45. Anyway this was just some stupid method I came up with dunno if its technically the correct way to do it but it works. Everything here can be found in the existing tutorials on the wiki.

You are 100% correct here. I abandoned that idea pretty quickly Yes this was what I was planning on doing. Though I didn't think about coding the bone animation that is a great idea. Thanks. As for the collision bodies relating to different bones I was trying to set this up to. I had a freaking disaster of a time trying to set it up. My idea was that I could have a main body that actually handled the physics and a bunch of dummy bodies. around it to detect collision locally and assign a bone movement. However, I had a pretty hard time making them because these small bodies can't collide with the main body otherwise it will be detecting collisions. The main body can't simply be a non-detectable type because other vehicles will have the same body type which is what we are looking for in a collision. On top of that the fact that it has to be a convex hull makes it even more difficult to fit pieces around the car without touching the main body itself... hehehe.... All these ideas I had turning out to be way more difficult than I anticipated... sounds about right for games development. I think I'm going to get some of the other mechanics down before I continue with this damage stuff. I'm pretty sure I can get it right with a lot of optimising and tweaking but I think I'll leave it till later. The frustration is starting to burn me out. hehe Cheers oh btw

Idk for sure how close it has to be to the real thing. However, I have purposely made different parts of the model different to that of a real beetle... of course it wouldn't be called nor badged as a beetle.. Though I don't know if that is really enough but... hehe guess I'll have to find out. Cheers... No I was not planning ahead for LE3. Just gonna give it a shot

Hi all, Just finished the first modelling part of creating my destructible vehicle. I have finished modelling the un-damaged vehicle but I still have to do the deformed models later. Anyway, as you can see the vehicle isn't one mesh but has many different parts including doors, bonnet, trunk etc that will be able to fly off during gameplay. The poly count is around 30,000 tri's for the whole thing. Some may say that this is a lot but I've done my research and its a lot less than most vehicle games like GT5 where they have between 200,000 to 500,000 poly's. I also looked up many other poly counts of vehicle games and they all seem to be much more than 30,000. averaging about 100,000. So considering that and considering the environment in my game will be not big as it will be arena based PvP with only about 8 players at a time I should be Ok. Also I have LODs. Anyway here are the pics. Next tim I think I'll make a less round car to make it easier to keep the poly's low. Edit: This first one looks a bit funny because these shots are in Orthographic mode and not perspective... oops

I know aye!

Hey thats actually pretty cool

I personally don't care what the name ends up being as long as the engine itself is awesome.... However, I found LE by doing a google search with the word 'engine' in it. I can't remember what the whole search was but it definately had engine in it. Not once did I think about searching game studio or anything like that. Also when I think Leadwerks3D.. hmm what is that? 3D modelling software? CAD modelling? TBH I wouldn't think of a game engine. Also imo the words 'Game Studio' are like a pointer to 'n00b n00b n00b'. If you tried to program a game with something called a game_studio it would look something like this: game_Studio->CreateOriginalGame(); ...... ERROR: SORRY, CAN ONLY CREATE COOKIE CUTTER GAMES! But Yeh I don't really care. Whatever, you think will get more people here Josh .

lol. Do it! Give them a good lecture.

What kind of animated character assets do you think would be best. In my head it would be the kind of generic ones. For example, soldier, or civilin and more generalized characters. That way people can have a good base and edit them to be their unique character. However, I really wouldn't know because I'm not usually the type to buy models so maybe poeple do want full on main-characterish models??? If I have spare time I'll make one to contribute to the asset store. However, that all depends how long it takes to convert my 3DsMax skills into Blender Skills because I only have a student version of 3DsMax lol

Yes thats what I meant. Fantastic. Thanks. I thaught this was the case I just wanted to double check Doubly proves my point

Just a question about this Josh. What about the apparent '5%' of us that actually do like to have the flexibility of coding and that actually enjoy coding with a 3rd party compiler. Will we still have the same flexibility in LE3? I can understand why others would want it but I personally don't like getting spoon fed to the point where you can just throw in a template and almost have a complete game...... So yeh just wondering if we will still have that flexibility. I just hope its not going to turn into some cookie cutter engine that tends to produce a lot of similar games that just have different artwork. I moved to leadwerks from another engine because I loved its flexibility and number of options. Oh... and I actually am originally a 3D artist before a programmer so I guess I'm an exception from the '3DArtists don't like to code' rule.

You could probably give players a choice of quality as all games seem to do. That way you can have a large shadow map size, and for those systems that can't handle it, they can tone it down for better fps . It seems in most commercial games that I play, puting shadows on and shadow quality up is one of the biggest fps hits in the options menu. Giving the player the option is probably the best way to go in that case.

Welcome

/agree

I think Aggror posted a bunch of progressive Lua tutorials one youtube. try searching 'leadwerks lua tutorials' in youtube.

<< You control each bit and byte that is sent in RakNet as well. << You only pay for RakNet once you make $100,000. At which point paying for it is nothing. << RakNet is fast << It is only not light if you decide to include every single file. You only use the things you need But either way I don't care. I'm sure SDL_net is good too