gamecreator

Curious if there's an update on this as this Sunday would end the 6 weeks. No need to answer for me as I'm using another engine now but others might want to know.

When you create a bone in either Blender or 3DS Max, they actually create two bones to give the bone length. With Blender it's just a single click but if you export it and import it into Max, you'll see the two bones (Bone and Bone_end by default). In 3DS Max you have to drag the bone out to create bone with the length. What's confusing to me now is that you can delete the second bone in Max but it still leaves the "length" of the bone. If you export it as FBX and reimport it, it will have the one bone with no length. But if you save and load it as a Max file, it still keeps the length.

If you know the next bone that it's attached to, you can get the distance between the two bones with GetDistance.

Thanks.

That doesn't really answer any of my questions.

I'm a little confused by this too. Is this a separate product from Ultra Engine? Or will this App Kit eventually gain all the features of a game engine (like terrain, etc.)? If so, will backing this Kickstarter get you all the future features?

Very true. It's difficult to be creative and sell people on it. But it's not impossible. Usually it involves combining familiar mechanics in a new way. Deep Rock Galactic does this very well (FPS, RPG, procedural generation, fully destructible world, etc.).

Very cool. Not to nitpick but maybe the vegetation render distance could be farther out, especially the bush (which seems to pop in very close). Otherwise it's already starting to look like parts of a game. Reminds me a lot of GTA.

Whoa! Thank you! I'm gonna read through it. I don't have a specific one in mind but this opens up a lot of possibilities, if it's as straightforward as it seems. Josh moved it to the programming forum but here's the link: Thanks again!

It would be great to have a simple tutorial or walkthrough for this process as I know nothing about shaders but I'm pretty comfortable learning by modifying.

Right. The host would still be authoritative and could check that the client didn't cheat. But that's down the line. Right now I'm just trying to get to step 1: making sure the client is where the host was.

Well yes, that's the plan. But I'm trying to figure out how the client would have the proper position for the character, since you can't just use GoToPoint() on the client (I think). The ideal way to do it would be for the host to not need to send anything to the client, once it sent the client the start and end points of the navigation (with timestamps). The client should then be able to calculate where the character needs to be at any given time. Yes. I was debating whether to include that but it demonstrated well that the controller might not even be where we expect. Probably should have been a separate discussion.

I was just theorizing about how to make sure that a pathfinding character on a host ends up correctly in the same position for a client. Actual network code would come later. And yes, I call GoToPoint only once (when I hit the spacebar). Ignore that it's possible to hit space multiple times in that code.

I'm trying to figure out how to do pathfinding over the network and I'm not having any luck so far. I found this nice thread and post where you could supposedly get the navmesh points. I threw together a project using it but my tests weren't too promising. The problem is that if the character is going fast enough, he'll miss points entirely, kind of acting like it's drunk, making all but the start and end points useless for network prediction/interpolation. Here's the video: The red markers represent all the points that FindPath returns (10 points + beginning and end). Note that I'm only using GoToPoint once. I have a feeling that FindPath only works for the default speed (and perhaps acceleration). Here's the code: #include "Leadwerks.h" using namespace Leadwerks; Entity* player = NULL; Entity* navpointbox[100]; int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) { int j=0; Leadwerks::Window* window = Leadwerks::Window::Create("Navmesh Point Test", 0, 0, 1280, 720); Context* context = Context::Create(window); World* world = World::Create(); Camera* camera = Camera::Create(); camera->SetRotation(65, 0, 0); camera->Move(0, -2, -12); Light* light = DirectionalLight::Create(); light->SetRotation(35, 35, 0); Map::Load("Maps/map.map"); NavMesh* navMesh = world->navmesh; //Enable navmesh debugging // camera->SetDebugNavigationMode(true); // Start: -15.0, -2 // End: 9, 7 //Create a character player = Pivot::Create(); Entity* visiblecapsule = Model::Cylinder(16, player); visiblecapsule->SetScale(1, 2, 1); visiblecapsule->SetPosition(0, 1, 0); player->SetPosition(-15, 0, 2); player->SetMass(1); player->SetPhysicsMode(Entity::CharacterPhysics); while(true) { if(window->Closed() || window->KeyDown(Key::Escape)) return false; if(window->KeyHit(Key::Space)) { player->GoToPoint(9, 0, 7, 10.0, 5); // player->GoToPoint(9, 0, 7, 5.0, 5); NavPath* path = new NavPath(); vector<Vec3> pathpoints; path->navmesh = navMesh; path->navmesh->FindPath(player->GetPosition(true), Vec3(9, 0, 7), pathpoints); for(std::vector<Vec3>::iterator it = pathpoints.begin(); it != pathpoints.end(); ++it) { std::cout << "Point: " << it->x << ", " << it->z << endl; navpointbox[j] = Model::Box(); navpointbox[j]->SetColor(1.0, 0.0, 0.0); navpointbox[j]->SetScale(0.3, 1.0, 0.3); navpointbox[j]->SetPosition(it->x, 0.5, it->z); j++; } } Leadwerks::Time::Update(); world->Update(); world->Render(); context->Sync(); } return 0; } So, is there a way to get ALL the ACTUAL points the character will walk through (not just markers it might miss anyway)? Meaning, if a host lags for a second, I want the client to know exactly where the character should be at any given time. If this can't be done for Leadwerks 4, maybe we could have a FindPathPoint in Leadwerks 5 that returns a Vec3 at a given time. I understand that a character could be pushed out of the way or whatever too so it won't be 100% reliable.

You can detect if two objects collide with Collision but I don't think it'll give you the shape of the collision. Might be able to do it with Newton somehow.

480p? Get some 4K, or at least 1080p going. That said, great progress.

I'd be really curious what it would look like at a good bitrate and as video instead of a GIF. As a GIF it looks a bit weird. But if it's just to give us an idea, then mission accomplished and pretty exciting.

Neat. Would this work with multiple hazes, separated by objects?

That was an issue in the past. Using GetSpeed isn't accurate so your game won't play the same on different computers.

Say a game is a fixed 60fps and you want to add that blur effect I talked about over 5 seconds. effect->SetProperty("strength", bluramount); bluramount += 1.0 / 60 / 5; // Adds a fraction of blur per 60fps frame and 5 seconds Edit: Actually, isn't this what SetFloat does now? I don't know much about shaders but would this be a uniform?

That would be a great step toward flexibility but I wonder: is this not something that can be manipulated in memory? Can you alter shaders after you load them from a file? Guessing that you can't from what you're saying. Oh man. Didn't even know this was an official function. Testing it now... thanks! Edit: it works! Yay!

Do you mean that these will be able to be changed by code? Like you could create an effect where you blur the screen more and more as someone gets more and more drunk or dizzy? Or use it as a fade in/out effect for menus? I'd love for this to be the case in the new engine. Yes! Thank you for asking. A shader you need to project a camera view onto a surface, like a TV or a screen. I was just researching how to do this and saw on the forums other people trying to do it. If you know shows like Star Trek, I was thinking of putting on screen the view of a camera in space looking at a ship: Or use the same trick to show someone talking to you: Other than that, whatever helps make the games look beautiful, which I know you're already working on.

That might work. You can also try just not including collision meshes/shapes for your models.

It's pretty straightforward with the directions you can find online but you can either right-click an exe (like Steam) and run that program through Sandboxie (shell extension) or you can run Sandboxie and find a program to run through it directly. There's maybe one or two more extra steps but that's basically all there is to it. It's kind of like a virtual machine, if you've ever used those.