gamecreator

You don't even need a second computer. I've tested it with a free program called Sandboxie ("open-source sandboxing program for Microsoft Windows") and I was able to run a second Steam account on the same computer.

This might help: I tried to look at the Lua code but I couldn't really understand how it's supposed to connect people. I don't know if you use Lua or C.

True, I was thinking about how I could just substitute different models directly. It's not really hard to do. The only real difficulty is turning vegetation into normal models without billboards. I don't think that's possible now.

To speed up development, I sometimes use a separate barebones map that still lets me test character changes. It helps to not have to wait for all the normal assets to load every time I run the program. But I was wondering if we could implement (or do we already have?) a sort of model substitution system. This would still allow the loading of the normal map but all the trees, rocks, houses, whatever would be substituted by low-poly meshes of our choice. For example: tree01.mdl -> treelowpoly.mdl tree02.mdl -> treelowpoly.mdl tree03.mdl -> treelowpoly.mdl tree04.mdl -> treelowpoly.mdl tree05.mdl -> treelowpoly.mdl house01.mdl -> houselowpoly.mdl house02.mdl -> houselowpoly.mdl house03.mdl -> houselowpoly.mdl house04.mdl -> houselowpoly.mdl house05.mdl -> houselowpoly.mdl etc. Would be even better to have the option to turn billboards off since those take a while to load too. I guess this would change it from vegetation to a static model. The other option is maybe to have developers be able to stream in assets as they play. Like, have the terrain and collisions load at the beginning but then all other assets stream in. Kind of like how we have that option for textures. Just some thoughts to speed up development and testing.

Did you see if it detects just the entity if you don't check for the key?

Go for it, if you have the time. But remember that while a great game makes Leadwerks look good, a mediocre game makes it look bad. You may also consider waiting for the new engine to drop to support that instead. I'm hoping it'll be out next year.

Looks like the window was behind your taskbar for some reason. You could have probably also just made the window smaller then dragged it up.

I like the work but it's a little hard to see what's going on.

Thanks for the details. It's good to know these tricks for optimization.

I don't know if you've talked about this before but how do you try to optimize for speed (if you do)? Do you use LODs, for example?

Love it. I recently had a friend try something I created with Leadwerks and he couldn't run it. It had to do with the Visual Studio Redistributable (missing DLLs) but when I made him go to the Microsoft site and install the files, it still didn't work. So yeah, anything helps.

Leadwerks physics shapes are limited and buggy. It's trial and error to see what works but I suggest having different models and shapes whenever possible. As I reported before, collisionmesh and polymesh don't seem to get along.

Might help to see what you're trying via code but here's someone using the function:

You may need to get the child of the model. Searching the forums should get you what you're looking for.

I PM-ed you the link and we can discuss it there if you have any questions to not keep this blog post derailed.

What would a road tracer do? I built a tool once and released the source for software that bent a road to terrain.

No prob, I understand. Relax, enjoy the long, holiday weekend. Treat yourself to something maybe even better than tea and decompress.

So, I hate to be that guy but... I don't suppose this is a good time to get back to that final update on Leadwerks 4? It's been over a year since the last update and you promised some fixes from even further back, including vehicles and the buggy character controllers.

Tested and it seems to work! I created a box (door) with a bone skinned to it and moved it around and exported it as an animated FBX. Then I created another box (doorcol) with just the collision mesh as another exported FBX. I then parented doorcol to door in a scene and then saved the whole thing as a prefab. Then I used the following code to load and animate the prefab: #include "Leadwerks.h" using namespace Leadwerks; Entity* entity = NULL; int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) { Leadwerks::Window* window = Leadwerks::Window::Create(); Context* context = Context::Create(window); World* world = World::Create(); Camera* camera = Camera::Create(); camera->Turn(0, 15, 0); camera->Move(-1, 1, -4); camera->SetDebugPhysicsMode(true); // Set camera to see physics shapes Light* light = DirectionalLight::Create(); light->SetRotation(35, 35, 0); // Make a sphere Model* sphere = NULL; sphere = Model::Sphere(); sphere->SetColor(1.0, 0.0, 0.0); sphere->SetPosition(0, -1, 0); Entity *model = Prefab::Load("Prefabs/thedoor.pfb"); // Entity *model = Model::Load("Models/door/door.mdl"); // Sanity check while(true) { if(window->Closed() || window->KeyDown(Key::Escape)) return false; model->SetAnimationFrame(Leadwerks::Time::GetCurrent() / 30.0, 1, 0); Leadwerks::Time::Update(); world->Update(); world->Render(); context->Sync(); } return 0; } The result (yes, the animation is sloppy but it was just to test it; and I put the collision off to the side so it's easier to see): Thank you everyone for the help.

Ah, of course. I think this could work!

Would this work? How would it know which bone to follow if there's more than one bone? Or imagine if there was a double door in a single mesh (each with a bone). Hmm. I guess a prefab wouldn't work either for this reason.

It was mostly just curiosity about whether or not I could combine an skinned model with a collision mesh directly in a modeling program but seems not. But there are several ways to easily do this by either code or the above-mentioned methods so it's fine.

Do you have a link to the tutorial page? The ones I found use code to move the doors. That said, I did think of two "workarounds" since then that I haven't tried yet: Joining the shape and the model as a prefab. I figure this should work. Using a single line in the code to parent the door and collision shape together. The point of this thread was to avoid code but it's not the worst to do this during map initialization.

Feel free to delete. They seem to be back.

Just curious. Maybe Josh is working on the site again but they've been gone for several days now.