gamecreator

In other news, they're also further competing with Steam by launching a free Epic Online Services, which is independent of Epic, meaning you can use it with any engine. Says it even has analytics built in.

Thankfully that's an extreme outlier: https://gamerant.com/pc-games-file-size-hd-space-biggest-huge/ But point made. It could get ridiculous, at least from our current perspective. I'm sure HD and RAM makers are drooling at the possible demand. I'd guess at some partnership between Epic and Quixel (they do have 82 results for Quixel in their store). It makes sense to control as many aspects as reasonably possible.

Right, disk space and memory. Don't know how they do it/intend to do it. A random scanned scene on Sketchfab like this one is a half gig download and it's only 1.3M triangles for a single scene (not a billion, like they said in the "frame" (not the entire scene)). But I suppose if people are used to 40GB or 60GB game downloads, they probably won't mind 300GBs or more. ?

I just watched it too. Looks amazing, of course but they never lacked for presentation. I didn't catch that they didn't use normal maps though. Does the engine generate them on the fly for the reduced-triangle models or is it just not needed somehow? I do like the thought you mentioned of games looking good even 10 years from now, being more age-resistant, and their talk of taking optimizing models/LODs out of the pipeline. That's a very powerful concept. Someone did mention in the comments about how much bigger file sizes must be to accommodate this but I don't know how that would work either.

Again, as I said above, have you made sure your unit scale is set to meters? The default in 3DS Max is centimeters. You also probably know that for some bizarre reason Leadwerks divides grids into multiples of 32, not 10 (yes, I know this is texture-related but it's dumb). And I couldn't find an option to change it to a normal 1m grid. So that first picture of TwoCatsYelling will never snap properly anyway.

For the sake of completeness, here are 2 methods in Windows to detect the desktop size: RECT desktop; // Get a handle to the desktop window const HWND hDesktop = GetDesktopWindow(); // Get the size of screen to the variable desktop GetWindowRect(hDesktop, &desktop); cout << "Desktop size: " << desktop.right << ", " << desktop.bottom << '\n'; DWORD dwWidth = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN); DWORD dwHeight = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSCREEN); cout << "Desktop size: " << dwWidth << ", " << dwHeight << '\n'; Sources: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8690619/how-to-get-screen-resolution-in-c https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17504954/windows-get-screen-resolution-in-c

There's a reason I said that it works for "most" above. I made a mini-game once using this autodetection, I think for a Leadwerks tournament, and someone said it didn't work for them. I can't find the thread now.

Usually you can just use the Resize option in the Model Editor. Also, check to make sure you have the right unit settings in Blender (I use Max but I'm guessing Blender has it too).

Yes, it looks like he's doing the same thing I mentioned, taking the last resolution from the list. It doesn't actually detect the desktop resolution.

This may not help but I've had issues with scaling in Max where Leadwerks applied a scale to it in the editor, even though I didn't want it to. I ended up editing the vertices themselves and scaling the model that way. Maybe give that a shot.

It's come up before and I don't believe Leadwerks does this, which means you'd need to use system functions. The workaround is that you can take the last (largest) resolution from GetGraphicsMode which works most (but not all) of the time.

There's always a chance you can find some code on the forums or maybe on Josh's blog. He sometimes posts example code when he's working on something.

I would have directed you to the documentation but it's another set of commands with not a single example. ? And if you try to search the documentation for VR, you get an error saying that the search should be 3 characters or more.

What helped me there is that there are a ton of free models and textures out there. I can't model complex things or create textures from scratch but I know enough to alter things to how I want and to animate things myself. It's a nice compromise and not too hard once you know it.

As someone who has been on these forums for years (since Leadwerks 2), I don't remember ever seeing this. But check out the forums if you want to verify for yourself. There have been thousands of questions and people help when they can, or sometimes the dev (Josh) does himself, like he did here.

This was for the Ludum Dare 46 competition a week ago and I ended up moving the gate with a collision mesh by code.

Yes. The collision box in the last picture doesn't move at all. I generated it at animation frame 0 but when I animated the model (in the screenshot it is frame 32) the collision box didn't move down. This makes sense because a model could be complex and anything could be going on, including multiple pieces moving in different directions but I wanted to test to see what would happen. Ideally you could tie a collisionmesh to a bone but Leadwerks doesn't seem to support that. I was mostly just looking for some sort of alternative, short of doing it by code.

The goal is to not have the player mindlessly shoot the closest thing to him all the time (as with all games, really). I've seen healers in these types of games which actively avoid the player. They either heal enemy creatures, provide armor or shielding or make them immune entirely. If there are a lot of creatures getting a buff, it's worth it to get to the healer first. Related to your acid mechanic, you could also have eggs or other creatures explode and leave a pool of acid behind for a time. Walking over this will do enough damage to you that you'll want to avoid it but it may be worth taking the hit to get to a better position. I've seen enemies that have shielding/plating in the front (typically making them invincible there) but are weak from the back. This would also benefit coop with a person on each side. Lots of other games out there to get ideas from like Metaverse Keeper, Moon Hunters and Hero Siege. But if you want creativity, check out Binding of Isaac.

You can either use the crawler.mdl model that comes with Leadwerks, buy a Leadwerks-ready model in the Marketplace or find animated models online (free or pay), like at Sketchfab or Turbosquid.

Good point. I've never really used prefabs but if that works and doesn't slow things down then problem solved.

True. I actually did this before I came back here. Still, having that option in the model viewer would save a bit of time.

I'm putting down a lot of cliffs and whatnot (not vegetation). I know in the scene tab I can set each one to be a nav obstacle, one by one. But this seems like a waste of time when there are dozens of the same model on the map. Is there a way to set the model itself to be a nav obstacle by default? The models each have a collisionmesh imported in from Max so it would have made sense to me that Leadwerks would have naturally considered them obstacles.

I tried to make a simple gate that lowers when a button is pressed. The gate itself works perfectly; a single bone moves it up or down. However, the problem is that I can't tie the collision mesh to it in any way so that it moves with the gate. I've tried: 1. Skinning the collision mesh as well with the gate bone (Leadwerks converted it into a non-physics model) 2. Skinning the collision mesh with its own bone and moving both bones together (same conversion) 3. Creating a collision mesh in the model editor (did not move with model) Must the collision mesh be moved separately by code or is there a way to make this work?

Thank you.

Say you create a 512x512 terrain. Does that also mean that heightmap should be 512x512? Or is 1024x1024, 2048x2084 or 4096x4096 better? In the same vein, if you were to create a 4096x4096 terrain, what's the perfect dimension heightmap for that? I checked the documentation but it doesn't mention this.