Xaron

My idea would be to use the 0 level (y) just as my maximum depth. Anyway it would be nice to be able to use PositionEntity on a terrain.

Hi, I just posted this a while ago but the topic got lost due to a rollback. I'd like to change the y position of a terrain. I create a submarine game and would like to use the y position as depth. So far it's not possible to change the position of a terrain. This isn't necessarily a bug but I'd like to see the possibility to do such a positioning.

Silent Depth is my lifetime project. Earlier I used BB3D, now I use BlitzMax + LE. Will take some years...

I second that. An integrated GUI would be awesome. And please not that LUA BS (sorry)

That's true. But it isn't an issue. Maybe Microsoft someone drops OpenGL support completely, who knows?

Well that's something like Windows against Linux flamewars. Fact is, DX is not better or worse than OpenGL.

LE has its own format GMF. Ultima Unwrap Pro is a good tool to convert any mesh into GMF. You don't have to think about that. LE does the culling for you. No way. LE uses OpenGL. Forget about mixing it with DX. I think the bottle neck might become the network and server. With 100 players in one area everyone has to get an update for all other visible players. Let's assume you need a bandwidth of 1k per second for one player. Then you would need to send an update to every of these 100 players (of the other players) and retrieve status information from the other ones which leads to 100*(100-1) = 9900 updates (every player needs updates from the other 99 ones!). With 1k per second (which is rather less) you'd already need a bandwidth of about 9.9MByte per second. That means with a 100MBit connection your server already sees his limit. At the beginning you should not scratch your head about these facts and any other speed limits. LE uses SM3.0+ hardware and might run slow on older hardware. But if you finish your project let's say in 3 years it's fair to say that it will run very smoothly on almost every computer. $200. Nothing more. LE3.0 will be a paid update. It's very, very cheap indeed.

Hey count me in. I have 3 totally different PCs to test: 1) Intel Quad Core with NVidia Quadro FX 1800 2) AMD (Dual Core) with ATI 5750 3) Netbook with Intel Atom and NVidia ION (yes LE works with that configuration)

Thanks for the help. CEGUI might be a bit of an overkill, will look into this LUA stuff even though I don't use LUA (and won't use it).

Thanks Josh. Must be deep at night now over there. Good morning and a nice week from Germany!

That's good enough and rather fair. Thanks Josh. I don't expect wonders though. So will that low-spec cards renderer use shaders at all?

Thanks Josh. For me everything below SM2 is low spec, SM3 is middle and SM4+ is high, but that's a matter of definition. I'm looking forward to this and might just start with BMax (which I'm just in love with, I do C++ all the day as a softwareengineer by profession so I just need some other stuff ) and the current version. I guess till I finish my game LE will run on all PC's (not because of LE3.0 but because of the fact that at least a 8800 should be standard). Another issue for me is the performance. It's a bit weak compared to other engines like Ogre even though the features are better. Any chance to improve this as well? It's just a fact that without a good SM4 card everything's a bit rusty. Again, that's not a rant, I aim for casual gamers and there the hardware is often a bit "older".

Thanks Josh, that are great news for me. If I hadn't bought LE already I would do it again. Could you please define "low-spec"? Is it SM2, SM3? Or just the good old fixed pipeline stuff without shaders? I understand the limitations and don't care about less quality in that case. Do you have any ETA when LE 3.0 will be around? Thanks again!

Thanks Lumooja, actually that would be some kind of a "killer" feature for me. I don't expect the same render quality of course but it would be great if it just run on low-end PCs. The reason is simple: I target casual gamers who are usually not like the typical gamers and don't upgrade their hardware that often. I like all the BB syntax from LE and that I get all in one (physics, network, sound, graphics). So maybe you Josh could tell some words about this? I know your point and up to now you always said that there won't be any low-end support.

Hi, how do you guys create a GUI with the game (menus, options etc). Are there any plans to add some GUI stuff into LE?

Yes the ION chipset is really good. The bottle neck is usually the CPU.

Will it may be run on older hardware as well like Irrlicht/Ogre?

I totally agree! Hey Lumooja, that's a very interesting part. When and how this will come into LE? What does that exactly mean? Will it run on older systems (pre SM 3.0) as well? That's a very, very important thing for me and the only reason why I still prefer Irrlicht over LE.

Is there anything performance wise with the upcoming LE 3.0? I mean will the render part be faster?

I have a Samsung N510 which has the ION chipset + a slow Atom CPU. Leadwerks runs fairly well even though the CPU is the bottleneck there. But for development purposes it's enough.

Actually I would love to see some kind of offline documentation as I'm traveling frequently and the wiki is not very useful in that case. Yes I just could mirror it from time to time but that is not very optimal.

Hi all and especially Josh, I just want to say thank you for this great engine. I follow the development since the beginning and I'm very impressed by the progress you've made so far. The $200 are really cheap compared to the features you get. I've tested a lot of different engines (free as well as commercial ones) and I can say that LE is one of the best! So keep up the great work! -= Xaron =- P.S.: Sorry, this is more off topic but there is no off topic sub forum here?

Yes. And of course DX7 is now emulated on Windows 7...

That's simply not true. BB3D runs very well on a Windows 7 64 Bit system. Regarding the other stuff: It doesn't matter. I made the experience that DirectX runs slightly faster than OpenGL but this is more a driver issue as most gamers use Windows and most games use DirectX. OpenGL is unbeatable if it comes to cross platform development.

Thanks! Great forum.