Roland

Wow. That's really awesome.

Josh. Please remove that "Saved file ..." popup or make possible to turn it off by a command line switch. Then it could be used in a simple cmd-script to convert all images in a folder without having to click for each file. Of course it has to take the file to be converted as an command-line argument also.

Rick. I highly recommend the Leadwerks Builder which is more up-to-date.

Besides more textures I miss one thing and thats some erode functions and image based brush. Maybe simple things, but that would make a difference to me.

Ah. I see you are using Silo2. Nice program. Really impressing results. Looking forward to more of this Looking really professional. My hat of for you. Great

I think Lazlo's C# implementation is a very good one and a great contribution. Very well done Lazlo and even if I now are going back to C++, I still applaud you effort and work. The reason why I'm back to C++ is NOT that its something wrong with Laszlos C# Leadwerks. NET. In fact its great and a very good tool for C# users. No, No ... there reason is very simple. I have been coding C++ since the language was public available (more than 20 years) I have been coding C# for about 1 year. Taking that into consideration its obvious why I'm back to C++. I can almost code C++ in my sleep But for you young guys (which I'm definitely not at 57)I highly recommend to have a look at Lazlo's nice C# implementation and see for your self in that's something of interest. Anyway. Thanks Lazlo for doing a great work there. Cheers Roland

Macros in C++ can easily be avoided like this Instead of #define TEXTURE_DIFFUSE 0 #define TEXTURE_NORMAL 1 do this const int TEXTURE_DIFFUSE = 0; const int TEXTURE_NORMAL = 1;

Hi Koan. I also like Dev C++. Really nice IDE. Keep us informed. Roland

I still dont understand. There is no need for a plugin if you export as a FBX in Poser and if LE3 can read FBX

You can either create your own character or upload you own FBX (I uploaded my own in the example as that girl was from Evolver). The model does not need to be rigged. This is made after upload. Then you add animations and export to one of several format ( I used FBX)

I don't really understand it either, thought I did So please ignore my comments.

I have. I works very good, but what I don't like is the naming of the bones. The don't follow the standard that used by BVH, which makes it a bit tedious to adapt for using BVH files. But if you go through renaming the bones it does the work. And if you pay the fee's for for Mixamoo's animations it works just like charm. Very nice. This girl is a model from Evolver, animated in Mixamoo and exported to fbx. http://vimeo.com/16127403

I use DAZ3D Advanced + their Game Development Kit.(GDK) + Animate2. With that I can Use DAZ3D and Poser models. Create low poly versions of them using Decimator in the GDK Create textures and normal maps for the low poly versions Export to FBX (including animation) Use both DAZ3D animations and imported BVH animations Edit the animations. Not the cheapest way to do it but it works and is fairly easy to do for a non-artist.

Aha Sorry! My misunderstanding. I thought you was opposing the auto-convert feature in a coming LE3. So then I agree However it felt good to pinpoint how very important I think a better art->editor pipeline is.

Then LE3 will not be that great thing that I though it would be. Whats the idea of having LE3 (LE3 editor) automatically updating changed files in runtime (as discussed by Josh) if it cant handle FBX files directly. Then it wont be that "Edit and save in you modeler program and watch it in the LE3 scene. I though this was one of the major improvements in LE3. But I may have misunderstood that. Hopefully not, as that would not be to great in the competition of other engines. Support of automated runtime update of FBX in the editor must be there in LE3, at least as I see it, not just textures. I also think that FBX format is quite enough as its supported by most modeler programs out there. Having to manually do conversion ala MakeDDS and FBX2GMF or go through UU3D is something that really don't want to see in LE3.

Koan said "plugin or a feature" So it may be a feature. When thinking a bit about this it may not be needed as long as LE3 can accept FBX files. Poser models can be exported to FBX.

Couldn't agree more

Will make a tutorial on that.

I do. At least for the pre-orders I have done for other softwares. Combined with a pre-order there is a discount on the price by most company's. But in this case I have to agree with Josh. Its way to early to set a price.

I have a model that will have quite a number of animations. There is no problem with getting the model with is idle animation into LE2. Now I want to add more animations by loading them from GMF files (same Model, same Rig, another animation). Those GMF files contains the animaton and the bones (no mesh). This is what I thought would work with this approach. TModel model = LoadModel( "abstract::mymodel.gmf"); // CountAnimations returns 1 LoadAnimation( model, "abstract::mymodel@walk.gmf"); // CountAnimations returns 2 LoadAnimation( model, "abstract::mymodel@run.gmf"); // CountAnimations returns 3 // ... more animations... // Main loop Animate( model, AppTime()/30, 1, curAnimation ) ; // where curAnimation = 0, 1, 2 The only animation that works is the one in the original model file ( curAnimation ). I have checked that each gmf-file has a working animation in the ModelViewer and they are all ok Where is my misstake ? Thanks Roland

Yes Josh. ToLua++ is a program that parses 'cleaned' header files and creates Lua-code from them. Does sound scary. It's a bit more work but not much. The cleaned files often just needs some very small corrections if any at all. One nice thing is that you can add extra things is those files to solve some things that is hard to do in a type LuaBind solution. The price to get more control is just the fact that you have to have a 'cleaned' header copy of the C++ header file. It's now a long time since I used toLua++, but either Lua or toLua++ seems to have changed to much since then. My son and I was writing a 3D Engine and like you studied various script languages and came to the solution that Lua was the way to go. It was fast, it was used as industry standard by many companys, it was stable. Then we tried LuaBind and came to the conclusion that it did not work as we intended when it came to C++. I now have forgotten the details, but it produced unnecessary code among other small things. There was something about the stack usages also which I can't remember right now. Anyway, after having struggling with LuaBind for a while we decided to have a look at toLua++ and was very satisfied with the result. It produced faster and simpler code, and also gave the opportunity to solve many things that was tricky with LuaBind. I don't have any samples now. That project died 4 years ago when my son got his own kids and did not have the time for the project any more. But our experience was that although LuaBind was very simple to use and produced what it was designed for, it did not quite got there when used for game code and C++. Of course this is just my personal view of it but thats was we came up to. I could have a look at produce a simple sample if you need that. Feel free to contact me in such case.

I'm in a standby position right now (making art and tests for my game, those tests are done in another engine). But my plan is to be back when LE3 is released and then see how it will work out. At that point I will not use any kind of wrapper what so ever. I will use C++ straight from Josh headers and go with that. The reason for that is simply. I know C++ and has no problems with that, also this way I will be in sync with changes without any delays or wrapper errors. I did abandon the C# LE.NET project as there was only a very few that liked it and used it. To much work for a few users. To those few users I apologize (again!), but in fairness I left a very stable C# wrapper source that those users should have no problems to update them self. All the tricky parts was done and at that point LE2 was locked for changes or news. So using LE.NET for the latest LE2 should be no problem. Personally I will from now on use Josh headers as this leads to less problems and C++ is a great game development language. Cheers Roland

Anyway. All is perfectly OK with me as long as there is a pipline that works for me. And now there is. I guess its hard to autogenerate materials. And the ADN Material Editor solved the problems, again...WHAT A GREAT TOOL! As I understand it, materials and edit of them things will be much better in LE3.

In fact you are both right and wrong at the same time. For models which have textures & normalmaps that are unique to the model (not tiled textures) the material is unique to the model as in my example (Although the textures in that simple one could have been tiled). In those cases the material could to be something thats generated more automatically as in 90% of the cases it is a color-map and a normal-map. For other models you can use tiled textures which are not unique to the model (like stonewalls etc..). In this case the material could be a material thats more generic (like stonewall.mat), which can be applied to different models. So in my view its two different kind of situations where the materials are used in different way. ModelMaterial - is unique for a model. Can be autogenerated with some effort. TiledMaterial - is a generic material which is non-unique and may be applied to any model

Ok. So its more complicated that one would ever think. Thats OK. But how can one handle resources in game with different levels. I want all but the player to be free'd up when a level is done and next one is loaded. Is there a way to do that ?