AggrorJorn

The materials folder contains some terrain textures.

Why is it money down the drain? Leadwerks 5 is not out yet and is a separate purchase. You can still use your current license for Leadwerks 4 without having to spend any money.

Glad you got it working. Dont forget to mark as accepted answer.

The plan on what to do with the map/entities isn't final yet.

The main lua script creates a window and everything, Since C++ does creates its own window (as far as I can remember) I would expect C++ to have its own menu creation. But that is just guessing, as I haven't tried it yet in C++.

The easiest, but none the less effective, way to optimize a large outdoor scene is setting a view range for an entity. Here are some basic rules that I used during the rebuild of the Return to the Zone project. Max: Here you can think of essential buildings and large structures. Think about distant buildings, powerlines, bridges and entities that stick out above the vegetation or water plane. Far: Here we have the larger props: containers, trains, vehicles, walls, statues. This also contains props that are exposed in open areas. Think about road side props like stone piles, crates or oilddrums. Medium: Props that are placed inside buildings can have either Medium or Near as a view range. When a building has several large indoor areas or contain a lot of windows and doors use the medium setting. Near: Tiny props, like cans, toys, garbage and pretty much all props that are placed inside confined rooms. Also, a few static camera points showcasing the Zone:

open the menu.lua script which you can find in the scripts folder. In that script you can find what should happen when the start button is pressed. Look for this line: if Map:Load("Maps/start.map") Change it to the name of your map.

Open main.lua and comment all the lines using 'gamemenu'

The UI samples are placed under 'widget' instead of GUI. It's kind of confusing. A reference from the GUI to the widgets could solve this, or simply putting the widgets as part of the GUI. That is probably the term people are looking for anyway.

I sat down last evening to give it a thorough read and I am really impressed. I also love the component editor system. This saves a lot of manual typing to register all components. What I like the most is that this completely overhauls my default thinking process about the game entities. The losely coupled structure is perfect and I think that this is the biggest downside to most of the code that I currently write. Everything needs a reference to objects in the scene or other scripts. This just makes management so much more easy. @Rick That API/components collections sounds awesome. I can allready see dozens of tiny components that can be useful for this. Any ETA on the project beta? nvm, end of august.

Thanks for the extended explanation Roland. I will have to sit down for this and give it a thorough read. Really cool to see how you guys are creating this framework.

Very cool stuff Rick and Roland. I would also love to see more enthusiasm on such a communication framework. I think adding a basic diagram on the flow of the message and the structures it passes through will aid in explaining what you are doing. For instance a character with a health component.

Those screenshots were just some experimenting with ambient and post effects, and by no means a final result. With Josh's new fog shader and SSAO improvement things are already looking better than in the screenshots above. The main reason for rebuilding it was to give Josh a packed scene where he could really see how a scene with so many props and vegeations would run. When you read Josh's blog on shader improvements, this already improves the engine for everyone a lot. That is what this is all about. Apart from that it just looks so awesome and that there could be potential cool mini game be created with this as the start map.

So much cool stuff going on. This is where Leadwerks truely shines.

Back in 2010 Josh, creator of the Leadwerks Engine, asked Dave Lee to create a part of the exclusion zone. 7 years later, this project has been revisited and rebuild. Original footage from Leadwerks 2.3 With Leadwerks 3 I asked Josh if I could convert the assets to the new engine. Most assets were uploaded to the workshop, but they lacked proper physics, materials etc. Back then the Leadwerks 3 engine didn't have the vegatation editor and no deferred renderer. So building the entire map was not pointless. Now in Leadwerks 4 the tools are perfect to recreate this beautifully designed scene. Josh gave me once again all the assets, and I started rebuilding the zone piece by piece. Many hours later in just the time span of 2 weeks we have some good results. Step 1: Terrain import and basic terrain painting. 2. Painting general layout and some first vegatation 3. Placing the first bridges 4. Placing the first large buildings. as you can see the texture are missing. 5 Reapplied building textures. Holy **** that was a lot of work. Some textures did get applied automatically, but a lot of the textures were combined in larger shared folders. A lot of manual searching and applying the right textures. 6 Props, props and even more props. The more I started placing props, the more respect I got for Dave Lee's original design and prop placement. The amount of props is growing significantly. Here is a comparison of Bober station, with and without the building. 7. Fine-tuning terrain textures and terrain. 8. Adding more vegatation and rocks. 9. Swamp emitters. 10. Some more props. 11. Performance optimizing. View distance, billboards etc. More on this in the next blog. 12. Adding some post effects and sound. 13 Some missing things: due to a tight deadline, no time for physics yet. Except for models that have box physics or where physics do not really matter that much. Optimizing and organising the scene is also far from done. I came across a nasty bug where all my assets were removed from the filters I had in place. That was painful. The final reveal of Return to the Zone project will be done by Josh. In the mean time...enjoy....

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=932421043

The leaves shader in the vegetation is one of the alphamask shadows. I believe there is another one, but not sure what it is called.

Awesome image macklebee.

It is good to see that you are making progress. You can shorten this line if (self.entity.world:Pick(Vec3(self.position.x,self.position.y,self.position.z),Vec3(self.position.x,self.position.y-1,self.position.z),pickInfo,0,true)) to if (self.entity.world:Pick(self.position, Vec3(self.position.x,self.position.y-1,self.position.z),pickInfo,0,true)) Glad they helped.

Look at vector3 in the API . There is a function called distanceto which you use to get the distance.

Something like Guilty Spark from Halo? Because you wouldn't need the level of physics details then. Go the API reference and look for World->Pick. The hover entity is the first position and the second position is your (hover entity position - 2 in the y direction). If nothing is returned during that pick, you are not close to the ground and you can start moving it towards to the ground.

Can you describe what you are trying to make? Rick is right about perhaps trying a different method instead of an actual hovering object. Does your object move from point to point? Or should the player control this object?

I would start of simple. The few usecase where you would still intersect because of an odd shape can be finetuned later. Have your floating object send a pick downwards (later this can be multiple picks and various spots of your floating entity). The pickedposition and your floatobject position has a distance, when this distance is shorter than x, start adding upwards force. Adding the force must be done in the physics update function. To indicate that you are applying force, place a downward emitting emitter. Everytime you add force, enable the emitter, and distable it again after you have had an update where the distance was large enough. I also predict some twitchyness of the floating object. It probably will start tilting over, so adding stabilizing side forces is needed. Tip: reducing gravity might help you better debug the situation.

Not trying to be pushy or anything but have you had a look at Visual code? Have look at how you can implement your own debugger. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/example-debuggers

Gorgeous work.