Pixel Perfect

Cool!

That's what I thought, so from a practical point of view ... that's a NO then. Shame, would have made it a far more powerful tool.

Looks great, but as Laslo already asked, what's the deal with terrain ... is this just for indoor scenes and can't be used for external global lighting?

Looking great, nice work!

Arteria3D did a nice video tutorial years ago showing you how to construct a medieval house from scratch, it touched on most of the features of 3DWS including some of the less obvious ones. Might be worth an email to Steve at Arteria to see if it's still available.

Great work Dave ... very inspirational. I too wish you good luck with your next project and thanks for showing us your vision of what's achievable with Leadwerks

Wow! Very useful! Many thanks Masterxilo.

Would be nice to have a finished model from any major modelling app that we didn't have to do anything else to in order for it to work in Leadwerks but that's not Josh's style ... he's always gone for proprietary formats. I've learnt to live with the various pipelines now. Once you're set up for it it's not too much extra work! It still irritates me though that we have to have .obj versions of everything if we need to generate convex hull phy files. Bit of a flaw in the master plan that one!

Always liked the support for up to 256 textures channels per layer in the Hero Engine ... apart from anything else.

I still use Video Wave III from MGI, that is such as great tool still for simple editing and transitioning.

Just a quick update to say that I've now coded some additional path finding visual feedback into the Editor. The 'Test Pathfinding' function now not only displays the final calculated path in blue with an NPC walking it but also all of the grid tiles taken into consideration whilst running the A Star algorithm and displays those in red along with the elapsed time in thousandths of a millisecond using a high precision timer. It will even sequence through these in slow motion (one every 1/4 of a second) so you can see the exact sequence of checks as they occurred when the algorithm was run. This gives the designer much more visual information on the performance of the system and allows for better fine tuning. This is great for playing around with heuristics and visualising the effects of any changes. It also gives good visual indication of where geometry layouts result in inefficient path finding using the A Star algorithm and allow you to do something about it or at least make decisions about how path finding in those areas will be executed. (This is a well recognised issue with A Star where, in the worst case scenario, certain combinations of start and end points combined with geometry can end up with it searching through practically every node on the grid before resolving the path). As my system can divide long path searches over multiple frames where needed this is less of an issue but the visual feedback can result in minimisation of these issues by aiding the designer tweak the level design. I'm off on holiday with my family later tomorrow (a complete break from computers for a while ) but will be concentrating on developing some real AI capability for my engine and editor on my return.

Already offered my services in your previous thread but for the record ... yes would definitely be interested

Yeah, I wasn't criticising you Rick, I was just pointing out that the majority of people don't care or even want to know the detail of what’s going on behind the scenes, so long as it works. I personally believe there are some definite advantages to nav mesh based systems and Recast as an example demonstrates many of those but they are not really essential in order to get a basic game up and running. If you already realise you have a need specifically for a nav mesh system then you are probably capable of integrating or writing one yourself and don't need someone else to do it for you. I went for the hierarchical grid based system because it seemed easier to implement especially when you have never done anything like this before. I suspect that NA probably did as well.

You can argue the pros and cons of path finding systems all day but in the end all most people want is something that works and works adequately well. I have already demoed my system which is essentially not dissimilar to Naughty Alien's as it too is a hierarchical grid based system and you can see it works well. There is always room for refinement in these systems but once you have a basic working system in place you can spend your own time working on that! It's excellent of Naughty Alien to take the time out to do this and undoubtedly many will benefit from it.

I think he was just referring to all of the node distance calculations. You can only really use the matrix method you are referring to with static geometry where you effectively pre-calculate all of the node paths and simply read them in ... very fast but useless for dynamic object avoidance. For that the nodes need to be updated in real time and the path finding done on the fly! My system certainly works on that basis although everything that can be precalculated is! I guess we need NA to enlighten us a bit more on how his does! The tutorial will reveal this no doubt

I didn't pick up on this earlier NA but I thought you had indicated in a previous post you were running the searches on the GPU yet your speeds seem comparable with mine running on the CPU. Are you not using the GPU then?

I suspect that should be UU3D Pro (Ultimate Unwrap 3D Pro). It's a UVing tool which is also very versatile at converting between model formats and has a host of other useful features. My primary tool for converting models to gmf format and well worth the money!

Yeah, that sounds about right. On my system I'm getting sub millisecond response on average with some extending up to 4ms on a 40000 node grid. I've not come accross that series of articles before VeTal, thanks for posting the links. Always interesting looking at how others have designed their systems.

Looking good NA. What sort of range of search times are you getting on average in mS?

Wow! This looks really promising and very effective. Nice work!

Well no-one 'has it' until they have 'done it'; and as always ... the devil is in the detail But good luck to you!

If your going to do it then that is the right way to go about it, things like that are best decided on and designed in right at the begining. Careful examination of both existing APIs should enable you to build up commonality and avoid any obvious pitfall areas but it sounds like it could be hellishly complicated and time consuming. Have you guys ever written a game engine before? You seem to be planning to take rather a lot on here!

Sounds like a great future strategy, I personally agree with you in not pulling in loads of investment just because you can. If there is a clear need and justification for it then that's a different matter. I also believe that with a sustained period of C++ coding you will not find it to be quite the beast you believe it to be, but only time will tell. Good luck and enjoy your well deserved break. Exciting times ahead!

That looks fantastic Steve!!! Like the new website design too ... much better.

Yeah, its just some silly bug thats crept in there somewhere. I did some stuff on modulating the movement speed to reflect the gradient and I've obviously screwed something up