Pixel Perfect

Haha.. good on you Rick. Nice to see you yet again have the courage of your convictions and work on bringing something you're sold on to fruition. Good luck mate!

Well I haven't played much with it yet having only just got it working last night but it's basic output as far as I've determined so far is: <FileName> <Line number> <Number Of Iterations> <Averaged time per call> <Total time in call> <Percentage of overall time> <Your label text> for every set of Begin_Prof / End_Prof sections sorted in descending order of time taken.

That has to rate as the most biased and bizarre statement I've read in a while, but I guess some people love to be really outspoken However, like Raziel, I have no great need to see Josh port his engine to the XBox360 in the near future. I'd rather he continue work on the next version (Leadwerks 3) but more importantly give support to existing people when required who are genuinely trying to code good engines with Leadwerks 2 and make games with them.

Very nice work as usual Steve! I'm sure he recently stated that there was more Sci-Fi based packs on the horizon, which would be nice!

File Name: Profiling code for C++ File Submitter: Pixel Perfect File Submitted: 08 May 2010 File Category: C/C++ Code Profilers are useful tools for optimizing your code and detecting where valuable processing time is being consumed, I found this one available as Freeware and managed to get it working today and have been using it successfully to profile my latest game code. It struck me as something that might be useful to the community. My thanks to Harald Hoyer for making this profiling code available. I have modified the cpp file to ensure it works with MS Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition and included the modified file. The profiler can profile multiple areas of your code, see the header file for a breakdown of the commands and usage. The output is sorted by time spent in each routine. Instructions for use (a simple one off function profile): Include the two C++ files hwprof.h and hwprof.cpp in your project Add the following to your main header file: // Three lines needed for Profiler #define PROFILE &Profile #include "HWProf.h" CHWProfile Profile; Add the following to the line before and after the call you want to monitor for example: // Starts the profiler BEGIN_PROF("Test"); // The function being profiled pAIManager->calcPathToPosition(pathFindTestStartPos, pathFindTestEndPos); // Ends the profiler END_PROF(); Then add the following profiler output dump lines at the end of your main routine before you terminate your application: // Profiling output - comment out if not needed Profile.dumpprint(); Profile.reset(); The Profiler output appears in the debug output window in Visual C++ 2008. An example is shown below: =========== Profile ================== c:\users\ian\documents\visual studio 2008\projects\leadwerks engine 2\navarea editor\main.cpp(1657): 0: 1x 271µs 271µs 100% Test Total: 271µs ====================================== Have fun! Click here to download this file

Great news and thanks for this.

That's my reading of the situation too

Looking good! I like you models, the lizards and the spider are particularly good. Nice level detail too! Looking forward to seeing more.

You can effectively select which animations you want by temporarily removing the ones you don't from their directory. It would also require, in my opinion, a scaling facility built in as this is one of it's greatest weaknesses. You have to get the scale right before importing ... notice any pattern here lol. It's a useful little program though for those not used to rigging in other programs and does contain a useful set of animations.

A quick bit of research on the Internet revealed the following about the creators of Eve Online: Subsequently Eve was released in 2003: All quotes taken from the wikipedia link

Good luck to you then

Well I guess the point is that Leadwerks supports a maximum terrain size of 4096x4096 at whatever resolution. So if you want seamless terrains larger than that then you are on your own ... and the suggestion to model the terrain and stream that in makes sense! Use 3DWS for CSG modelling only, the Leadwerks Editor replaces all it's remaining functionality and improves on it. P.S. Do you have upwards of half a million dollars to fund making and putting something of this size online and maintaining it till you have sufficient customers? Please don't take this the wrong way but unless you have successfully done this before (which is unlikely from the questions you are asking) it sounds about as achievable as putting yourself on the moon! I'd suggest scaling down your ambitions to something more achievable in the short term.

I know nothing about the web side of things nor do I have any immediate requirement for this, but it sounds fascinating non the less. Nice work and very well explained! Looking forward to seeing what else you end up working on.

All sounds great and of interest, thanks for the detail update. With regards the pathfinding, how is your system 'aware' of level geometry. Are you relying on hand placed nodes/waypoints or is it processing the level geometry in some way?

Yes, each destructible object can have a whole load of properties set against it including the breaking force, so anything exerting this force from a nearby explosion to a collision with another object or even a fall from a height will initiate the break where the prefab parts are swapped for the original and forces applied to separate them. The barrels for instance have a propagate explosion distance property assigned to them, and barrels within this distance from an exploding one will explode themselves. Yeah, I had to break the models apart myself in my only legal modelling tool as I can't afford the more sophisticated modelling tools (and I don't rip software). As I'm not a modeller either I found that a steep learning curve! The Blender tool looks nice though!

Yes, you can remove linked nodes or flag them unwalkable or use heuristics. This mimics how things are in real life. The first time you go into an unknown area you are totally relying on your senses to give you navigation feedback. You might know the rough direction you are going in or even have a distant visible target but your senses navigate you through the static geometry and alert you to dynamic threats such as the sentry gun. The initial knowledge of the static geometry will enable the path finder to plot a course through that but it has no way of knowing about the sentry gun unless you've told it in advance (this might be true where the AI is simulating advanced reconnaissance). Therefore when the NPCs line of sight identifies and enemy sentry gun the AI would update the nodes surrounding that object and probably make them unwalkable, making all future path finds avoid that route. Heuristics can be used to make a route or area less likely to be chosen and may be set for example by the AI when enemy activity is detected in that area, it doesn't mean the path will never be chosen (you might have no choice if others are subsequently blocked) but whilst safer routes exist it would not be chosen.

Yes path finding is tied into AI but it's not the job of the path finder to act intelligently but rather to simply supply a viable path based on data supplied to it at the time the path is requested. It’s the AI which decides that a current path is no longer viable and requests a new path find at that point, possibly updating data the path finding is based on. It’s quite rare in a dynamic game for any lengthy path finds to be completed without being terminated well before this takes place due to changing circumstances. The basic function of path finding is universal but needs to be based on dynamic data supplied by the AI system. Its ability to mimic real life successfully is of course a reflection of how well your AI performs.

I can't think of many games that don't require basic path finding as a minimum and do not see that as being game specific in any way. After all, if you want to move a NPC from a to b how else are you going to do it? Rick is right in as much that nav mesh node based systems utilising A* for the path finding are generally considered optimal these days ideally with full support for dynamic object avoidance and steering systems, but any form of path finding is preferable to none. Path finding can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it! I would place this as number one on the list. Animation & physics driven rag-dolls with IK and lip-sync support .... great as a wish list but have you any idea how much work goes into this. Hope you have your credit card ready B) I'd love to see some specifications for the systems you've developed so far Naughty Alien.

Great little tutorial and a great little package by the looks of it. Thanks

Jeeeez ... hope you have your Hazmat suit on ... we are talking major grunge here! Great work as usual

Facial animation/expressions library would be of interest.

Various people including myself have tried this with some success. I developed a series of classes for defining destructible objects of which my exploding barrels are an example as they break apart when exploded (video link). I went on to add crates etc. I know wh1sp3r demoed some destructible buildings too which looked really effective. The trickiest part I found was generating the physics objects for all of these but the technique works really well. The Newton demo gave me the impression that the destruction was being done procedurally in code rather than using the prefab fractured object method, but I may be wrong.

Thanks for the insight NA. Looks like your talent and perseverance has paid off. Good luck with the completion of the project. Nice to see someone managing to overcome all the obstacles and get a publisher onboard. Will be watching with interest.

That's a really nice model. Looking forward to finally seeing some video of you game when you are in a position to release something. Maybe we might have to wait for the publisher to show us something ... I don't know! A quick question NA, did you convince a publisher to take this on after starting work on it or had you already got a publishing deal in place?

DrawTextW, as referenced in the error message, is actually the Win32 function DrawText which is probably why it's complaining about the arguments. The compiler is not recognising the parameter set and chosing the right function. Just of the top of my head try something like: char text[255]; sprintf(text,"Player head height is: %.2f",myPlayer.PlayerHeadPosition.Y); DrawText(10,10,text);