Flexman

Non of the devs I speak to are interested in VS2012 for a variety of technical reasons. XP support is vital for us though.

I went to look at the screen-shots and went "wow". Problem with models looking that good is you need everything else made by you Could you include a well and waterwheel in the next collection? Maybe a forge and stable facilities?

I would suggest avoid parenting unless you have to. I have 3 kids now and they are quite demanding. In the past I've seen issues relating to scale (and rotation) when parenting one model to the child object of another. I will instead parent the model to another model's root or pivot, then translate the attached model to its final position/rotation (fine if the position is static).

Aye, this was my experience also. When we created the cockpit textures we noticed a huge difference in quality between DTX5 compression and uncompressed. It introduced a purplish hue and grain (bumps) to flat black panel surfaces. As you say the quality is much better without. It left me wondering if there's a texture tool that can achieve a compromise. What we ended up doing was picking choosing which textures to compress and which not to.

This is 1 base texture with 1 detail layer. We use a 3rd party terrain editor and bake everything into a single base texture. Max res is 4096x4096 per terrain tile which looses definition when close to the ground so we apply a detail/noise layer over that. This leaves 3 more splat texture layers to play with. It's not the best example just one I had to hand. (Using GROME imported into LE but several programs can generate maps and baselayers)

What I do is calculate ambient and sun light values every lighting update (which is configurable to every frame or every 5 seconds). This happens regardless of the visibility of the sun or moon. The directional light representing the sun is turned it off when the sun is masked by the terrain. To prevent shadows from suddenly vanishing what I do is attenuate the sun entity (a d-light) intensity *before* it dips below the horizon, and in the morning it's attenuated until it's a few degrees above the horizon. When the sun d-light is hidden the sun colour is still blended with the calculated ambient light colour to achieve a smooth lighting transition. It works even if the colours are not natural. As a quick thought (I've never tried this) put a flipped plane under the terrain to cast a shadow?

All looking quite interesting. I've been working a lot the past two weeks with Unity and UDK editors doing the same things. When using Leadwerks you appreciate the simpler and more open layouts without having tons of stuff in your face but miss basic features like this. Looking forward to having the best of both worlds. I have a question about the scripting. Are app level events going to be easily available? So we can script map loading...well pretty much everything from start to finish?

Ah, domestic violence game would go down great with my kids here. They have to settle for blowing each other up in Minecraft. Oh the howls of laughter and joy. @Ken, as for CombatHelo, I return to that in September when I've got my book out of the way. As for realism, I can take it or leave it, depends entirely on the game and what it's trying to do.There'a Air Traffic control sims and there's those little air-plane lander games that you swipe with your finger. The occlusion issue I totally forgot about, "layers" in other engines you're not supposed to name get around this. Your method should work fine in this respect. Macklebee had a kind of x-ray shader thing going on.

Thanks Ken that was a nice walk-through. I remember first time I saw fading walls in Die Hard, a shooting game on the old Playstation which had 3 game types bludgeoned together. One of them was 3rd person. It's possible without too much effort to do fading walls at the shader level but I like your approach as it has character and fits with the lovely retro music you've got going on. You could even combine the two. But if anyone wanted to play with a shader to do it, off the top of my head... The rotation angle of the model subtracted from the camera angle in the vertex shader will give you the parameter needed to determine how much the wall can be faded. This is passed to the frag shader which blends the rgba output accordingly. Alternatively use the vert colour to set the alpha (and set the colour of the model in a LUA script based on it's rotation). Kind of messy but affords a level of control (since you can set keys to start/stop the fade). Just some thoughts. The level manager looks great too. It will reap rewards in terms of control over performance. That's something you can't do with large levels containing big models. I've heard people say GPUs are more efficient than culling routines but in the real world it doesn't work out like that. Good work, I wish I had half the energy you have

Really interesting MG. Those modules can be had for a song and re-purposing them for LE is a a great idea, but you took it beyond the idea stage and actually did it. Awesome work.

You are spoiling us with these new toys.

That seamless tiling is 100% awesome sauce. I'm currently writing a chapter on water features in Unity, UDK and other engines and all the time I can't help but compare them to your shader. Visually this has enormous bang per buck. If the physical interaction can be worked one it's going onto the shelf of "I can't believe it's not from a AAA game".

I recorded it but it had no audio which sucks. Topics covered were: Cool stuff being done by the Leadwerks community recently; Shadmars Ocean shader, Josh was clearly stoked (and rightly so) about Hookwink on Steam, some thoughts on the LCP and focus on gameplay. Then a question on Leadwerks3D and Josh talked about focus on gameplay features (it will have tutorials on that). And I can't remember much else except a dog barking and trying to mute it but not being able to find the right one. I hope we can do it again sometime, I think we can share desktops and running apps so a show and tell should be possible.

And amazingly this debug out looks slightly more elegant than iTunes.

I go with whatever works, forget craft, elegance, politics. Whatever you need to get the job done. Glad you got Raknet compiling GP. It might be commercial but it's free for the likes of us. Really it's just an event system around a wrapper, easy to change IF and WHEN you have a viable working alternative.

Popcorn out.

Raknet wrapper works fine for current version of BMX. Still using it here.

Where's the popcorn emote? What year is it where you are? It's 2012 here. Maybe we can spin this thread out another 15 pages before it's released.

Is there any chance of this getting updated headers for C++?

So long as I can set a hot key for everything it's not far off from other editors I'm using which also have asset preview panes etc. With a lot of functions come the hassle of navigation. While the above interface was initially laid out with artists tablets in mind, for us non tablet uses hot keys get used a lot.

Scumbags have no care for other peoples work only their own selfish poop-flinging. Really sorry Jorn. Guess there's some scriptable exploit in that BBS software?

I say something in Unity for like $100 bucks a pop but I think it's really smart. Even more so as it's in Leadwerks. Why is it called HAARP out of curiosity?

Might be something to do with China. BBC were reporting on a European host being attacked from China. Lots of hosted sites down or getting ....I won't say hacked, vandalised is more appropriate.

Nah, AAA is actually a freak weather-storm off the coast of Argentina. OK who had the correct definition? Let's find out after these messages....

That'll teach him I did come away with the knowledge that there IS indeed a coffee made from a bean that monkeys poop and that wasn't even in this thread.