Michael Betke

I was never impressed by this video. Offset is a dead end project since they are taken over from Intel. All they do in this movie is building up a house from lots of small models. I also can do it with any other engine out there and turn it into a prefab/group (ok not LE at the moment). Usually you use your 3d app for building up a house out of several small pre-made sets which you reuse.

With the number of vegetation layers constatly risen vegetation painting can be used for morethe nvegetation. I use it a lot for twigs, rocks, debris and other filler objects. This is limiting in some ways. I have to rename the objects I want to paint into a "vegetation_modelname_bleh" to be able to choose it as a vegetation object. Renaming takes time and if I used the object before on another spot of my level/project I have to keep two versions of the same model. One with the prefix and one without it. This raises the overall amount of needed memory if I use the same model with two names, raises the amount of total assets I have to manage and lowers the overview I have over my assets. I think this could be solved if I would be able to load just every object without caring about a special "vegetation" prefix from a regular file open dialog. Every project should have a good file structure so the "mess" (if I see all assets and not just the vegetation named ones) would be small. I also could generate Billboards and other vegetation benefits for my filler objects. So "+" for the ability to load every object as a vegetation layer.

haha made my day!

The last releases works like a charm too. Now we can start buggin' Josh with new feature requests again to keep him busy.

This is the so called "noob-cube" Its one of the most useless stuff I've ever seen in 3dmax

Isolate is more a feature for level designers and production enhancement. Most editors come up wtih filtering stuff but you still have to tick checkboxes here and there. isolate would be very fast. I love it in 3dmax to work on special areas of my model as it gets more complex.

Some features are nice to be adapted from other engines like autosave or undo. This two features would make LE a bit more unique and standing apart of other engines on the market: Isolate Mode: A simple mode to isolate the area where you work on at the moment. Drag a rectangle to select the "zone" and just press isolate. Now all non-selected entities are culled but lighting will always stay and terrain too. Pressing Isolate again will make all stuff visible again. Benefits are viewport speed, tidy view of the working zone which results in a better editor experience. Vegetation Color Variation (VCV): An additional low-res color texture which gives color variation to leaves. For example: You have a forest which consists of two or three models or even one model if the forest is supposed to be a "area filler" only. With VCV you load a low-res color texture for the specific vegetation model. This color texture will blend on the existing leaf texture and gives it color variation. Benefits are less needed vegetation models to break up a generic look of distant forests which results in more speed and realistic look. Seen there after I had the idea and searched a bit for it: http://www.burnstudio.co.za/blog/texturing-1000-trees-with-one-texture/

I tried. It works for the moment but after I restarted the editor its te same like before and the roads are messed up.

Last sync messed up all my roads. They are connected with the green line but not the texture. Worked before I synced.

The editor messed up my level suring save. I wasn't able to reproduce it. It says something about line XYZ error in file XYZ and closed to desktop. After reloading I only got one road left plus some modela floating in the air. The whole map was simply devasted. I was lucky to have a backup from some minutes ago. Otherwise the whole project would be gone because it seems the .sbx was just writen to a certain part. I highly recommend to make daily backups of your project maps. I'll do so from now. Maybe doing a autosave every XYZ minutes to autobackup files would be awesome. Like 3ds max does it. Or at least rename the last opened .sbx to .bak and then save the new one as .sbx. So you have the last working version. Get a simple crash is one thing but loosing an entire map is another.

Ok finally a little report from me too: Severe bugs: - Bloom doens't work. If I tick it the screen went bright for a short time and then fall back to the same lighing then Bloom off. Bloom seems to work if HDR is off. - Stuttering and lagging all over the scene. In 2.31 all was fine and smooth. If I stand on a location and pan around I get those lags. - In paint mode the "fit to terrain" option is gone. Now I can't use my sat-images anymore. Annoying: - SSDO way to strong. Why no sliders to let the artist set simply strengh? I have to change the shader everytime. And after every update too. - Rivers gone! Minor: - Editor still doesn't save window size. - Still no current mapname near "Leadwerks Editor". - No placeholders to indicate missing models. - In Gamemode the playermdodel doesnt swim in the water but just wanders around on the ground (never noticed before). Used the updater. I'll try the installer pack and hope it will work better this time. EDIT: Installer pack r2 stopps downloading everytime before it finsihed and is corrupt. (140MB, 110MB, 128 MB)....

looks ace. good work

Seems some people didnt get the mail. Will re-setup the mail distribution and sent again.

Yes that was the idea. And the packs can be used for every commercial game of course.

Thanks mate! I will bookmark this thread so I'll never loose it.

I'm looking for a script which hides/unhides the waterplane. I had it but overwrote it by accident after and sync... It added just a hide/unhide checkbox to the properties so I'm able to edit the underwater zone in a nice way. Maybe someone can resent it to me or tell me what I have to add.

No because I have tons of objects on the terrain and my valley started on height 0 which will be still 0 even if I raise the value you suggest. I did it the "brute force" way with raising the terrain now and it worked but was quite some work. But thanks for the useful screenshot link. It imports nice now.

How can I import a exported heightmap from LE into Photoshop and save it back into a readable format for leadwerks? I only get wired and senseless back/white lines. I dont want to go the way with 8bit .bmp All I need to do is to make my terrain a bit higher.

Yes the rought shape isthe same but your model has straight cubic edges. The bridge on the photo has some smooth plastered corners and the transition is smooth. This makes the difference to realism.

Finally I found some time to convert the four packages to additional formats. Now all Vegetation and Environment packs have those formats: .max (2010), .gmf, .3ds, .dae, .fbx (2009), .obj I feel comfortable with the formats now and can concentrate on new packs or make the existing packs "game-ready" for other engines. But Pure3d also has tons of work to do so it will take a while. The updates on the formats are free of course and all clients will get a mail within 24h from now on.

The bridge looks like taken from Counter Strike and lacks detail plus texture work. But your cockpit works and vehicles are awesome.

I played around with unity a bit and really liked the drag and drop functionality for models and textures from the explorer.

I use it for various projects. Mostly showcasing assets with an application but my clients also use it to make their simulations available for their clients. For example to show citizens how a new highway or a big solar-parc will look after its build and how the impact to theier environment will be. The people can download the application and "play" it on their on PC. Or it#s used directly for presentation on gouvernment presentations in meetings. So I think Simulation and Promotional Advertising are the fields of profession.

For the time I look back into the leadwerks feature releases I think a roadmap is nothing you guys should rely on. Some time ago Josh told us he will do a material editor with nodes. Then he told in a Blog he will update a lot of Tutorials. Both didn't happen or was skipped. Instead we got other fine features. So a roadmap would only make people angry if other stuff is done before. A roadmap would also be oboslete if Josh gets some funding because the posibilities will for him would change. So a "-" from me.

They are supposed to float. Its just a basic functionality wihtout depth. But I'm very happy with having rivers. But if you are able to add depth and color adjustment with .lua just do it. It will certainly help Josh.