Pancakes

The fact is that game engines are changing big time. CryEngine 2 and Blender game engine, and Blade3d (now out of business), are the harbingers of this change. Once young people have gotten a taste of them...which they have, including myself, their entire expectation of what a game engine is has been redefined. Any game engine developer who doesn't come to understand this is intentionally choosing not to embrace the future. Ogre3d is a big culprit in that regard. They are non commercial and have zero reason to appeal to a wider group of anyone. All these years what has been stopping them from making their renderer, often associated with game engines, more widely accessible to the public, hobbyists, children, etc. Just a lack of will. However, what about commercial engines like Leadwerks that seek customers? It's a completely different situation because these engines have chosen to make themselves a component of the free market. The guys posting nasty reviews wish that a certain type of game engine exists. And because that game engine they wish for 'apparently' wasn't Leadwerks, in their eyes at least, they'd just as soon see Leadwerks die in a fiery explosion inside a volcano. Why would they quietly leave? They still don't feel satisfied within the entirety of the indie game engine market yet. They demand something different by the power of their 'expectations'...who will supply them with what they think they want? Right as they are. Or wrong as they are. They do partially represent the demands of the market. Which translate into the oppurtunity to make profits. If game engines are an art. This is an 'ugly' reality. If game engines are a service for a humanity. Then this is a 'beautiful' truth. Problem is that game engines are both an art form and a service and defining exactly how they should be developed for future generations is a tricky business indeed. You have to strike a balance in moving forward.

Well there was a time when I was extremely unsatisfied also. This was about a year and a half ago I think. The reason I was unsatisfied is because, frankly, Josh's ability to support non programmers was poorer back then. He has improved on that a lot. The reason I say it was poor is two reasons: 1. This is a silly reason but it still was a psychological one. He named his Editor "Sandbox" right around the time Crysis Sandbox had recently been released. Yet he had a completely 180 degree difference in design philosophy of the editor. Which to me, was misleading because of the fact there are 100 game engines out there and I simply missed the oppurtunity to get clarity about what direction the editor was going to go in before pressing the purchase button. I had done a ton of research on game engines then, but somehow I didn't get around to asking that one super important question. At the time, seeing engines like Blender, Blade, and CryEngine 2, which were very powerful and also very friendly to non programmers, I felt like "wtf, this editor is from the stone age" That thought may make a programmer cringe, but it is how I felt and I wouldn't be surprised if that is how other non programmers came to feel also. 2. The 2nd reason is that before Josh put his picture and name on the forum he SEEMED much colder and uncaring. I was not the only one to get the impression from him. He has a way of just stating the facts. If the answer is "no", sometimes he'll just say, "No." And you're like..."What? That's it?...no?" Also there was a couple of times I made bug reports that Josh didn't believe me about and it took almost an entire month for him to get around to actually checking to see if my bug reports were accurate and then guess what? They were. And all he said was, "I don't know if this is the bug you were talking about but I changed this thing" After an entire month of doubting my concerns I was right, and he didnt' really apologize or anything it was just like... "Oh maybe this was a coincident, I don't know, but I changed some code here" Anyways, Since right before Werkspace was completed, I've never seen anything like that coming from Josh. And it's been a much better experience for me overall. And I have no complaints whatsoever. Josh even listens to my concerns which I didn't feel like he was before. Maybe he was listening the entire time, and it was all in my head just because of the fact that he put a picture of himself with a friendly expression on his face. I don't know. But I just know that it was entirely possible for a non programmer to find reasons to be dissatisfied back in the day. It was. Now it's completely different. Especially cuz we got this gigantic cake of awesome known as Lua.

I'm probably not good for those. Would hate to lead people astray. You're better off doing a google search there are plenty of good video tutorials on both sculpting and modeling with polys. Usually, those vids don't come with meshes to play around with though so I thought I'd upload something.

book marked, downloaded, and ready to rock ^^ thanks Aggror

Hm, then Flash and Josh have much in common

Thanks Pixel! And Tyler I will do a search for that! If that's okay with you.

eh hope it can help a little, just a little...just a liiiiiiiitttle lol a lot would be good though too

Hello guys! Thanks to Aggror's tutorials I can actually do stuff inside the editor!~ (I still haven't gotten over the fact that I can actually use Leadwerks now ) Okay at this point I will begin animating characters pretty soon and before I begin rigging I'd like to know what are the rules of thumb for Leadwerks 2.31? If any of you are animators or have animators on your team it would be very helpful if you could answer the following questions because the only game engine I've used animations in before was Blender Game Engine and as you know in Blender you can simply animate your model and then press the Play Game button and it works. I'm not used to importing animations across multiple file types: 1. I will be using IK solvers to assist me in my animation attempts. How exactly does that work in Leadwerks? Do I need to import the IK (solver) bones or just the bones with weight painting to them? In blender this is handled automatically so I could use a hint. 2. Also, how many bones do you recommend. My character triangle counts will be about 3-5k each. Texture res will probably be multiple 1k maps with the occasional 2k map. So how many bones before performance gets hit hard for a middle of the road performance PC? That's about it for now. Thanks for any help!

File Name: FaceMesh File Submitter: Pancakes File Submitted: 11 Jul 2010 File Updated: 11 Jul 2010 File Category: Models Triangles: 3.2 k LOD Versions: No License: Free to use Non Commercially Hello the purpose of this upload is so that maybe some people can have a mesh to look at one method of edgeflow for something that you're modeling. Disclaimer: Edgeflow is not perfect, but could help give a beginner a few tips for their own models on what type of edgeflow is ok for animation. A sad attempt at being generous or helpful. Click here to download this file

If you release this for public consumption will it be compatible with Lua and Rick's PiE? Because that would be like, insanely wonderful. I'm pretty sure you said that it was compat with lua. Oh I am looking forward to navArea and PiE. Will you also make available your weather system. Oh, I feel like I'm browsing at the icecream truck.

though nice job Mrosmaniac with the bug reporting - nice eye for detail. If I need a bug test in the future I will come knocking on your PM box and very cool NA

Pixel Perfect if you made some more tools of this calibur I'd be interested in purchasing them. For instance a cinematics editor with branching dialogue trees. As well as some form of GUI editor. That would be GREAT! btw I would also be interested in this pathfinding as well. B)

imperfection is variation, the way a human hand quivers when it draws a straight line attributes personality to the line that is drawn, compare a free handed line to a line drawn using a ruler Compare a natural human voice to a voice altered by autotune It's the imperfections of a musical instrument that gives it it's own soul. I don't think there is any ideal base mesh just as there isn't one ideal guitar. I think most people understand this when they fall in love with a 3 legged cat or when they like an old pair of jeans because of how beat up it is. Which is why I still just don't understand MakeHuman. Remember Charlie Brown, or the ninja turtles, neither was animated accurately but that was a part of their charm. If people start using these universal base meshes they are extinguishing the charm that might come in to being through the imperfections of their own models. that's just my opinion. I'm not trying to change your opinion. But I am usually lured into a rant against my better judgement whenever I see another announcment about MakeHuman or any software that removes variation of the human hand from art a bit overmuch...at least from my point of view.

I've never understood MakeHuman's purpose. If you can make your own base mesh then you would just about always want to make your own base mesh. If you don't know how to make your own base mesh, then you probably wouldn't know how to make use of MakeHuman's base mesh. Who is it for? Also the notion of taking the human element out of 'the arts' seems like it should be the last task on society's list of things to do.

wow I'm very impressed that is extremely well done. I like your system better than CryEngine's

no sculpting works fine in blender, just make sure subsurf is not on unless you are using an infinite clay build. But even so I recommend sculptris for sculpting.

Here is what I will do - 3dCoat for volume...export to Sculptris for detail...export to 3dCoat for retopo and bake and textures...export to blender for export to obj...convert to gmf...import to Leadwerks.

some radioactive geese flying in the distance would also be nice also a duck

looks amaing! how's the occlusion culling in the scene

That's awesome

But but wait guys. Maybe it's not so bad. As long as they give the option to download the game that you purchase it might be worth it. For instance let's say an indie company releases a game OnLive for $5.00. Each month they update their game with new content for another $5.00 after that. Like buying a magazaine. If you love the game and want to see what happens next you'd keep buying it all the while being able to play it in social settings with your friends like on your ipad or android or something I guess. Then when you get home from college and you want to play completely lag free you just download to your main PC and keep it there. I don't think the executives at OnLive have to figure that out is more like the developers who are releasing their games. And it could be a simpler pricing model and cheaper too. Cuz Josh's suggestion of 20-$50 a month would take a lot of kids out the market right there. Who might get birthday money or a small allowance from mom and dad. I'm not thinking to critically on this though tbh /devil's advocate

or the camera itself could be an object with it's own set of specialized components... OR there can be a director object which accepts every camera in the scene as a component this way you can save several camera presets or have cameras for cinematics set up but you'll only have to connect the player object to the director as opposed to having several different camera components connected to a single player object... Or! lol there are so many ways of setting it up good luck man

This is just... what can I say? +9001 So in other words. You could have a controller component, a sound archives compononent, and animation component, a mesh/model component, a special collision/physics component, and then save these all as a single prefab called, BasicCharacterComponent? Is that how it works? Then you drag drop the prefab into your scene and just edit the parameters of each component in order to define your entity?

I like pie!

Can anyone who knows how to do this PM me a modified shaders.pak it seems no matter how I change it it stays the same. Also when I mess around in shader.pak too much it eventually breaks my install.