Pancakes

I've had all sorts of problems with the GMF converter because of close vertices and stretched triangles. The resulting render will be an exploded mesh with vertices hovering around in mid air. If you try to physically interact with said model the editor will hang. The problem has never been the file format, but the topology of the mesh itself. And Sketchup exports strange topology. Some would call it 'bad' topology.

The problem with Sketchup is that the topology is going to feature a lot of very close vertices coupled with extremely stretched triangles. The GMF converter hates that kind of topology and will produce all manner of artifacts in the rendering engine even after the conversion is 'successful'. Usually attempting to register any kind of physics from the model will hang the editor. In other words, I would guess that converting many sketchup models is going to be like playing the lottery.

whoa! this blast of awesome is a bit overly intense

the vegetation i modeled is one face with 2-sided material, that's the way all vegetation that I've ever seen is.

i think u need bloom or is it HDR in order to more closely match it?

Finally got my editor to open. The updated version doesn't start but I did a fresh install into another folder and it's working: The only things I notice are: 1) Performance seems much faster though I can't do a direct comparison due to the fact that my old install is now broken =(. The increase of speed might be the tweaks that you made to SSDO too. 2) Atmosphere renders pure white. 3) There is a motion blur effect along the border of the skyline and anything that breaks the skyline particularly visible in the alpha transparency of vegetation. 4) DoF is nice! 5) The UI is stuck in vanilla windows color, though the properties panels still have the proper colors depending on what color scheme you have loaded.

Before I was using old updater. Now I have new one. So with the new beta installed, the editor briefly displays a splash screen and then closes without opening a window.

It seems the same as the one I downloaded a couple of weeks ago. It didn't undate anything new using the updater I have. Do you know when the DoF shader fix is going to make it in. I know it's not the most important thing...

not to hijack you, but can you even get the 4096*4 tile terrain to work in the first place? Does the collision work throughout the entire terrain? For me I fall right through around the edges of the terrain and I'd be interested if you've tried that size yet and tried the collision between the default controller in the editor and the terrain that is far from the center

I can remember a long time ago; back on the old website where I tried to convince Josh to take an approach that was a cross between blender game engine and CryEngine2. Looks like we are finally getting there with thingoids + Kismet/Flowgraph. While you guys are designing this stuff you might want to take a look at Blender Game Engine. It's quite smart the way they've done things. I'm thinking you could build some concepts from their implementation. And before you scoff at the notion (not to be presumptuous our anything); keep in mind blender has SSAO, HDR, Bullet physics including softbodies, shadows, all kinds of post filters, scripting, trigger volumes, raycasting, etc etc etc, in fact the only thing they don't have is deferred rendering. In other words, it's quite a mature engine and I think you might want to study it for a bit. I've said it before but the Blender opensource project in general is to 3dsMax as Leadwerks is to CryEngine2. It is really elite calibur software. And if you find it difficult to understand it's interface right away, I can help you to interpret it easier as I've been using it for years. You guys are doing phenomenal work already and I only mention the idea of closely looking at blender because I think that it could be beneficial from a design standpoint. A lot of things you seem to want to do have already been addressed in Blender. Not that they couldn't be improved in some fundamental way but again looking at them might not hurt. If you haven't already that is.

Josh can take a while to get to those, but usually it's quite swift, I just think to myself that whenever he's late replying to an email it only means he was hard at work making Leadwerks even awesomer. But that can be a hard pill to swallow for those hours where you are "locked out" of the updater, I know.

I just tried it out and it worked at first, but then an error occured and it went black screen. Perhaps its a bug. But while it was working it looked extremely impressive.

you're a saint

i just downloaded the blender SSAO and I have to say it is extremely impressive just random comment ^^ SSDO is great too but the blender one has some nice features it only shows up in dark areas, in light areas it doesn't. And it's very smooth looking, not grainy, though sometimes grainy is good too link if any one wants to see http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=184102

Josh have you taken a look at Visual3d.Net skies and water? They have one of the BEST skies I've ever seen. Please take a look at it. There are a lot more options to the sky than what you can see on the surface. I can take screenshots if you want to see what I mean.

if I had a top hat, I'd tip it to you sir

awww was hoping for shader skies because the clouds could roll across the sky but this is okay too

Unity is a slut.

Was just playing Crysis Warhead for the first time in months in order to test out the driver update that I just downloaded. I noticed something about the SSAO effect. I'm not sure if it's the new Nvidia SSAO or maybe I just didn't notice it before. But it seems to me that instead of using grain they are using just a couple of layers of a black textured polygon and then stretching it out to align with the perspective of the camera and then adjusting the opacity of the polygon in order to make the black get deeper or lighter depending on what's appropriate. I don't remember it looking exactly like that before because I remembered it being fuzzier. It could be the driver update but I'm not sure. The reason I say that is because the effect seems a bit more 3d than the one in Leadwerks. It almost seems like there is a cloudy substance in the occluded area that you can reach out and touch. But then you walk closer and it recedes back into itself. While Leadwerks' SSDO seems to have a less active quality to it. Just pointless observation I guess.

If you're making it for yourself I think that's great. However I'm not sure if it's time well spent if you are making it with others in mind because usually people will either buy their trees from somewhere else or they have some other method of modeling trees.

that is like the most hardcore statement I've ever read online

I mentioned "martinsh" before. I think it might be useful if he could so some shader stuff for Leadwerks. He and the Hydrax guy are amazing.

this is good

I'm a ex-crysis modder, that doesn't make me an expert. But I don't see a very big difference between CryEngine2 and Leadwerks right now. Also Visual3d.Net has Infinite Terrains and spherical worlds and universes coming soon. Does this not surpass Unreal and CryEngine3? Unity is "comparable" I wouldn't say it surpasses them. Leadwerks, is more open to programmers and is rapidly developing so I would say Leadwerks which is already in my opinion on par with CryEngine2 as it is can find several niches to surpass CE3 'right out of the box'. And because it's more open to developers than a free CE3, I think programmers will be able to add even more functionality themselves which is part of the reason I think Leadwerks has the ability to surpass CE3 depending upon the fervor of the community.

it sounds good, but still Leadwerks is a better deal provided it gets a few crucial additional features They really are picking a fine time to do this. At exactly the moment when Leadwerks and Visual3d.net and Unity are getting to a point where they are comparable and even capable of surpassing Unreal and CryEngine is certain respects and in Leadwerks' case all respects. My guess is it's free to use but you must pay a $25,000+ royalty per commercial release.