SlipperyBrick

Awesome thanks Shadmar! I was doing some reading on Ambient Occlusion and I saw this interesting tutorial on how to do AO the way they do it in Crysis. Might come useful to someone who knows how to write shaders. The results look great in the tutorial and it sounds like a pretty efficient way. http://john-chapman-graphics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/ssao-tutorial.html

Not to sure, it is still available on the Workshop and I've had it for awhile but never got it to work it has always been like this for me.

I am more than likely doing something wrong. I am applying the SSAO.shader to my ROOT in my scene but everything shows up black and white. When I add the SSAO.lua though it seems to be less intense but everything is still in black and white. I don't know if my layer stack is correct though if I add SSAO.lua on top of the shader it seems to make things go a lot more crazy. Would love to know how to use this haha. Like I say it is probably something I am doing wrong. Does the shader need editing or the lua file that comes with the shader?

Don't know if this has been mentioned before. When you are in the editor placing objects can you make the escape key deselect objects you have already selected. Right now you have to find unused space and click to deselect.

I live in the UK in a quiet place called Wales. It's a nice and peaceful place although there is nothing for the game industry here. No game studios, film studios, nothing technology wise. London is the closest thing to me that would offer something like that. Living here though is real cheap and you can get some really nice places in the valleys but there is barely any sun (it pretty much always rains). Personally the midwest option sounds great I don't know my geography really well and I've only been to Florida once. Go with the option to get a cheap house, it sounds like the daily chores of life would be pretty easy (groceries, no traffic, etc.) Sounds like you can really focus on work but still get some time away from work when you need it, which is important.

CryEngine have their own file extensions for models so I wouldn't waste your money

One of the community has started a shader tutorial series. You can find it here on his Youtube.

As everyone stated in here, the best way to start is with a design document. You don't even need concept art or anything artistic in there. All you need is objectives and your general idea, doesn't have to be fully detailed (although the more detail the better) Start a document off by thinking of the genre of your game, Free 2 Play, MMO, FPS, whatever you want it to be. Give a short plot of your game. "The era is 1876, your a US soldier a tank driver to be specific. Your behind enemy lines feeding intel to your commanders." Having a short plot can give you more information, the era of your game, the theme of your game, the location of your game. Write down the mechanics of your game: 3rd person RPG Massive Multiplayer, Open World Skill Tree System Vehicles, Tanks, Cars. These are just a few things you need to note. As I say the more information you put into this document the more clear your idea is and also the easier it will be to elaborate on your current ideas. With your idea down on paper you can then start looking for a team, modellers, animators for your game assets. Programmers/Coders to work with the modellers and animators to make game assets work in line with your game mechanics. Game Designers to work on the levelling up or skill tree system. Level designers to flesh out the level so that you can test it and make sure your gameplay mechanics will work in your level. Having a design document allows you to manage your ideas without forgetting anything. If you plan ahead that means that things will go a lot smoother and expectations will remain good. Plus you are organized which is the key to success in making a game, no organization and things will start to fall apart, people will leave your team, motivation will be at a low and you will never even reach anywhere near a finished product.

Blender is free and you can actually texture your model in there along with sculpting your model to bake maps to low poly models. Pretty much the same as Substance Painter but in Blender. I have a tutorial series that I am working on for Blender which will be available very soon that will take you through the necessary steps on how to do all common things inside Blender.

Valve are gonna be giving an interesting talk about developing with Vulkan at GDC soon http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/practical-development-for-vulkan-presented-by-valve-software I am really excited to hear about what this is capable of. I think now is the perfect opportunity to get this implemented into Leadwerks!

I agree with what Roland said above. Spend your time working on the engine and adding features, the engine sells so its time/money worth spent The Workshop Store will pick up at some point via the community. Over the past few days 3 people here have agreed to start actively providing tutorial videos for a few subjects in regards to Leadwerks, hopefully the new skills people learn from these tutorials will start to drive new content onto the Workshop and possibly new games made with the engine. I would say the majority of users can afford to spend time working on content that they would happily take a gamble on to distribute to the Workshop, for us it is only our time but for you its your money and time. Once that has kicked off and you start to see numbers go up on the Workshop then you can safely start to invest in custom content. Although this isn't really a reliable source I do think its a better option. That's just my thoughts anyway. Just thought I would join in on the conversation

This looks totally awesome. Would love to see it finished and working. Amazing work! Looking forward to using it

I would suggest sticking with Blender, like anything in this world there is a learning curve. The thing that makes Blender so tedious and scary is the insane amount of keyboard shortcuts, as Brutile said though the more you use it the easier it will get, you just need to break down that barrier of discomfort. http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/14215-blender-leadwerks/ Here is a thread I started, I've made a Blender scene which is the exact measurements and grid size as Leadwerks. If you download that and follow the instructions in my post to make it your 'Start up file' then everything you model in Blender will always be the correct orientation and scale for Leadwerks (no models come in backwards or upside down or to small or large). If you are looking for something even easier for modelling (and not animation) you might wanna check out Wings3D. It is fairly old but unbelievably easy to use, it doesn't have subdivision in there so you will have to do all that manually with edge loops but it is as easy and as straight forward as the Leadwerks level editor. Silo 2 is another one which I saw was suggested in here, very minimal UI, easy to use and fast. That has subdivision and UV'ing as well but no animation capabilities. Personally as suggested before, stick it out with Blender its the whole package and its free, the more time you spend in there the more comfortable you will be, you will pick up the hot keys as you go along as well. Combine that with the Leadwerks Exporter and you will have awesome models in Leadwerks real fast

I would personally like to see more tutorials on Lua. I find that the current tutorials available really help but I want to know more, may be have a section where you use everything you have learnt in a real world example if that makes sense.

I'm always on the forums, I wouldn't mind if Josh gave me moderator abilities, I would be happy to help maintain the forums but I don't think he would do that haha.

I am hoping we can get this pinned in the Game Art section of the forums. That way people can just grab it and not have to search or figure it out in Blender. For pivot placement it works awesome too because everything is the correct size in Leadwerks it makes it really easy to have your models origin anywhere you want, great for snapping

Ahh cool, splines in Leadwerks? I had no idea that could be done! Really need to check that out as I could put that to use with other things too

@Josk. That 2nd option seems the most appropriate. I'm just looking for an effect which will sell the illusion of someone walking in front of the player leaving the footprints behind so having the decals already laid out and then showing them at a certain speed would work perfectly, I guess very similar to revealing using a mask. I'll defo check into this more as I wouldn't be 100% sure on how to code the speed part of the idea. Plus I want the actual event to happen only when the camera looks at it. So the event can trigger when the player collides with a trigger box, then as a last check to start the event I want to check the camera is looking in the correct place. I hope that is all doable haha.

Hi Guys, So I have come up with a specific idea in my mind for an event that is going to happen in my game but I need to know a few things before I attempt to try and create it. Basically I want footprints to start walking across my floor in my map (wet footprints to be specific) but I want this to be revealed in front of the player as if there is an invisible person walking in realtime and all they can see is the footprints of the water on the floor. I was wondering at first how to achieve this then I thought the decal system in Leadwerks may just make this work. My questions are: Is there a way to reveal decals in real time (some sort of way to mask them and then move that mask, just a thought). If decals isn't the answer, what tools in Leadwerks would be able to achieve something like this? My first thought would be to get a character and put an invisible material on that character and use decals for the footprints and somehow reveal them that way. Right now all I have is idea's but nothing seems to make me think that it would work haha. Thanks.

That is a lot of code to go through. I am still learning Lua as well and I am very inexperienced but here is my guess as to why you are getting an issue with 'startPivot'. There are scripts at the very start of the code that you are calling within this script. 'startPivot' is it's own script that you are calling within this script. You are getting a 'nil' value because it cannot find 'startPivot'. My guess would be that even if you fix that you would get further issues because throughout the code you are using scripts and calling functions that are supposed to be defined within those other scripts. Then again I could be completely wrong. I am still learning myself and that code above looks big and scary Kudos though for the time and effort you have put in, that is some dedication right there!

All Allegorithmic products are now on a rent to own plan. You spend around less than $20 a month and you can stop that plan any time you want and start again from where you left off, or pay for a few months then pay the remainder off. https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-live I can guarantee with a plan like this in place a lot of people will start to move towards these tools as they are professional quality but at a really affordable price and very fair deal. There is an SDK available that Allegorithmic offer to developers that are making content authoring systems which allow them to implement the benefits of their tools right into their applications and I'm sure that is free to all developers (I could be wrong). I don't want to cause any animosity here, I love Leadwerks I plan on using it for my development of games and I am happy to wait and see if things like this get integrated and I hope they do as I can only see great things from it. But that is my opinion and everyone has the right to express their own opinion Anyway I found out that Substance Designer exports gray scale images in linear RGB space. I don't know if this is a normal thing or if this helps find the solution in anyway. Whenever I export from Substance Designer I need to export from Photoshop or GIMP in order for Leadwerks to be able to read it otherwise when importing to Leadwerks straight from Substance Designer I get an access violation exception error from Leadwerks. I hope that helps the problem, if not sorry for sharing useless information haha Just for the record, I am totally fine with the above workaround and understand if something like this is low priority to fix or even if it doesn't get fixed at all. I can still get my stuff into Leadwerks it's just two extra steps so no big deal. Just wanted to make Josh aware thats all

Ahh that's where I've been going wrong. I've been using the regular diffuse+normal+specular.shader lol. Thanks macklebee!

Rather than using the diffuse+normal.shader I've been using the diffuse+normal+specular.shader. Will a specular map also work in a decal?

I did take the same textures and used them in Unreal Engine 4 and with the same compression methods Leadwerks has the PNG files worked without me running them through GIMP. Unreal also has deferred decals like Leadwerks and the same compression methods.

Yes Brutile is correct if you have a decal which has a lot of detail in color and opacity variations in the color you will notice a lot of bleed and the decal will look pretty low res. Here is my decal with DXT3 compression. Here is my decal uncompressed.