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Hello dear reader, First of all, as I recently though on how to make the blog more interesting and valuable for you to read, I thought it would be a cool idea if I provide a gamedev specifc tip (can be everything from productivity, to technical stuff, to marketing) at the end of every blog entry. I would be really happy, if you tell me what you think of this idea. Back to topic. I want to present what I am working at the moment. Last time it were some animations and rigs. I had some more trouble with them then expected and needed to do all that stuff again (rigging and animations). As they are just meant for a visual impact for me to be able to build and optimise the systems (e.g combat, movement) they don't look very professional, but my intention was not to create high quality game ready animations . Enough about the past, I will showcase the animations any time soon, as we take a look on the combat system maybe. So what I am doing now? Well I made some good progress and have some quite cool stuff to show. I was heavily working on my npc/character system (called "Character Set"). The NPC is now able to wear diffrent cloths. Already provided are: Helmet, Body, Gloves, Legs, Boots. At the moment I am working on the weapon system. So you can easily equip, range and melee weapons to the character. As I slowly would like to get a little bit more into detail here the settings for the character set: As you see I try to keep everything as clean and userfriendly as possible. A very cool thing are the "NPC Settings" which gives the systems a lot of power as it keeps the script settings clean, and gives you a lot of options to costumize the way your NPC behaves. It even gives you access to some technical stuff you can change, so there are no boundaries for you when using diffrent rigs/animation systems etc. Maybe I will talk more detailed about the whole AI/Character Set stuff another time. Another cool progress I made is the "PHFW Animation Manager". As my system works not with the Animation name (e.g "Walking", "Running"), but with the animation index, this tool is very helpful. Why I use the animation index you may ask. Well I use my own animation playing system (not the Leadwerks "PlayAnimation" function) and unfortunately the "SetAnimationFrame" function of Leadwerks does not provide to use animation names. To work around this I created this tool. This is the first external tool for the phodex framework and there are some more to come, I will then, most likley, put them into a huge toolset. There you can also set various keyframes needed for the combat system, so the tool can still be helpful, if the "SetAnimationFrame" function gets enhanced. This is how it currently looks (its like a pre alpha :D, just set up the rough system) So as promised here is the tip: Game Dev Tip #1: If you have a problem, you struggle with for a long time and you just can't find a solution. Stop working and do something completely diffrent (for example go outside and take a walk), then come back with a fresh mind and you will be suprised what great effect this can have, how you find new ideas, or simply get new motivation. I hope that helps some of you. I try to provide some more visual content to show in the future as I know its much more fun to watch pictures & videos instead of reading long and boring texts . Just the best and stay cool . Markus from Phodex

Hi, I've seen a simple issue that I would like to report, but I don't think that would go as a BUG REPORT per se. I've seen a little issue with the MERC character, is that simply in the template, the character shadow is set as static and his weapon the same. Changing the shadow setting break the template. A simple tweak would need to be done to the template. Another issue was that I was finding that he was moving too fast for my taste, and did not have option to change the speed but was quickly adjusted that by adding the options in the LUA script. This character is really more useful to me than the monster to test stuff. I really like it! EDIT: I've simply changed the shadow from the MERC and the M4A1 object to dynamic shadow. That fixed the issue and then I saved back the "merc" in the scene view as a new prefab.

Hello there, I have been messing around with Leadwerks and have made new npc's and created new scrips for those npcs and it all works well they move, attack me, and such however I can't seem to kill them. When I try to shoot them, it just goes right through them and I cant seem to figure it out. Second issue, when they come after me they are always looking away, I have the Character angle at 180 but when I turn it to 0, once they get near me they kind of just bounce away not sure why. Any help is much appreciated and thank you.

Working on two principles K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid!) and more for less. I spent a lot of time researching (read playing) certain games that have what I call an ambient NPC population. This is specifically those NPC's that reside in the background and generally have no real or very limited interaction with the player. Two such areas of research <coff> included Assassins Creed and Fable 2. Although both of these games have a far more complex general NPC population than what I am setting out to create, but the "research" was most enjoyable. First Step: Machine Intelligence "Kinda Almost": Machine Intelligence "Kinda Almost", simply gives an illusion that there is intelligence at work but there is not, sort of like, the lights are on but no ones home. There are several subsets to this group but the obvious one is simple animation. Also this can include proximity reaction behaviour, a posh and complicated way of saying when the player is near, stop what you are doing, and do this instead. But that's as far as interaction goes for those NPC's in this group. This simple ambient NPC type could also use lua scripts, loaded with the level and be left to attend to themselves. For example, just two chaps having a chat: Having a chat is basically all they do, its simple per character animation's controlled by lua scripts. The purple block volume is the walkable area that would be utilised by more "advanced" ambient NPC's, typically those that move about, particularly those that would use Pre-Loaded and Pre Calculated path routes for this particular level. The purple block volumes are simply required by the application I wrote to generate the route node data for the pathfinding tools I created and have demonstrated here. Not that this is a level just something thrown together for testing but I think I should unarchive some of my GMF format models and put together a small town/Village for testing this, rather than another simple "BlocksVille". There are obvious limitations to consider with this approach to the first tier of the Ambient NPC population for a "busy" town/village. The NPC's need animation's, most come with maybe 15 animation's (if you're lucky). My intention is to surmount this by adding animation's to them, primarily Mo-Caps. This will require a little work but will be the bedrock for the construction of this "tier". There are some very good applications on the market for achieving this. For me I prefer Fragmotion, there is also a free alternative that I also use on occasion called Pacemaker. But don't be fooled though, none of these applications will do it all "for you", you will need to skin the mesh to the correct rig for the plethora of free to use Mo-Caps, or indeed ones that can be purchased. It will all depend on budget and or requirement. This is still only a very basic outline for this "packing" stage, it will still require a lot of work but my goal is to get the impact of it at runtime to an almost negligible effect even when including proximity reaction behaviour.