Hello, and a question (or two)

[Wolfsong]

So, I'm not sure if this is the right place to do this, so, please move this thread if it's not.

 

I'm a new license (Indie) of LW, and thought I'd hop in and say hello to everyone. So, hello! I hope to be spending a lot of time around here.

 

I've been following Josh's work since using Cartography Shop about, oh... a million years ago or so now. I recalled being really impressed with how artist-friendly, and easy to pick up it was (if a bit quirky ); how quickly you could just sit down and start creating something. In many other similar apps I'd used, you had to spend an hour going through tutorials just to get the most basic stuff done.

 

I decided to give LW a try, as there are game projects I've had back-burnered for a while, which I'd like to finally jump into, and I'd like to support a smaller, indie engine developer to that end.

 

Well, I'm glad to see that, in my very limited time learning it so far, LW is proving to be just as intuitive. There's been a couple hiccups, but I was able to figure them out, mostly on my own, but a couple by doing a search or three.

 

I'm particularly impressed by how seamless and simple the pipeline from Blender to the engine is, via the exporter. I don't think you can get much smoother, unless you're working in the Blender Game Engine itself and aren't exporting anything at all. FINALLY someone got this right. Awesome awesome.

 

I give an especially enthusiastic 'hell yes' to the use of CSG style editing. It's such an intuitive and "quick" way to work - whether prototyping/whiteboxing, or even for final assets. I'm assuming all CSG objects are treated like normal polymesh objects, and there's no BSP going on? If so, that's even better.

 

Good times. I'm really excited about learning and producing something with this engine.

 

I've attached a quick screenshot, of a simple flat plane, subdivided a few times, and one of my own textures slapped on it, and tiled (via UV scaling). I applied the diffuse/normal/spec shader to it, though you can't see the specularity much in this shot. Anyway, it's super simple, but it's awesome how simple it was to get imported and looking right. "Small moves, Ellie" (10 points to who ever knows that quote without Googling it ).

 

That said, I *do* have a couple questions, each related to the other.

1. Is it feasible to create environments entirely via polysoup models? Like, if I wanted to create an entire scene in Blender (modular, not one huge contiguous mesh), including terrain - rather than using a height-map, would there be any performance concerns with that?

 

2. I haven't dug into this too much, yet, so it might be the case, but is a multi-texture shader available.. perhaps of the vertex-blending variety?

 

And, as a sub question... is it possible to create one by one's self to use with the engine? I understand the engine uses GLSL, and I'm not very familiar with shader languages, at all, but I'm willing to learn if it allows me to paint my environments in Blender, via vertex blending, and have it translate 1-to-1 into LW.

 

And, I think that's it!

 

Thanks for your time, and take care!

[nick.ace]

Welcome!

 

1. This is a case by case issue. If the level is small enough sure, but most likely you'll want to import each item individually to take advantage of instancing and occlusion. Note that the heightmap-based terrain uses tessellation, so your terrain mesh wouldn't be able to take advantage of this either.

 

2. This seems like a custom shader, so it probably doesn't exist. You can write one or if you gave specifics on how you want to use the multiple textures, then someone might be able to help you out here.

 

[Wolfsong]

Welcome!

 

Thank you!

 

1. This is a case by case issue. If the level is small enough sure, but most likely you'll want to import each item individually to take advantage of instancing and occlusion. Note that the heightmap-based terrain uses tessellation, so your terrain mesh wouldn't be able to take advantage of this either.

 

Yeah it would definitely be done in a modular manner, with smaller pieces, etc. Larger pieces would be individual, but smaller things, like grass, boulders, trees and the like, would be instanced. This is mostly going to be in the case of smaller and more "confined" areas, like towns, dungeons/caves, etc. For larger, sweeping areas, I'll be using heightmapped terrain for sure.

 

2. This seems like a custom shader, so it probably doesn't exist. You can write one or if you gave specifics on how you want to use the multiple textures, then someone might be able to help you out here.

 

Indeed. I looked at the GLSL language a bit and it's pretty daunting lol. But of course, that's because I have no idea what I'm looking at.

 

There's two ways I'm aware of that it's done, one is through vertex blending, where vertices are either black, red, green or blue.. and then there's a texture/material assigned to each vertex color through the shader. It's very, very popular and I'm sure you already know what I'm referring to.

 

The other way is through a splat map, which would basically be a separate texture, also painted with either black, R, G or B, with each color representing a different material. The difference is, with a splat map, you get much finer resolution, as you're working on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and the splat map itself is mapped to the model's UVs. So, you can really get some small detail and such, that you can't get with vertex blending. This is really the "dream method", with the control it gives you,but I think it also becomes an issue of texture memory, unless you're using smaller resolution splat maps with higher compression.. which *should* work just fine, and without too much loss in quality.

 

Of course, in both cases, you also set up a texture tiling amount in the shader as well, for each texture layer.

 

In any case, it would be awesome to be able to work with something like that. You could really do some nice work with non-terrain models, as well. You could paint in weathering or such, etc.

 

In any case, that's what I'm after. Again, not sure of the feasibility, but it's something I think I'll look into.

 

Thanks!

 

Incidentally, here's a newer shot of more doodling I'm doing, to learn my way around the editor. I have a couple copies of that flat plane from Blender now, with a heightmap terrain blending into it. And of course, some other fun bits . Guess you could call it a "sandbox map".

 

Realllly enjoying working with this.