Is Leadwerks right for me?

[DonMegel]

I am in the early stages of developing an alternate history based Real Time Strategy/First Person Shooter. As with most start up projects, funds are limited and I want to get the most bang for my buck. With said, I am considering a few different engine possibilities. ofcourse I would like it to look as good as possible so the engine needs to support advanced shaders, HDR, etc but most modern engines look just fine. What I am really concerned with is are the features I am planning on incorporating into the game.

 

Good AI support: There will be AI controlled units but they only need basic AI as they will be managed by players. They won't need to make their own decisions, however the code needs to be efficient because I plan on having a number of them. Few engines offer this out the box due to the complexity of AI programming so this might fall into "Would love to have" rather than "Have to have"

 

Wide open spaces: RTS games are big and I want big maps in mine. Almost all of these will be outdoors with organic terrain and will need vegetation and other props. Most structures will be placed by the team so there is not a great need for brushwork but it would be great if the mappers had alot of freedom to make buildings and what not on their own.

 

Huge models: As mentioned before, most structures will be placed by the team while in game. That's pretty simple. The problem is I want my buildings to be very large and have multiple levels. This could lead to more complex collision meshes and hit boxes. The engine needs to be able to handle this.

 

Vehicles: There are going to be alot of them. Wheels, tracks and aircraft.

 

I would like to be able to change the map objects on the fly. This would mean periodically changing/replacing props and textures while a game is in progress. I am not talking dynamic terrain, although that would be great, just objects and textures. Again, this is a "would like" not a "must have"

 

Net code: This is going to be an online game so good net code is important.

 

Support for both FPS and RTS views: One player will be in RTS view exclusively while others can switch from one to the other. This should just be a camera orientation issue and a pretty simple feature to implement.

 

I would love to have destructible models as is supported in UDK, however this is another "nice" feature not a must have.

 

With all of this said, what do you think about Leadwerks for what I need? I wanted to post hear to get some opinions from experienced users of Leadwerks before making my decision. If this won't work, perhaps there is another engine I should be looking at?

 

Thank you in advance for your help,

[Rick]

I would say the networking, AI, and destructible buildings are all things you'd have to do yourself somehow in Leadwerks. There is 0 AI of any kind of LE. LE has networking code but it's not that advanced yet. It's still in very early stages. Destructible buildings is something you can have, but you have to come up with the implementation yourself as it's not "out of box" in LE.

 

Huge maps aren't an issue.

LE has some of the best graphics of any engine.

Switching from RTS to FPS and back isn't an issue at the surface, but underneath you'd probably find that most RTS games have limited polygons in their models. Since the camera is so far up it's not really a big deal to do this, but when you get closer it becomes noticeable and things start to look ugly. LOD can help with this but I would think your FPS camera mode might still not be up to par with most FPS games because of the need to be in RTS mode also.

[cocopino]

Highlights of the engine are the ease of use (very nice API command set), the price, the activity of the community and the quality of rendering.

But as Rick said, it's not really complete in the sense that you'll need to program many things yourself. If you have no problem with that, I see no problems with your list.

[iRobo]

Hi, I'm starting a new simulation project. A robotic simulation software.

what I need is an engine that :

1- use newton as it's physics engine (because it's the most accurate free physic engine)

2- Visual c++ api so I would be able to do complicated robotics calculations and other needs with visual c++

3- scripting capability would be a great help for me (I've been using lua script at work for like 6 month so LUA scripting would be the best for me)

4- Multiple camera support

5- A user friendly GUI

6- messaging system is a great help

 

plus I've been using LE at work (for game developing porposes) and I'm very comfortable with LE.

there is one reason that prevent me from buying a LE license for myself. I dont need any graphical effects or something. I dont need skelton and skining either. I barely need a simple texture for robotic parts! but LE supports all of them, and that makes it to need a minimum requirement of Pixel Shader 3.0 to run.

 

It's a kiiler for my software. because the customer of this software (probably a electronics engineer like myself), usually does'nt have a PS 3.0 support graphic card. so the software won't run on his/her system at all.

 

so i'm wondering, is there any way to disable PS version shader checker before runing the engine?

I would disable all graphics option, and use the lowest quality for render. will it help to run the software on a earlier PS version?

 

beside of LE, I researched about Quest3D. it's perfect for me too, but there is a huge problem. Quest3D does'nt have a Visual C++ api or SDK!!! it just have a diagram editor, as I know. Am I right about that? Does Quest3D fulfit my needs?

 

What about IRRLICHT?

 

I'm so confused, and I will be very thankful if anyone can help me with this.

 

thanks in advance.

[wh1sp3r]

You can use DirectX and make own small engine for that .) DirectX SDK has lots of functions to load .X models, so you can load model, display it, you can download newton SDK and use it You have only what you need + you can run it everywhere.

[Canardia]

Irrlicht is not so good. Use Ogre with Newton physics (OgreNewt) for low-end games. When LE 3.0 comes out, you can do low-end games with LE also, and then it's better to use LE for everything as you can use the same source code for low- and high-end games.

[iRobo]

thank you for replys

 

You can use DirectX and make own small engine for that .) DirectX SDK has lots of functions to load .X models, so you can load model, display it, you can download newton SDK and use it You have only what you need + you can run it everywhere.

 

I think it would take a lot of work and time to develope a stable engine that I can release a bug-free software with.

On the other hand, this way I will lose scripting , messaging system and GUI and I think multiple camera support would be a tough work for me to do too.

I prefer to use a less powerful engine than developing my own engine.

 

but thanks for the idea

 

Irrlicht is not so good. Use Ogre with Newton physics (OgreNewt) for low-end games. When LE 3.0 comes out, you can do low-end games with LE also, and then it's better to use LE for everything as you can use the same source code for low- and high-end games.

 

LE 3.0 is gonna be out soon?

and again I'll lose scripting and messaging. I dont know about multiple camera and gui with Ogre.

multiple camera support is very important to me.

what about quest3d? it really does'nt have a SDK for visual C++ or something?

I even think about Luxinia engine. I dont know if you heard of it. The problem is, Luxinia does'nt have SDK for any language either!

 

It's a head scratcher problem for me! ;-)

any other idea?

 

thanks again.

[Canardia]

There are no decent game engines for indies except LE, else I would use them instead of LE. It won't take too long before LE 3.0 comes out, I'd guess less than a year. And developing a full fledged game takes at least a year anyway.

[wh1sp3r]

IRobo : What about DarkBasic pro ? :D i remember i was doing a robo software too 7 years ago which was controlling real robot via serial port. .. it has LUA support, it's simple

[DonMegel]

Hey, get your own thread :-p

 

Maybe a better question for me would be, why should I not used leadwerks?

[cocopino]

Maybe a better question for me would be, why should I not used leadwerks?

 

- It needs a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card or better, so it's not really good for "casual games".

- It has a nice scene editor, but it still could use some tools to make it easier for the developer, like maybe pathfinding tool/visual ragdoll tool etc.

- Terrain has a limit of 5 textures

 

I believe the first and second point (at least pathfinding) will be addressed when LE 3.0 comes out, not sure about the third.