what do you want see in leadwerks 3.0

[Alessandro]

@E2: Use the shift (faster) and control (slower) modifiers.

+1 for normal placement though.

 

Thank you for the hint about CTRL, but... it does not work :-(

I press it and camera goes always to the same speed (LW 2.40).

[Masterxilo]

I wouldn't use the CSG solids as ingame models/assets but rather as guidelines for the artist making the asset. The crysis example I posted was made into a much nicer bridge model for the final game.

 

This would of course require the ability to save those solids as e.g. .obj models.

[Canardia]

If Editor will not have CSG, then it should have a decent modelling feature. Programs like Blender, 3DSMax and Maya are horrible because they turn randomly faces inside and you can't see it in their IDE, you only see it in the game and with some effort also in UU3D.

[Michael Betke]

Call it CSG, Brushes, Solids, Volumes.....but a solution to block out geometry within the editor and export it to an 3d app is a MUST for professional usage.

 

You won't even be able to block out a bridge over a valley without it in a comfortable way.

 

They way I would like it is to block out my rough geometry, group it to an object and have a right-click menu which exports directly into my already opened 3d-suite. Something like GoZ from Pixologic. This is just the trend and candy to have people using your engine. Less clicks and inter-application-operability.

[Rick]

With tessellation some CSG models won't really need to be exported and defined better in a 3D program. They'll get defined better in real-time by the engine via tessellation, assuming we have control of triangle count on each face. I also think people often underestimate what you can do with CSG. The difference in some situations between something created with CSG and something created with a 3D app are hardly noticeable given good textures and such.

[Alessandro]

Somtimes we confuse/merge two different problems: What's better for the final result (what the player will see and play), and what's better for the game designers (programmers, 3D artists, sound/musicians, etc....).

I red many good right comments, but it seems some of them are for the final game, other ones are for the designers.

Maybe we could evaluate what's more relevant in this case.

[Rick]

I think in the case of CSG it's both. CSG is very suitable for the final game (it has and is still used in games sold today), but if others want to use it to give dimensions for artists to make other more detailed models then it's good for devs also.

 

More importantly in the terms of what kind of people will be using LE, namely hobbyist and indie, CSG is a must to help speed up dev and still provide very acceptable end game quality graphics for certain structures. Most bridges, even the one used in that Crysis example could have been created with CSG and been perfectly acceptable in the game. Most everything today is about materials these days anyway.Add on to that tessellation to help make things look better, I think CSG could be very powerful.

 

The idea of exporting CSG groups is pretty cool too though.

[Naughty Alien]

..feature request? One and only feature what will make this system on the top of everything out there..cross platform rendering (considering existing 2.3x feature set, depending on target platform of course)..everything else, looks like water bashing to me..

[Josh]

What does cross platform mean? Windows, Mac, Linux? With fallbacks for the fixed-function pipeline?

[ZioRed]

I would really like to see an official and complete wrapper for .NET with full access to every engine C/C++ commands (like the old Core.* functions named as the C/C++ official from 1.32 .NET headers) shipped with the engine or the library be a managed DLL. I must admit that Lazlo and Tyler made a very good work with the new .NET header 2.0 but still I don't like to have a "custom engine.dll", I just want to use the official engine.dll

[Guest Red Ocktober]

just a working api that i can base a game engine on... a shooter engine, a flight sim engine, and a naval sim engine... that's all i'd like to see... as long as i can get geometry into 3.0, then the amazing, be everything to everybody editor can wait...

 

oh yeah... and what NA said... cross platform... (win,osxminimum)... and you can leave out the fixed function fallbacks for now if it's too much work

 

--Mike

[Mumbles]

With fallbacks for the fixed-function pipeline?

 

You mean none of the fancy shader stuff? With graphical quality as good (or bad...) as the first Unreal? Nah, don't waste time that. Any system needing the fallbacks because it has **** hardware, you should just ignore. Otherwise you'll put lots of effort into it, and people using systems that need those fallbacks when complain that it looks awful.

 

I thought that was the policy for LE 2 because I think that one should stay. I also thought that in addition to its current user base, LE 3 was also to be expanded towards professional studios, rather than tramps using 10 year old hardware. Wasn't that the biggest reason to move to C++?

 

There's only one way I can look at this: This engine is your business, which in turn constitutes a large portion of your life. Anything the professional studios want will almost certainly take priority because they will be willing to pay more, also they stand a much higher chance of the engine the publicity it desperately needs. However much it feels like a kick in the face to us, the faithful, current customers...

 

Whilst I'm sure there is a large call for cross-platform ... between the three major computer operating systems. I didn't think there was much call for FFP fallbacks. Likewise, there are lots of calls for console support. Whilst it would be nice, would it be worth the time supporting the current generation of consoles when the graphical quality may not be as high?

[gordonramp]

Weather, moving clouds, examples, day/night, hide the black and white start up screen that come with the Lua Engine.

[Alessandro]

Weather, moving clouds, examples, hide the black and white start up screen that come with the Lua Engine.

 

Another good point. Any engine is not useful if the documentation is not well done. A game engine is a complex system.

I eliminated some engines just because their documentation was terrible or almost non existent.

LE documentation is just enough. Need more info, more examples, etc...

 

About LE 3.0? My legs are shaking since I'm afraid what could happen for this new version:

1) New price.

2) New documentation for new features.

3) Some radical (not backward compatible) modifications.

4) New Leadwerks company policy and licensing.

 

But I'm even excitated thinking about the possible new features/enhancements!

 

I definitively wait for a real hi-end world editor, and a GREAT scripting editor (or better: a scripting IDE, with debugging, watches, etc...). I wish a performance profile to find the bottlenecks.

 

The engine is simply great, so I will expect to enforce all the weak points that make this engine sometimes so "hard to be used".

I'm a professional software developer since from 25 years, and I will never understand why the programmers must always GUESS the functions (arguments, etc...) of programming languages, libraries, 3D game engines..... :-)

[Rick]

I'm a professional software developer since from 25 years, and I will never understand why the programmers must always GUESS the functions (arguments, etc...) of programming languages, libraries, 3D game engines..... :-)

 

You must not be a Visual Studio programmer.

[Alessandro]

You must not be a Visual Studio programmer.

 

Please don't start a stupid fight for this system or that language. I used popular and well documented systems, but even M$ has a lot of undocumented (and even never published...) functions inside their API.

I talked in general, so please don't make name & surname of this tool or other language.

 

Thank you.

[Canardia]

Actually CodeBlocks and CodeLite are also nice IDEs, since you can show the syntax and even examples of each command in the mouseover popup. I think the C/C++ headers could have some comments which would be recognized by those IDEs.

[puki]

I think it should slot nicely into Blitz3D - just to give it that touch of 'street-cred' that the kids can recognise and relate to. All this BlitzMax and C++ are okay but, frankly, most people have probably never heard of them.

[Marleys Ghost]

I think it should slot nicely into Blitz3D - just to give it that touch of 'street-cred'

 

 

That would probably give Blitz3D that touch of 'street-cred' ...

[Rick]

Please don't start a stupid fight for this system or that language.

 

That wasn't my intention at all. Was just saying that existing IDE's solve that issue.

 

 

On a side note, I think it was a poor decision on Josh's part to try and write his own scripting editor. The thing crashes on me all the time for putting in tabs

 

Instead Josh you should look at what's already out there and use those. I'm pretty sure you can even setup VS to handle this stuff for scripting. For anyone with 2 monitors (which just seems like a must have) it would work great. Have the LE Editor open on one and VS open on the other. Get all the features from VS!

 

Here is just a quick search for some Lua support: http://vslua.codeplex.com/

 

This could really help scripting with the editor. You would just need a way to reload the script when it's modified from VS. The filewatcher class could probably do that for you to tell when it's been changed.

[Marleys Ghost]

 

On a side note, I think it was a poor decision on Josh's part to try and write his own scripting editor. The thing crashes on me all the time for putting in tabs

 

 

 

 

Odd? I have never had that problem myself.

[Alessandro]

On a side note, I think it was a poor decision on Josh's part to try and write his own scripting editor. The thing crashes on me all the time for putting in tabs

 

Instead Josh you should look at what's already out there and use those.

 

I quote this one. I think the famous open source Scintilla component (and the related SciTe) editor could be the best solution. It is light, free (no! Open source!), and really fully customizable (written in C and with full source code available).

[Rick]

Odd? I have never had that problem myself.

 

I remember when I posted about it a few months ago a few others said they had similar issues. It would literally crash, not all the time, when I was tabbing to indent my code. Talk about frustrating.

 

 

Yeah, Scintilla is a good one too. I remember that being fully customizable. He should just use something that has been tried and tested already instead of making his own.

[Pixel Perfect]

He should just use something that has been tried and tested already instead of making his own.

I couldn't agree more. Josh should spend all his time doing what he does best and not spend it reinventing the wheel.

[macklebee]

I personally have never had the tab crash that you always claimed to happen either... but its strange that you are suggesting that Josh just use some standard IDE now when it wasn't that long ago you had started a post stating that he should create a LE IDE for all languages... or at least just the languages that only you use.