Public game demo :

[YouGroove]

Well like Torque 3D, will it be a public game demo for people to play with ?

I think in the advertisment and marketing side in fact, not on my own.

 

I know it asks some good 3D art and it costs money, but made cleaverly, with only some minmum models assets like in Torque 3D ocean demo,

a great demo can be achieved (even if there is no ennemy to shoot at like T3D demo) !

 

A good looking demo, instead of a simple 3D editor demo can only attract new comers.

I know it's more time spending in something else than making the engine, so it's just a general idea

[Canardia]

Aren't there already tons of public demos for LE2?

For example on www.magiam.com and Werkspace Demos.

[YouGroove]

First time i see magiam.com and it's great

Perhaps it's not really needed finally !

[Guest Red Ocktober]

i don't think that's exactly what he's asking Mika...

 

--Mike

[paramecij]

It would be good to have a official LE3 tech demo, a collection of scenes or maybe a simple game to show off all the engine features and let users evaluate performance at the same time. This could be a community made thing (and let Josh do what he does best), but it must be officially supported. It would also be good if it was open source (to developers), in that way it can serve as a good reference on how to do different things, an invaluable help at learning and even later.. VeTaL already expressed the need for more art and coding guides, this could be something like that!

 

If we set things up right and worked closely together it could drastically help Josh bug solve the engine, at all stages,.. early on we'be beta and stress testing for him, later on users would have a working reference to check if it's not a problem with their code, model, material... there's even more reasons why we should do this, but it's a thing we all can profit from ..

 

There's some talented people here, ..and i'd be interested in a collaboration like this, if there is enough interest (Metatron is already doing something in the way of this with his gamelib, and others too with support tools and assets).. what do you think? ..Josh?

[cassius]

Would the code also be available as example code?

[YouGroove]

In fact the problem , it's time consuming !

For terrain the textures and trees are already here, in the 3D art section for making a big demo it would need diversified 3D models only like :

one or two ennemies models , and some houses and strcutures like bridge and other 3D small assets , and perhaps some other ground textures.

But a demo in Follout 3 style could be made with stupid ennemy AI.

I think mobile support like Ipad, Iphone Android support will be what will make LeadWerks more popular whitout needing a PC demo ?

 

But if the idea remains, what could be done, would be just go step by step and assigning a first task to each participating people like :

- People A make house structure

- People B would make an weapon

- People C would make the script for managing the ennemy idle, run, attack, die

 

The goal would not be to show some AI , caus it would need specialized libraries, but only demonstrate ability of the engine on handling a complex world with

techniques like LOD and other sutff.

[paramecij]

The goal would be to write first and foremost a tech demo to show off engine features and for performance testing, and later to serve as an example implementation of different engine features (code samples) .. Josh and others made some videos to show off LE2, and they probably will too for LE3, Josh (and others) also made a lot of tutorials showing how to do different things in the engine, they also answered a ton of forums posts on how to do things over and over again, and Metatron made his gamelib... all of this required some assets, code and a lot of time to make/write.. there's some duplicated effort as a result of everyone working on their own. So if everyone willing is planning to do this again for LE3, all i'm saying is, there's a better more optimized way to do this if we work together on the same framework and share the same asset pool..

 

Let's say we start small (LEBuilder style) and set-up a small application framework and person A is in charge of maintaining it, every other person uses the same framework and adheres to same rules, for example every person uses the same class scene and has to implement sceme::load() scene::start() scene::unload() so person A can easily integrate it to the demo app ...

- person B joins in and writes a basic physics example using only primitives

- person C joins in and donates some of his already made assets ( soldier, test level )

- person D joins in and writes a character controller example using the assets available

...

depending on how things turn out, we could then think about doing a simple game or whatever (again, with already available assets), the idea is to save on time while giving out more to the community.. I have a lot of stuff i'm willing to put to a good use..

 

You couldn't do all too much in the evaluation kit anyway, with this you'd get right to evaluating the engine instead of trying to figure out the editor and write some scripts.. and for the developers (they get the source) it would be a good starting point or a reference in the future (like some of the tutorials and docs are now)..

[Josh]

I think what happens is, by the time you have coded to that level, it's beyond the ability of new users to do anything with it. Instead of modifying and using your beautiful code, they will just end up asking for a lot of features to be added, and then you're coding someone else's game for them. That's why I am trying to make the new engine have a lot of high-level functionality built-in.

 

On top of that, you have the issue that 3 or 4 main languages are being used by the community, and any language you target will only be relevant to a fraction of the users.

[Rick]

I would think it would still add value. Even if it's to advertise that you have a demo game in which people could play before they buy LE, but have to buy LE to see how it's done. Would help get people in the door sort of speak.

[ConradAlistair]

Honestly, that's how I first started using Unity3D, so I think it would help just as a game, not any of the code being released in the engine, but merely to show what the engine can do. Also, this will motivate people with no experience in game making at all to try and get their hands dirty.