..devmaster reviews..

[Rick]

That comment leans towards expensive.

[Marleys Ghost]

For the record, the price of Leadwerks3D has not been announced or hinted at in any way.

 

 

For the record, that was kind of my point, which renders "LE2 + upgrade < LE3" too vague to draw any real financial conclusions from.

[VicToMeyeZR]

honestly the reviews of any engine is always going to bias, and not really even worth reading in my opinion. The good or bad of any engine is dependent on what game you are even trying to make with it anyways. One might be better in FPS genre, one might be better in RPG genre, while others will be better in RTS genre. Its all from a perspective.

 

What I use in an reivew is this. :

1. Art pipeline

2. learning curve

3. responsiveness of owner/developers

 

That's it for me. Anything else is just opinion based on your perspective on the game genre you are doing

[Canardia]

To each her/his own. And Leadwerks owns even in that area

[Scott Richmond]

Chasing features is the worst thing I could do. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, increases the complexity of the system with each thing you add, attracts the most unrealistic dreamers, and you will never satisfy who you are trying to satisfy because their tastes change each week. With Leadwerks3D I am focusing completely on the user experience and the ability to create gameplay. The entire focus is on the core user experience and facilitating the production of games, since that is where most people have trouble, in every system I have ever seen.

 

You get severely diminishing returns as you add more and more abstract features, and if the core experience isn't easy and simple, you can never go back and "fix" it without starting from scratch. I am betting that a good core experience with excellent documentation will win based on what I have seen over the years.

I can't really argue with any of the above - I was never expecting LE2 to keep getting new features as it's scope was never as wide as that of UDK/Unity. However for LE3D I would worry that the product would fall behind again in ~2 years without any new major features, so I'm hoping you plan to continue to add to it.

It really depends on where you want LE3D to go I suppose - If you want to be among the market leaders then you will need to compete with their feature-sets. You can win that competition by first creating an amazing user experience and building upon that in an agile way. It sounds like that is what you're planning, however I'm unsure where you plan to take LE3D after release. The whole engine sounds very abstracted so I'm guessing it would be a fairly modular experience to add more features.

[Canardia]

I would love a pure text/DOS based version of LE3, to get all the n00bs scared off, but unfortunately Josh needs money for food too

[Josh]

It really depends on where you want LE3D to go I suppose - If you want to be among the market leaders then you will need to compete with their feature-sets. You can win that competition by first creating an amazing user experience and building upon that in an agile way. It sounds like that is what you're planning, however I'm unsure where you plan to take LE3D after release. The whole engine sounds very abstracted so I'm guessing it would be a fairly modular experience to add more features.

Yes, I took the painful route of writing a new engine from scratch in C++ because it will ultimately provide a better platform to build on. There's not ever going to be another rewrite from scratch of this engine.

[Mumbles]

One of your largest problems was, LE2 was future proofed .... for programmers. I mean real programmers - the ones who understand the mainstream languages. C, C++, Java, .NET and so on, hell, even COBOL (although I've not seen LE2 running on that).

 

However we've also got a lot of people in the world who consider themselves programmer's because they've written a macro in MS Office. Others have built webpages in HTML (with a rare few in PHP), thus we have yet more programmers who have panic attacks at the sight of

int i = 0;

 

But one of the worst things I think is happening is actually things like FPS Creator. It's great when you've never made a game before but within weeks you'll probably have made just about every type of game it can make. I use that one as an example because in 2001 I started with Dark Basic, so it came from the range of products I was familiar with (It was my 15th birthday present). I used that for about 5 years before upgrading to DB Pro (and then 2 years before moving here). In that time I remember looking at FPSC, thinking "But this is just 3D Game maker all over again". To my shame I've got a copy of that somewhere too, I used it for all of about 20 minutes.

 

Sad truth is, there just isn't yet any decent package that really lets you create a customisable game without any programming knowledge. We're getting closer but those that are, are still heavily reliant on proprietary scripting languages. As a programmer, there won't be a single engine available any time soon, that I can use on my own (without any artists/modellers) and produce excellent results, neither will the be an engine that artists or modellers can use without any programmers.

 

Would you want to join a team when you don't even know your own capabilities, and what you can bring to the project? Would you want someone else to join you when you're unsure of their capabilities? And if several people did join together, whose project would be developed first? Would they hang around once theirs had finished?

 

Game dev, whilst we'd all love to develop our own games, is something that requires co-operation. So long as LE3 doesn't go the route of single user "Klik & Play" type, should be interesting to see. The largest problem is, that's what the market demands. It comes down to whether Josh wants to be immortalised in history for building the most powerful indie-friendly engine ever, or whether he wants to keep a roof over his head...

 

However I'm under no illusions, that anyone has really maxed out LE2's capabilities. It was just a little too good for its time, sort of like id Tech 3 - no way would I ever have imagined when I first saw Call of Duty 4, that the underlying graphical rendering technology was an updated version of something that was 8 years old...

[Pixel Perfect]

Well put Mumbles ... I'd pretty much agree with everything you've said there

[Michael Betke]

I think the 150$ I once invested into Leadwerks were one of the best investment I ever made in 3D/CG.

I still use the editor regulary and its not bad although I have no clue about .lua coding or whatever has to do with numbers.

 

Of course I miss stuff like a solid material editor and the need to reload the editor after some material changes is annoying on a long term if I see how other tools work. But because I see how other tools work in terms of workflow performance I love the Leadwerks editor. Its simple and fast to use.

 

I hope LE3D won't be a Coder solution only and deliver me the possibility to make great visuals out of the box with the few missing things I would need in LE2.5 now.

[Canardia]

The same goes for 3D World Studio. I still use it quite often to make some quick test levels.

[AggrorJorn]

One of your largest problems was, LE2 was future proofed .... for programmers. I mean real programmers - the ones who understand the mainstream languages. C, C++, Java, .NET and so on, hell, even COBOL (although I've not seen LE2 running on that). However we've also got a lot of people in the world who consider themselves programmer's because they've written a macro in MS Office. Others have built webpages in HTML (with a rare few in PHP), thus we have yet more programmers who have panic attacks at the sight of

int i = 0;

But one of the worst things I think is happening is actually things like FPS Creator. It's great when you've never made a game before but within weeks you'll probably have made just about every type of game it can make. I use that one as an example because in 2001 I started with Dark Basic, so it came from the range of products I was familiar with (It was my 15th birthday present). I used that for about 5 years before upgrading to DB Pro (and then 2 years before moving here). In that time I remember looking at FPSC, thinking "But this is just 3D Game maker all over again".

I couldn't agree more. I took the same road from FPS creator. The via their website I found Leadwerks and thought "Ah, that is the next step". Fotunately Leadwerks offered lots of good beginner tutorials at the time.

[cassius]

I started with blitz 3d then fps creator with which I quickly got bored so went back to blitz 3d until le version 1 came along.

I am now 88 years old nut I have been a programmer ( of average ability) since computers got small enough to get thru a door.

The only reviews I trust are the ones written in serious computer mags.