Things that Leadwerks can use to be just as good as the UE3

[niv3k]

Hey, I had an idea to add on to the editor of Leadwerks.

 

I was messing around, trying out the UDK that epic released, and was thinking that Leadwerks really isn't that far off.

 

If you could implement 3D World Studio into the editor, add some global illumination, and moving the assets to a separate window, and add the drag and drop command for textures...

 

you'll be on a verge of easy made commercial indie games, instead of non commercial like udk, unless you plan paying 2,500 bucks a year...

 

but yeah, just my opinion...which would make this engine worth around $250 to $350; a price i would be willing to pay

 

oh and also, the ability to use DirectX 11

[L B]

Hey, I had an idea to add on to the editor of Leadwerks.

 

I was messing around, trying out the UDK that epic released, and was thinking that Leadwerks really isn't that far off.

 

If you could implement 3D World Studio into the editor, add some global illumination, and moving the assets to a separate window, and add the drag and drop command for textures...

 

you'll be on a verge of easy made commercial indie games, instead of non commercial like udk, unless you plan paying 2,500 bucks a year...

 

but yeah, just my opinion...which would make this engine worth around $250 to $350; a price i would be willing to pay

 

oh and also, the ability to use DirectX 11

 

implement 3D World Studio into the editor

And lose significant profits...

 

add some global illumination

Which is what the community has been asking since the dawn of time. According to Josh, he "has some idea of doing it in another way", or something similar.

 

moving the assets to a separate window

Why not. ;P

 

add the drag and drop command for textures...

This would ask for the node based materials. See this thread. I must although admit that drag and drop would be nice.

 

oh and also, the ability to use DirectX 11

You have to be kidding.

[niv3k]

oh and also, the ability to use DirectX 11

You have to be kidding.

 

why you say that?

 

 

also how would he lose profit?

[macklebee]

LE will probably never have DX11 unless Josh goes back on what he has always stated. One of the goals for LE is to be cross-platform compatible, which means OpenGL.

 

--EDIT- not all 3dws users are LE users and vice versa...

[Canardia]

DirectX 11 doesn't bring anything which is not in OpenGL 3, it's the hardware which matters.

In most cases the new features of DirectX have been already in OpenGL for years, for example the hardware tesselation has been in OpenGL 2.0 since 2007, but in DirectX only since 2009:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/AMD/vertex_shader_tessellator.txt

[Marleys Ghost]

add some global illumination

 

 

Josh :"I have an idea of how this can be done, but I'm not going to pursue it for a while. I want to focus on game tutorials."

[niv3k]

add some global illumination

 

 

Josh :"I have an idea of how this can be done, but I'm not going to pursue it for a while. I want to focus on game tutorials."

 

 

yeah i read him saying that and i haven't seen game tutorials.

 

if people really wanna learn how to code and make their own games, they should go to college and study for a few years. tutorials are only good for showing where everything is at and what it does, then the rest is up to the user to play with.

[TylerH]

Someone has recently been playing with UDK. Did you read my MSN status and decide to try it out?

 

The only thing(s) I found cool were the fracture tool and the fluid surfaces, both of which could be done in Leadwerks by the community if you tried hard enough.

[Marleys Ghost]

they should go to college and study for a few years.

 

what about use the interent, read a book , ask questions on forums and experiment with tutorials?

[Rick]

implement 3D World Studio into the editor

And lose significant profits...

 

Josh has said he plans on giving CSG to the editor. I think it's pretty much required. There are always parts of levels that level designers should be able to create from CSG and not have to rely on modelers.

[Niosop]

Someone has recently been playing with UDK. Did you read my MSN status and decide to try it out?

 

The only thing(s) I found cool were the fracture tool and the fluid surfaces, both of which could be done in Leadwerks by the community if you tried hard enough.

 

It's got a lot more going for it. And of course they could be done by the LeadWerks community, but having tight integration into the editor is always nice. I miss the physics editor a lot more than I do the fracture tool or fluid surfaces though. And the material system, although being able to write our own GLSL shaders is really nice, being able to do it visually w/ instant feedback is a real time saver.

[cassius]

I would like to see something better than phygen and more comfortable to use.

[AggrorJorn]

New features that improve working with engine or improve better performace is always welcom.e However when the price goes higher, a different goal of customers is being addressed. This could lead to loss of customers.

 

 

 

DirectX 11 doesn't bring anything which is not in OpenGL 3, it's the hardware which matters.

In most cases the new features of DirectX have been already in OpenGL for years, for example the hardware tesselation has been in OpenGL 2.0 since 2007, but in DirectX only since 2009:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/AMD/vertex_shader_tessellator.txt

I haven't seen any hardware tessalation as good as in DirectX 11. Try the demo of the benchmark of the unigine engine. You can select between DirectX 9 -10 -11 and OpenGL. With the tessalation from DirectX 11 you get some pretty cool results. You do need indeed special hardware for this.

 

Take a look at this video for example: Skip to around 2.20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR40GwRtFyw

[niv3k]

Someone has recently been playing with UDK. Did you read my MSN status and decide to try it out?

 

The only thing(s) I found cool were the fracture tool and the fluid surfaces, both of which could be done in Leadwerks by the community if you tried hard enough.

 

i was just searching stuff on youtube and came across it.

 

fracture tool is really helpful, kinda wish you could go more in depth instead of only 150 chunks.

[niv3k]

reason why im updating to an ATi 5770

 

DirectX 11 is going to be amazing for pc....lets just imagine Crysis 2 on the PC!

[Canardia]

If the hardware doesn't support tesselation, then DirectX uses software tesselation, which is just code, so it can be done with OpenGL too. However, OpenGL's software mode sucks, so you'd need to do that with GLSL shaders then.

 

OpenGL's hardware tesselation can adjusted on the fly also:

http://fireuser.com/blog/tessellation_enhance_your_geometry/

[niv3k]

or just pay 150 bucks for a directx 11 card?

[Canardia]

Then you need buy also Windows 7, and to buy a second PC which runs Windows XP for the legacy apps you still need daily.

The virtual XP mode might also work (I haven't tested it), but then you need to buy more memory, I think 4GB should be enough.

I counted 4 buy words so far to get DirectX 11 running, but OpenGL runs without any buy needs on any PC or OS

[Niosop]

An interesting article even if it's a little out of date. Not much has changed since then that I can see. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

[Rick]

New features that improve working with engine or improve better performace is always welcom.e However when the price goes higher, a different goal of customers is being addressed. This could lead to loss of customers.

 

 

 

 

I haven't seen any hardware tessalation as good as in DirectX 11. Try the demo of the benchmark of the unigine engine. You can select between DirectX 9 -10 -11 and OpenGL. With the tessalation from DirectX 11 you get some pretty cool results. You do need indeed special hardware for this.

 

Take a look at this video for example: Skip to around 2.20.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR40GwRtFyw

 

 

That video and the excitement those guys are having for the tessalation is the excitement we should all have for it. This is the next advancement to the graphics in games. The visual benefits that you see there are simply insane and it's a fraction of the time to get it. That's what indie developers should be jumping for joy about. Instead of creating 3 differently detailed models of all these things you only need to create one. So much more emphasis is going to be on the texture side of things instead of the modeling side, and I think that's a good thing because I believe there are more 2D artists than 3D artists in this world. That opens the doors and jobs to all those amazing 2D artist that are out there.

 

The more I see stuff like this the more I'm convinced that some day it'll all be texture based modeling in the future, where the code generates the models based off 2D textures instead of a model file. This could save a ton of space on the model size since you wouldn't need a model file and pretty much leave 3D modeling a dead art. Of course they would need to figure out animation then to go along with it.

 

Look what we can do with 2D image information today. We can sculpt amazing terrains from 2D images and the information they hold so why can't we make any model with a few different 2D images? Given some sort of standard, code could take 2D texture information and turn a simple cube into a house, bench, gun, character.

 

Things like http://www.enlighten3d.com/2008/09/12/create-3d-models-from-photos/ will make it into games in time. I for one, can't wait!

[L B]

Alright so before anyone invades the feature request forums, let me remind everyone of the archived conversation:

http://forum.leadwerks.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5428

[Marcus]

I was messing around, trying out the UDK that epic released, and was thinking that Leadwerks really isn't that far off.

 

If you think LE editor is even in the same ballpark as UnrealEd, you must not know much about UnrealEd. UnrealEd is light years ahead of LE editor. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves.

 

Now before the fanboys flame me, this is coming from someone who has been using UnrealEd for the last 6 years. Most of you are programmers so you might not understand why it is ridiculous to compare the two, but they are not even in the same ballpark.

 

This is no disrespect to Leadwerks as an engine. Leadwerks has a great renderer (which surpasses Unreal 3), but the editor is not its strength. The strength of Unreal is its editor.

 

In short:

 

UnrealEd > Leadwerks Editor

Unreal 3 > Leadwerks Engine

Leadwerks Renderer > Unreal 3

[Niosop]

I have to agree with you. Although IMO LeadWerks is a lot more pleasant to work with, I find myself frequently missing features that are supported by UE3 and nicely accessible through UnrealEd. And since you can finally call DLLs from UnrealScript so you can do simple things like read from/write to a file, the UDK is probably more useful than it was even 4 months ago. But I'm having a lot of fun w/ LE even with it's limitations and, if people keep contributing at the rate they are, we'll keep gaining on the features that UE3/UnrealEd offer. A more modular editor w/ plugin support would be a big first step in this direction as then members could contribute plugins for the editor to expand it w/o having to rely on Josh to add everything we want and without us having to start from scratch with our own editors.

[Naughty Alien]

..agree entirely with Marcus...comparison i see here is quite funny at least...im also quite convinced that people whos talking about UDK and its 'flaws' has no knowledge about system or if they do, its very limited..and since I do agree with this comparison

 

UnrealEd > Leadwerks Editor

Unreal 3 > Leadwerks Engine

Leadwerks Renderer > Unreal 3 (is it???)

 

I will leave serious question mark over Renderer because its ignored fact that Unreal 3 is cross platform system...anyway, LE is very nice, I like it a lot, and fact that im seriously using it for project of mine says a lot about what i think about it..I just dont believe that this sort of comparison have any sense..thats all..

[Niosop]

While comparisons might not really be reasonable, if we want to improve the toolset and editor then we could do a lot worse than trying to emulate UnrealEd. If we could balance the power of UnrealEd with the ease of use and extensibility of Unity then we'd really have something.