Mobile plans ?

[panz3r]

First of, "the community" doesn't homogeneously make games but individuals in it do. "The Windows community" (whatever that might be) doesn't develop games either and you would never make such a nonsensical statement.

 

With that in mind, the lead dev of Starbound is a Linux guy and that's actually where the game is build first before it is send to another dev for Windows and Mac compilation. Popular enough?

 

Also don't put words in my mouth I never said, I only said you can't attribute the entire stretch amount to just OUYA/Android while also admitting that some people did back the project just for that. Wilfully misunderstanding somebody's statement to undermine it makes for really bad debate.

Dude, i don;t want to debate you, I am glad if you are going to develop a linux game. I am sick of dual booting.

[panz3r]

wait for official news. mobile is not dead it may comes back some day. focusing on a stable xplattform engine is more important now. sure it is not nice for us but its better than a buggy engine with overload of supported platforms. forget about the past. 3.1 seems to be completly redesigned. if we have linux/mac/win support and a good engine that fit our need that will be worth it. josh dont do that to annoy us he do it to give us a stable 3.1 engine. he is not lucky with it but this is business if you dont care about little things you will fail so it does here. so make the best about it or feel free to use other engines that are the best choice for you if you really extremly need mobile support for now. josh created a nice engine here dont forget that he did all the stuff alone.

DudeAwesome, i am not sure how old are you but i can tell you one thing. In business if people don;t trust you they don;t make business with you. I said I understand his point of not macking money but I would expect that Josh would offer some options for peoples involved in mobile development. Yougroove proposed a different product bassed on Leadwerks 3.0 named Leadwerks mobile and which gets only bug fixed. That would be fine.( Btw i don;t even want to start with false advertising sh1t and bait and switch)

[AggrorJorn]

Yougroove proposed a different product bassed on Leadwerks 3.0 named Leadwerks mobile and which gets only bug fixed. That would be fine.( Btw i don;t even want to start with false advertising sh1t and bait and switch)

A 'simple' mobile product as yougroove suggests will still cost an anormous amount of time and money. What would be the difference with a 'normal' mobile add on? You would still have to make all the support to several android devices. You still would have to adapt and maintain the render engine speciffacly targeted to mobile.

[panz3r]

A 'simple' mobile product as yougroove suggests will still cost an anormous amount of time and money. What would be the difference with a 'normal' mobile add on? You would still have to make all the support to several android devices. You still would have to adapt and maintain the render engine speciffacly targeted to mobile.

We try to come with a solution. What is your proposal Aggror, i promise i will support it if is anything else then "get used with it, there will be no mobile". I have big respect for you because i learned a lot from your tutorials .

I would be fine to pay 1000 for the source code of 3.0 as it is now(+ some minor stuff fixed).

Or maybe Josh sets a price tag to open source it to verybody with a kickstart project.

[YouGroove]

A 'simple' mobile product as yougroove suggests will still cost an anormous amount of time and money. What would be the difference with a 'normal' mobile add on? You would still have to make all the support to several android devices. You still would have to adapt and maintain the render engine speciffacly targeted to mobile.

 

The best option than could have been open source engine and editor code for mobile. But again that's Josh time and work, and code , so not sure it could be possible ? Even not sure we would have mobile coders to fix and adapt code for every mobile ?

Like Torque 3D open source , you rely on people motivation, time and volounteers, they can abandon at any time, even main guys working on source code for non coders people using the free product can fly away at any time.

 

So yes, LE3 Mobile seems not possible when there is already lot of work and time involved in PC/Linux bugs fixes, lot of features still not present.

[DudeAwesome]

DudeAwesome, i am not sure how old are you but i can tell you one thing. In business if people don;t trust you they don;t make business with you.

 

well trust and success have nothing to do with each other. you can even success when noone believes in you and your work and you also can still fail very hard when everyone trust you. The problem is that if you trust someone and he failed you are pissed. If you dont trust and believe in someone you can tell that it was obvious. its just a shine related to the angle of view. trust or believe in something is just an emotional thing that influences your decisions in mind by supporting something. Trust makes businessdecisions easier but its just a shine in business you dont need it really to earn money . But to get the real thing you sometimes have to do risky things and waste some venture capital. I also dont can understand what my age has to do with my given answer. Dont claim so much with your emotions they have nothing to do in conversations like this one here. stay factual and wait and you get answers you need. to stay philosophic I can tell you that its not the age that makes you old. its the experiences you received in your life that makes you old.

 

eg: An old fart that has got no experiences in life will not be smarter in making decisions like a younger person that have to deal with it everyday.

 

I also already give you the answer for everything and all (42)

wait for official news.

 

But you see this is just the answer. And there is no question. so what is the question?

 

Fail in something or at work will fall you back thats right but it give you the experience that you dont stay in the loop to do it again and again and again. Failing in something is not bad. And Josh was not failing here. He is doing the right stuff. and well, I believe in him. Not because I trust him. its because I like his work he doing all the time here. alone.

 

now clap your hands and smile. linux version is out.

[AggrorJorn]

We try to come with a solution. What is your proposal Aggror, i promise i will support it if is anything else then "get used with it, there will be no mobile". I have big respect for you because i learned a lot from your tutorials .

I would be fine to pay 1000 for the source code of 3.0 as it is now(+ some minor stuff fixed).

Or maybe Josh sets a price tag to open source it to verybody with a kickstart project.

Thank you. I just want to be clear that I am not against mobile versions at all. It would be great if leadwerks supported all these platforms. And it is certainly regretable that (unofficially) mobile has been dropped. but honestly: I don't know what a better solution to this would be.

 

Lets hypothetically say the partially opensource option would be the 'best' way to go. First, I don't think the mobile code is a completely sepperate component from the render engine in 3.0. This would mean Josh has to spend a large amount of time sepperating all this stuff. My guesses are that is completely interwoven in the engine of 3.0. This would mean that you would have to strip out the mobile parts and somehow link the old render engine with 3.1 (since deferred rendering is too heavy).

But who is going to do that? I know I wouldn't have the skill and or time for it. As a matter of fact, I think you need to be an expert on Game engine development, C++ and Android in order for that to figure out. This is not something fixed in a few days. It would take weeks if not months to get it up and running for android. Even if a part would be opensource,

[panz3r]

Maybe payed support cand be a solution - like 100-200 per bug fixed. For reported bugs Josh estimate a cost and people contribute and when ammount is reached Josh fixes it.

[Rick]

Any solution would have to be something Josh isn't himself doing, because that's the issue. This takes time away from Josh doing other things. I think at some level Josh feels he's the only one who can do certain things in his engine. I don't 100% agree with that, but I think the point is Josh would have to explain so much detail of what would need to be done that he maybe feels he might as well do it himself, which takes his time away from other things. I don't agree with this as explaining what needs to be done and actually doing it are 2 very different time requirements.

 

Let's think about how much this would really cost though. $100-200 would probably get you 1-3 hours of a contractors time in Cali (where Josh lives). Josh would have to spend some of that time explaining the issue and the contractor would have to spend a long time figuring out the engine. Then they would have to actually fix and test. So each bug fix could possibly take a contractor a couple days after the initial time learning the engine. That could equal about $2000 or so per fix for Josh to hire out.

 

It would be interesting to see how many people who want mobile would be willing to pay for something like this (if Josh would even go for it which I doubt). Maybe find 100 people willing to pay $20 for each bug fix?

 

I think this would be an interesting model for creating a game engine from scratch actually

[YouGroove]

Some smaller abandonned 3D engine proposed evolutions based on donation amount to reach, there were some motivated people ... well never heard of it anymore. Indeed it would cost too much, because of compatibility problems, complexity of bugs will only delay main PC/Linux platforms even with some people paying something.

Paying all year for bugs .... and how if nobody pays no more ... you will have to pay the full note ?

Even if it is some idea , you can make pay for features, but clients rarely will pay for bug fixes as this is part of engine to have bug fixes.

 

And correcting bugs, don't mean making Leadwerks 3.0 mobile evolve in terms of editor or features, why paying if you have better and free 3D solution for mbile. Only solution to not slow down PC/Linux, would be to have some guy working full time for Josh, but for that it would need :

- Massive demand for mobile

- Mobile complete features new price and more expensive

[Rick]

why paying if you have better and free 3D solution for mbile

 

I don't know about other people but I use Leadwerks because it's entity based programming and it's the easiest 3D API I've ever worked with. This is what keeps me with Leadwerks. Every time I use another engine I'm reminded of this.

[panz3r]

Some smaller abandonned 3D engine proposed evolutions based on donation amount to reach, there were some motivated people ... well never heard of it anymore. Indeed it would cost too much, because of compatibility problems, complexity of bugs will only delay main PC/Linux platforms even with some people paying something.

Paying all year for bugs .... and how if nobody pays no more ... you will have to pay the full note ?

Even if it is some idea , you can make pay for features, but clients rarely will pay for bug fixes as this is part of engine to have bug fixes.

 

And correcting bugs, don't mean making Leadwerks 3.0 mobile evolve in terms of editor or features, why paying if you have better and free 3D solution for mbile. Only solution to not slow down PC/Linux, would be to have some guy working full time for Josh, but for that it would need :

- Massive demand for mobile

- Mobile complete features new price and more expensive

Yeah I am feeling that I am beating a dead horse. RIP Leadwerks Mobile

[beo6]

i still don't really get it how mobile etc. can be compared with that huge difference of advertising that was published.

Mobile got nearly no advertising as far as i know and Linux now got a lot of advertising like Greenlight, kickstarter Josh going to different events etc.

 

I accept that Josh is focusing on Desktop for now. It is just a bit sad that the mobile LE3 stuff i bought is pretty much useless for me. especially now.

[Josh]

i still don't really get it how mobile etc. can be compared with that huge difference of advertising that was published.

Mobile got nearly no advertising as far as i know and Linux now got a lot of advertising like Greenlight, kickstarter Josh going to different events etc.

 

I accept that Josh is focusing on Desktop for now. It is just a bit sad that the mobile LE3 stuff i bought is pretty much useless for me. especially now.

I actually put a lot more effort into promotion for mobile, but it's up to the media to pick up your story and run with it. I showed them a deferred renderer on an iPad, and nobody cared. When I did interviews for mobile all they wanted to do was ask me questions about Unity. I'm not even sure if the interviewers understood the concept of a game engine outside of that.

[gamecreator]

I'd swear this would be a different story if you promoted and sold it during the Linux and Steam campaigns.

[beo6]

That's interesting. I guess then mobile press is more into applications instead of games or game engines. When even apple rejects your deferred renderer because they think it is a movie.

[Flexman]

I bought into the LE3 mobile SDKs to show support. I'm glad it wasn't such a huge layout. What I *wanted* was LE2.5 with OpenGL 4 and better tools. Maybe some of the streaming stuff that was talked about. Linux is the new toy-boy thanks to Steam, I don't know how long that will last. Ouya got a lot of press then reality arrived in the post. SteamOS is cooling off and we've not seen much in the way of a breakout yet. I remain hopeful and enthused by some of the content posted by new LE3 users.

 

It's frustrating that to this day, I still spend most of my time working around LE 2.5 limitations to achieve things that should be quite simple. But the awesome thing is, every big problem I came up against I've been able to resolve with a lot of heart-ache and creative use of the semi-open nature of the engine. In the end, much more rewarding. (Source would have been more awesome.)

 

I'll just finish by saying I have had a very real love-hate relationship with Leadwerks engine. Hell, they didn't even send me a t-shirt even though the company used a personal photo of our Christmas tree with the kids presents under it in a promotional post last year. It was funny as hell to see (especially our lovely brown curtains).

 

I lost out but then I knew that ahead of time anyway. Josh needs to do this. Last time Josh changed tack, some of the old community deserted to other engines because they were not interested in mobile. Josh went ahead and did it anyway but you have to keep in mind that there's a certain silicon valley mentality that's OK to try things and fail. You learn and try the new thing. It's something people could learn from. Failure is an option.

 

I still want a bloody t-shirt from the tight git for the Xmas tree thing though

 

I look forward to seeing a renewed focus for the desktop which is what he's best at. Maybe upkeep of the mobile engine could be entrusted to the community under a strict usage license. Just a thought if it's not going to be doing anything in future.

 

All the above is just my personal ramblings.

[gamecreator]

Well put.

[Josh]

I still want a bloody t-shirt from the tight git for the Xmas tree thing though

How the heck did that happen?

[Roland]

Very well put Flexman. I was a 110% Leadwerker in LE2.5 and left because of the Mobile direction which I was totally uninterested in (and also didn't believe in for one second). The move over to Mobile simply did not give me any choice and it was with a big sadness I had to look for other ways to go further with my ideas (OK.. I'm only a hobbyist but still with ideas). Anyway with the introduction of Leadwerks 3.1 Linux I could feel a turn back going on, even if nothing such was said or declared. So I joined the Kickstarter with a hope for that. Now reading an official statement of this turn back on right track (according to me at least) makes me very happy. Right now I have invested so much work and efforts with the engine I turned to when the mobile thing was hitting us, so its more or less impossible to move that project back. But hopefully I can now with some trust turn back to making things with LE and start next project there. Thank's Josh for bringing LE back to where it belong. The great engine with great rendering and don't you dare to go mobile again

[Rick]

I look forward to seeing a renewed focus for the desktop which is what he's best at.

 

But he's only "best" at it because he's been doing it for many years. There was an LE 1 a long time ago. I think Josh did pretty damn good on mobile for just learning it at that time for the first time. He did bring the ease of LE to the mobile platform. I don't think the platform really matters here in terms of what Josh is good at. Josh can bring LE to any platform, which he's shown. It's all about the numbers and mobile just didn't bring them in. It had nothing to do with what he's good at or not IMO.

 

Clearly, more games are released on mobile every day than for the PC or consoles combined. So there is still a question of why didn't LE mobile work? Why/how is every other engine able to make mobile versions and make money on them? The numbers are the numbers and it didn't work so it's hard to say LE should do mobile, but I am interested in why it didn't work.

[YouGroove]

but I am interested in why it didn't work.

Seems :

- Lot of work for many platforms , specific bug correction , Android specific optimisations ... too much work specially if you have to complete the desktop PC/Linux with missing features and all bug fixes.

- Free and complete versions or cheap ones with prooven tools, extensions, optimisatiosn tricks for mobile

- Small demand on Leadwerks 3, kickstarter just shown lot people wanting Linux/PC versions

 

Why/how is every other engine able to make mobile versions and make money on them?

Companies with mobile full time dedicaced people to optimize and bring features , correct bugs that makes all difference and make them able to bring 2D or visual programmign language, new tools because they only work in mobile.

For money, indeed they make lot of money to propose expensive PRo version for each individual mobile device.

 

Major part of mobile games use 3D without big shader features , but with skilled 2D and 3D artist behind, your engine need to be able to run well on low mobile and be easy for 3D artists and game beginners to pick it up and be able to make simple games (easy language, visual script, easy commands, lot of tutorials, plugin extensions, sample projects of any genre)

 

----------------------------

 

Mobile is a big platform : Nintendo has come into it finally , Square Enix came from some good time now, and other big companies are already present. So it's growing a lot , even in software industry where all companies genre begin to propose mobile solutions even thtought SAAS cloud.

[Rick]

Seems :

- Lot of work for many platforms , specific bug correction , Android specific optimisations ... too much work specially if you have to complete the desktop PC/Linux with missing features and all bug fixes.

- Free and complete versions or cheap ones with prooven tools, extensions, optimisatiosn tricks for mobile

- Small demand on Leadwerks 3, kickstarter just shown lot people wanting Linux/PC versions

 

The performance/features of what mobile was in LE 3.0 is basically where LE 3.1 is right now on the PC, so I don't buy the performance/feature reason. As with PC Josh fixed performance issues on mobile after release.

 

There was no Kickstarter for mobile so no direct comparison can be done between the Linux kickstarter and a non-existent mobile kickstarter.

 

There is no doubt LE got on the Linux game development bandwagon at the perfect time. Could it simply be timing for mobile? Was LE just too late to the mobile game?

[YouGroove]

As stated it represents too much work and would only make PC/Linux delay months/year before beeing complete enought. And not enought mobile demand it seems on LE3 engine , lot more people asking PC/Linux.

 

As LE3 will become lot more popular, some people will begin to ask mobile, if LE3 will have a big and enought money income , in that caes it would be possible to do like small comanies and begin to hire a mobile dedicaced programmer (that's way Unity and some other has done, begin some platform , than when growing a lot with good money income, hire programmers than put people specifically for mobile work only)

[Rick]

As stated it represents too much work and would only make PC/Linux delay months/year before beeing complete enought.

 

This doesn't have anything to do with the demand. I'm asking why is the demand low when clearly the mobile market in general is pumping out more games than the PC market each day? Why aren't the mobile devs interesting in LE as an engine is the question.

 

 

that's way Unity and some other has done, begin some platform , than when growing a lot with good money income, hire programmers than put people specifically for mobile work only

 

This isn't correct. Unity took venture capitalist money which has nothing to do with the income. Investors saw potential and so they gave Unity a ton of money in which they went out and hired all their people to cover all their bases in game development (including mobile). So their hiring people to do work wasn't directly tied to the income their work was bringing in.

 

Josh had a chance to do this at one point but decided not too. I don't blame him for it as you generally lose control of your company when you go the venture capitalist route, but it does have advantages. Namely, that you can afford to take a hit now and take your gains later (which is the game with mobile as people generally develop the game on the PC first before buying a mobile license).