Josh

In the script editor log, are you seeing errors like "Failed to load texture..."? I tried a new FPS project and I don't see any missing textures. I do see a pause the first time I shoot. I think the engine is probably compiling a shader for the first time when that happens. The only way around this would be to precompile all shaders in advance, which would make load time a bit slower but might be a good idea. At most it would only be a few seconds, not several minutes of shader compiling like some other games have.

I have had a very bad attutude in the past with this. I often felt like I wanted someone to take my engine and use it with really good art and make some AAA game, but I should instead be encouraging and helping you to bring your creative dreams to life. If I am not happy with artwork being used, then it's up to me to provide better DLCs, which people always buy a lot of. It's up to me to lead the way as a game developer, and show people what is possible, while supporting all types of projects people want to make. I should definitely not be critical of peoples' work or pressure them to make a commercial game if they just want to make something for fun. I am very grateful to have such a wonderful creative group of people using Leadwerks to make interesting things.

The game has been added to the Leadwerks Games Bundle: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/43610/Leadwerks_Games_Bundle/

I am glad I backed everything up in multiple ways. These are being uploaded to the downloads section here: https://www.leadwerks.com/community/files/category/152-games/ It looked at the time that platforms like itch.io and Steam were the best way to get eyes on your game. It turns out, the basic problem on all these platforms is although traffic is high, it all gets funneled to the most mainstream items, and everyone else is kind of "blacklisted by default". You can actually get more visibility in Leadwerks Game Launcher on Steam than you can get by having a game on Steam! So it seems there may still be a need to form some kind of micro-community for games. I don't think this should be done through the custom game pages system we tried, but the game launcher on Steam has gotten a pretty large amount of usage, before the integration with Workshop broke.

It might make sense to launch a new app in the future, but I should probably just use the existing app ID, because it has a lot of content already uploaded. I should get that working first.

Okay, I understand what's going on now. Developing games with Leadwerks is a social experience. It's fun to make things, show your friends, make friends online, and get comments from people playing your game. Making a commercial game can sometimes be where it no longer becomes fun. Now you have to pay $99 and your game most likely will be ignored on Steam, unless you have a plan to promote it that works. Even if you are successful, you can no longer just make the things you want to, now you have to make exactly what the players will respond to. Also, the players aren't able to tell you what they will respond to, so you have to guess and you only find out after you make the game if that's what they wanted! So I can understand making small games during the game tournaments, without any competitive pressure, and being part of something fun...this is a great setting for creativity to thrive in. Publishing your game to the launcher and seeing other people playing it is very gratifying, for the same reason people make mods. (In some cases, some of those games will go on to become commercial titles, but it's not a requirement and that doesn't need to be the goal.) Now if I feel frustustrated that AAA games aren't being made with my software, that's my problem to fix. People will buy DLCs if I publish them, so I should be able to afford to license pretty much any artwork we need. And the best way for me to show the way is to create a high-quality game myself and prove what it possible. (Which is what I am doing.) Many people just want to bring their idea to life and let other people play their creations. This is just as valid as anyone who wants to try to be an AAA developer, and we should encourage their creativity. Everyone doesn't have to be a professional game developer, and it's okay for Leadwerks to be good for hobbyists.

I am also uploading some of your archived games here, where they can be downloaded without a login: https://www.leadwerks.com/community/files/category/152-games/ It was more difficult to do this before, but since this website now uses S3 for all the file storage, I can store many big files and it doesn't make my web backup process very difficult.

Reduced the strength of the bloom effect. It's hard to come up with a good default setting, because it really depends on the look you want, but I think it's a good balance.

These changes are now on the beta branch: Terrain fragment shader now using tone mapping. Some fixes to the weapons slot system in the FPSPlayer class for C++.

This contains a lot of nice terrain materials with a cohesive look: https://www.leadwerks.com/files/Landscape_temp.zip It's not finished. I don't know what the channels in the _M texture are supposed to be. They don't look like occlusion or metalness. Based on this package, license is CC attribution: https://www.fab.com/listings/c6a8fa58-84f1-4bb8-935d-a3467e9fe58d

Leadwerks 5.0 is now available on the beta branch on Steam.

I am planning to update Leadwerks Game Launcher and relaunch it, with support for first Leadwerks 4, and then adding Leadwerks 5 Lua games. Setting up a Steam page is a lot of work many people don't want to deal with, and not everyone has to be a professional game developer. The app has been effective in getting your game in people's hands, before Steam Workshop broke, so for many people this is just the way they want to make games and let other people play them.

There is a special extension that does this. Geometry shaders are usually very bad for performance.