Recently I was doing research on some stuff when I came across this article: Web-Based Real-Time Application Analysis. I gave it a read through, modified the code a little, and tested it out. Sure enough, it worked.
Suddenly, the light bulbs in my head started lighting up.
Why didn't I think about this earlier?!
See, in the past, I've only through to use my application to generate web friendly log reports (an example) or used my application front end to communicate with a server back
The art-gnome at Combat-Helo has been playing with bloom and glow shader materials for the cockpit and came up with instrument night lighting. I thought it was a cool use of extra texture stages and materials with Leadwerks engine, it's an easy effect to add. With additional green point lights around the pit it should look pretty close to the real deal.
Here's a real shot with night lighting. Panel back-lighting and small point lights.
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This is OpenGL, vector based rendered to an offscreen buffer, now with added mipmaps. I'll try and detail the functions of these pages and sub-modes as I go and allow you to submit corrections early on.
The WEP (weapons) MFD page
Pictured below shoing the gun sub-mode. Main feature is the bust limit selector on the left side indicating the number of rounds fired when the pilot commands. The bottom MFD buttons marked GUN, MSL and RKT will switch the weapons and display rounds and options.
Like many hobbyist developers, I was looking for the biggest bang for the buck. So I experimented with every engine out there that I could find. One of the most common problems I found regardless of the engine is the challenge associated with the content pipeline.
Some engines use proprietary formats like Torque's DTS, or DIF, and others use common, but dreadfully inefficient formats like Microsoft's .x format. Leadwerks uses its .gmf or Game Model Format. And there in was my first obs
I have noticed the usefulness of others blogs on this site, and thought that my efforts to learn and utilize this great leadwerks engine might eventually be beneficial to others getting off the ground.
First and foremost, I am a decidedly avid fan of Blitzmax. At work, we use C# and Java which is great for professional work. I run a software company for my day job. But I am just a hobbyist at home. This means, I have no grandiose designs for the next great MMO, but rather just love playi
Today I took a break from the current pure3d game-art job and enjoyed the weekend. But I also took my magic blue carpet and camera with me to make shots for upcoming vegetation sets. A friend at Crytek showed me this photograph technique some time ago (they do it in a more professional manner). I just take a small branch with leaves from the bush/tree place it on my blue carpet and take a picture. Cloudy days are best because you get a nice ambient color without shadows. The middle photo was ta
AD has been finishing more of the villages and green zones around the region. You can read more about it here...
SimHQ Dev Diary update
This is "Dara" in the Northern region (See map below)
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Hello again, everyone! It's been a busy few weeks on the Zone project, and a lot has been accomplished. Besides the work presented here, a lot has been going on behind the scenes as well. Last week Josh wrote the GMF Processor, which collapses GMF models into an optimized mesh. This tool has helped speed up in-engine performance significantly, and you can try it out for yourself here: http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/topic/1767-gmf-processor/
I've also been fixing mesh errors and c
Progress has been good over the past few days of working on the editor. I've been implementing more logic for handling the designing of GUIs as well as adding some features that are vital for efficient GUI designing. I still have a bit of work to do and code to cleanup, but things are looking very good right now.
Here are some updated development screenshots.
I added the ability to easily resize the application to commonly used screen resolutions. I took this idea from the original CELay
I'm in the process of adding the weapon systems; avionics and links to the stores. While that's coming along at a steady pace I often come across a bit of code and think "I could quickly do this..."
So I just quickly added the third-person cam; as we don't yet have any character models I'm having to use this laughable code generated place-holder.
Character height is 1.8m.
We're going to require a rigged humanoid with a number of animations for sitting, prone, kneeling, aiming,
Spent the day working on the Helicopter entity and the sub-classes that handle all the pylons and stores. It's worth spending time automating these things as much as possible now to simply things later.
I broke out UMLet, a nice fast Java based UML editor to look at my structure. What's missing is the store-jett which needs to be a function of [TStore], pass it the pylon number and it will be required to generate the physics object, parent the rail/pod/fuel cell, detach it from the pylon and
For my current Leadwerks project, I need to setup some GUI panels for logging into the game server. The way CEGUI is setup makes writing your own layout very hard by hand. Just take a look at this layout for example. Yea, good luck there.
I gave the Official CEGUI Layout Editor a try. I was hoping I could easily mock up some basic screens that looked nice and just be done with it. Boy was I wrong.
The biggest problem is having to work in the unified coordinate system. Now, while the UCS
I started this blog to share my indie experience with all Leadwerks users. Also I will post here news about our current projects.
About RVL Games
My name is Raul Gogescu and I made RVL Games a year ago. Right now we are 5 guys and we all worked in gaming industry. Unfortunately our skills are not enough to create a full commercial game so we have to make contracts with other teams.
About RVL Hacker, our first game
With a friend of mine, which is also our web designer, we made the graph
I needed to add some on-the-fly lookups for data stored in XML databases without having them gobbling up memory. Most games of this type had a vehicle and weapon database, usually with a rotating 3D model or picture of the object. Using the TxmlTextReader function with a cache works fine. Only need to do the lookup once when examining an object.
All weapons come with suitable entries by entering the ground crew mode from proximity to any Apache helicopter. We can re-use this for tutoria
It's been a blissfully quiet weekend.
The Combat-Helo configuration files are now in an easier to use XML format and I added a lot of extra options too. Player profile name, host IP, graphics filters etc. Fullscreen and Windowed modes having their own settings.
Also experimented with light scattering, we'll be adding per time-of-day lighting and retiring the old LB2 style skybox. That's not a priority item just something that's nice to toy as a little break.
Arming system which shoul
Day/night cycles are something I have thought about for a long time. There's several possible approaches to simulating these, but it wasn't until today that I decided which is best. Here are some options I considered:
1. Shader-based skies with particle clouds.
This is the method Crysis employs. A subsurface scattering shader creates the sky background. The mathematics are pretty complex, but the results for an empty blue sky look great. Particle clouds are used to place sparse clouds
I started out this morning looking to update a test scene that I used for some first person tests I did in C++ after only having the engine for a few weeks and coding in C++ for even less time. Well, that was the plan. I managed to redesign the layout using 3DWS, and threw a few Dexsoft crates and Barrels in. The plan was then to work on textures but as usual after about an hour I had set sail on the good ship "unrelated" for a voyage across the bay of tangents. Don't you just hate it when that
hehe well the XPatcher2 software worked great for the upload, but the client program doesn't seem to want to work at all, requesting a file that wasn't supplied or exists.
Might have to look at other some other software.
Converting all config files to use XML format, this will make editing control inputs a bit easier later. They are rather messy atm and adding new options should be a lot easier.
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Currently testing the autopatcher software. Broadband upstream speeds being what they are, don't make this a fast process. The project core files are currently around the 300mb mark spread over 1300+ files. This will come down when we package them.
The benefits of having an autopatcher is the ability to push updates for CombatHelo on a regular basis without too much hassle and players having to negotiate versions when playing with friends. Just run the updater and everyone should be in sync.
Until now, we haven't really had proper debugging info when a crash occurs during execution of a Lua script. Thanks to some previous work TylerH did with Lua, a conversation with him revealed how to easily add debugging info into the editor and script interpreter. (Incidentally, the Lua integration was Tyler's idea to begin with!) Here's a shot of the Script Editor catching an engine crash and displaying the script line the error occurs at. This is a crash that occurred in the engine, not a
