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About this blog

A blog where I talk about anything relating to Leadwerks, and then some.

Entries in this blog

Vectronic: Demo Release!

Note: This is pretty much a copy and paste from this post here with a few tweaks. After 3 years of planning, modeling, texturing, and a lot of engine hopping, I was able to create a playable demo in the Leadwerks Engine for Windows and Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint). You can download the demo from this page. A small demo was created not only to test the basic elements of the game in the new engine, but to also give back to those who have been supporting this project since I started talking a
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Cyclone

Cyclone Open For Mods

As a teenager, I've spent thousands of hours with the Source SDK. It was really cool how Valve gave people the real tools to develop and create maps and mods. Overtime I got to see and take apart games to see how they actually work. Overtime, the indie engine market took over, and making Source mods is now just a terrible experience. Hammer crashes more frequently and the SDK branch of the engine has old bugs that were never patched. I want the excitement I had of making maps and cool featu
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9

Vectronic: What Now?

Over 2 weeks ago, I released a small demo showcasing my project's core gameplay on the Leadwerks Engine. Although I'm happy with the demo; it's a good landmark for the project, but it can be better visually and functionality. I learned a lot of new information about the engine on how to better optimize it, multiplatform diffrences, and I grew a slight hatred to a certain brand of GPUs. But the demo on the Game Launcher to me was a success.   The stand-alone version in my opinion was a bit sha
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New Icons on Beta Branch

If you join the beta branch and updated your projects, you'd probably noticed that the low res Leadwerks 2 icons have now been replaced with high resolution ones that match the rest of the user interface. Decals, Particles Emitters, Cameras, and Probes now have their own icon, and you can tell all entities apart just by looking at them.   I've originally made these a while ago when I noticed that each entity had it's own material and texture, but most of them just recycled the pivot icon. I've
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Loading Sounds with JSON

Loading sounds in Leadwerks has always been straight forward. A sound file is loaded from the disk, and with the Source class emits the sound in 3D space. The sound entity also has a play function, but it's only really good for UI sounds. There is also Entity::EmitSound() which will play the sound at the entity's location. (You can also throw in a Source, but it'll auto release the object when it's done.) While this is OK for small games, larger games in which sounds may change might mean y
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Cyclone

Cyclone Is Coming Soon to Steam!

It's been roughly over a year since active development started on this project. Today, I'm excited to announce that Cyclone now has a "Coming Soon" page on the Steam Store! This marks a huge milestone for the project and I'm looking forward to getting this out as soon as possible.  Cyclone is planned on being released as an Early Access title. Releasing into Early Access will grant a layer of feedback, bug reports, and ideas that can help build the remainder features, as well as additional
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5

Status Report

I wanted to give you an update since this blog post and let you know how well (or not) I'm following those plans.   Blue Portals: Anniversary Edition (Skip this if you don't care..)   Sunday I pushed a long over due push to Steam for beta testers to play and give feedback. I don't like to push to Steam often as my connection isn't that strong so any uploads bigger then a few megabytes causes an upload failure, I usually split updates into multiple pushes to prevent such problems but sometime
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Custom Shapes for MDLs in Leadwerks 4

There has been some discussion regarding on how to set collision shapes for your models. For 95% of models, you should be building shapes with the Model Viewer as described here. In some cases, the model artist might want a custom shape to be made. In this post, I'll be going over how I import models into Leadwerks, and building custom shapes. A few notes first. I use Blender; Blender 2.79b to be exact. I haven't get got the hang of 2.80 and until the new engine's art pipeline is fully onli
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Code

6 Reasons You Should Use Ultra Game System

Back in July, I set out to create a base for creating a version of Cyclone with Ultra Engine. I've gotten a lot of feedback from the release and started to conceptualize ideas on how to prevent or limit on making the same mistakes. One major goal I had was to compartmentalize the system. This should just exist on it's own and game code should just lay on top of this. This was possible thanks to the event system which cuts down on the number of pointers that need to be passed. Components can
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5

More About Stand-Alone, Menu, and UI

After the release of the Vectronic Demo, I started to seek out how to make the game to be able to stand-alone without any additional launchers, batches, or required installations. Shortly after my last blog post, Josh informed me about Inno Setup, and it answered my questions about providing OpenAL if the user did not already have it installed. More about that here. I haven't played with it yet, but it gave me insurance about packaging it up for the final release down the road. Alternatively, St
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Back On Track!

After a whole summer of working on the LEX template, and learning new things about the engine, I'm happy to say that Vectronic will soon be back on track in full development!   Before I go into full detail, I wish to mention that the Vectronic Demo has been updated with Josh's optimization edits, and the VecBall has a new effect I've made during the development of LEX. If you had sluggish performance before, I recommend you check out the update!   Now that I've got a nice foundation with a m
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First Test, VecBall Design

Another week, another weekly report. Vectronic is going more smoothly then ever before taking things one at a time, and just shelling out maps and ideas quickly. Last week, I did a few improvements with how the player picks up objects, and fixing the issue of shooting projectiles through objects. I did not shell any more maps because I thought it would be better to focus on a small amount of puzzles at a time, perfecting them before making more maps. For this, I needed help.   As of this week,
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Building Cubemaps In Leadwerks.

With the recent popular substance shader by Shadmar, more talk and focus has been about cubemap reflections surfaced in the community. Reflections in Leadwerks were done in the past with the SSLR post process shader which made all surfaces reflect the world in real time.         However, it had the following problems: It was applied to ALL materials in the scene. If you had a material that wouldn't normally reflect such as concrete or wood, the shader would still effect those materials. B
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Cyclone

The Cyclone Demo is now live!

From its initial concept in 2017 through the last sixteen months of development, I am ecstatic to announce that the free demo of Cyclone is now available in preparation for the June Steam Next Fest!  This demo includes three maps from the main game showcasing the functionalities of Cyclone and various puzzle elements.   The demo is available right on the Steam Store page! Cyclone on Steam (steampowered.com) While this is both an exciting and a scary time. I can't stress enough tha
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3

Reflections on Crawler's Den.

Crawler's Den is a demo I made for the Summer Games Tournament this year. You can grab it here. This blog I'd like to share my reflections on developing the project on LEX2 and Leadwerks in general.   When I started the project, my template had no animation manger, and the puppeteer system was just coming online. The goal was to recreate the AI and Events map and write the entire thing in C++. Not only to test the puppeteer system and my ideas on how to link said puppeteers to the flowgraph,
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Cyclone

Cyclone Participating in Steam Next Fest 2022

I'm excited to announce that Cyclone will be participating in Steam Next Fest 2022! While I'll not be live streaming, a playable demo will be available during the festival. The demo will act like an even softer release than the Early Access release, which should roll into the planned release date of June 23rd, 2022!   Add it to your wish list on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1803590/Cyclone/ Check out the itch.io Page: https://reepblue.itch.io/cyclone Join my publ
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3
Cyclone

Cyclone's New Menu

The time finally came to revamp the main menu for Cyclone. Doing menu work for me is really hard to get into but once I'm knee deep into it, it's all I want to do. I decided now is the time to work on a semi-final menu system due to the following. I just finished Steam Input and the menu wasn't compatible. The white text on a bright background was hard to make out. I only had a "New Game" option. There was no way to jump to a map you wanted to play without the console enabl
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2

Experimentation

I almost let a whole week go by without writing a blog, ahh! I've been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting over the last few days, and talking to other people about Vectronic.   Last week, I talked about improving functionalities of the pickup system and the platforms. Although the pickup system is near done, the platform system, well they need work. I made a topic about them here, and kind of left me on a stand still on the project because I see them as a vital piece of the game, and th
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Battle Plans For 2016!

It's been over a year ago since I've released the Vectronic Demo using Leadwerks. The demo was composed of assets I've made ported from the Source Engine and my lack of understanding of the API and lua scripting at the time. (I'm used to coding everything in C++) As of writing, it has 1,221 subscribers on the Steam Workshop, 25 out of 26 positive ratings, and is the second most subscribed item! So there is sigh that this as a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was a success. And again, the Game Launch
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Lua or C++?

Through out the Leadwerks community you'll find two types of users. You'll find a large portion of the community using lua, and a small dosage of them using C++. This makes sense as people are more often going to purchase Leadwerks without any DLCs (including the Professional Edition), and get into developing. From experience, Leadwerks at the moment puts it's primary focus on Lua scripts with it's script editor and debugger, flowgraph editor, and the script property system. Everything is pretty
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Reorganizing and Defragmenting

After I've returned from Steam Dev Days, I caught a terrible cold, so my first week home was unproductive when it came to LEX or Blue Portals. But besides that, I had a great time! I mentioned briefly in my last blog post before I went that I was giving LEX some reorganizing and defragmenting. This blog post, I'm going to go more into detail.   LEX2 has a lot of things going for it. The developer console is really handy, the AssetManager prevents crashes and has the ability to pre-loads things
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Luawerks For 4.4

Luawerks has been updated for Leadwerks 4.4, taking advantage of the new GUI system while adding new features and commands that allow you to develop your game better.   Developer Console Refresh The Developer Console is the stable of the framework. Thanks to the GUI, you can now scroll through your history, highlight, and move the cursor around! Page through your history using the Page Up and Page Down keys! Having a console is vital for development as it allows developers to chan
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Code

Creating a Stable Foundation - 5 Years In The Making!

In late 2014, I made the bold decision to focus less with Source Engine mods and pick up an actual engine I could use without legal conflicts or worrying about knowing the right people. At the time, it was like all other options were telling me to forget everything I've picked up through the years of making popular maps and mods and learn something that's completely unique to their software. CSG tools were declared too uncool, and any engine that was nice enough to support it enforced that any a
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2
Cyclone

Cyclone is now available in Early Access on Steam!

After sixteen months of week-by-week development, I'm happy to announce that the anticipated spiritual successor of the Portal mod, Blue Portals is now available for sale as an Early Access title on Steam!   I want to take a moment to thank [b]everyone[/b] who has played the demo and gave feedback. There's still work to be done! Being an Early Access title allows Cyclone to continue keep players involved in the development process to help it evolve into the best it can be!  I hope
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Code

Where Input Has A Name

I've spent the last few months pressing buttons, clicking joysticks and shaking my computer mouse to solve the solution input for Cyclone. Back when it shipped in June, I've created a system that allowed users to assign keys to actions, in which the game would detect as input. My player code never knew what button was pressed; it just knew what action was caused. This is very similar to how Steam Input works. There were a few flaws with my original system. Some of which didn't surface until
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