In this blog I want to talk about some cheap and easy ways to give your players a deeper more memorable experience, without touching a line of code.
Voice Acting Games have used off-screen voice actors for years to add character, tell stories, and create a setting with minimal investment. A good voice actor will give enough texture to the backstory that the player will make up the missing pieces in their own imagination. All it takes is a microphone and someone with a nice speaking voice.
A small update is out, on all branches, that fixes the vehicle wheels not being positioned correctly:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/15405-problembug-with-vehicles-cars-wheels-dont-move-since-update-4-2
Keeping your social media accounts active with screenshots, videos, and updates is important, but as an indie developer you probably don't have time to post on there every day. In this blog I will show you how to easily automate your social media accounts so that a constant stream of new content is going out to your fans.
First, you will need to create a free account with dlvr.it. Connect your social media accounts to it. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are the important ones.
Now you
Here I thought that I would be done with my entry in no time. Finetuning everything turned out to be a pain to be honest. Luckily the GUI was set up rather quickly and most of the game state switching worked almost instantly.
Tired of the tires
The real time consumers came when suddenly my tires wouldn't update with the vehicle. Spend a good time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, but eventually just decided to leave it until the very end.
Analytics
I added Josh's ne
The model editor animation bug was the second-worst bug to hit Leadwerks Game Engine in all its history. Reported multiple times, this would cause animated models to discard triangles only in the model editor, only on Linux.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/10856-model-editor-freaks-out/ http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/12678-model-animation-vs-flashing-bodyparts/
Since our animation commands have worked solidly for years, I was at my wits' end trying to figure th
As noted previously, Leadwerks 4.2 now support built-in analytics. To enable this in your game you need to create an account at www.gameanalytics.com and create a new product. You can find your keys on the Game Settings page.
At the beginning of the main lua script, some code has been added to initialize analytics. By default this is commented out:
if DEBUG==false then
Analytics:SetKeys("GAME_KEY_xxxxxxxxx", "SECRET_KEY_xxxxxxxxx")
Analytics:Enable()
end
Uncomment this
A new build is available on the beta branch:
Fixed animation bug found by tumira
Multiple animations will now be a bit faster.
Fixed probes not rendering bug found by reepblue
If all is good this will go out on the stable branch this Sunday.
The beta testers have done a great job. Thanks for your help!
Hey!
More stuff will come in the next version, my objective is to improve the Prologue to use as a demo for a Greenlight campaign to the next chapter. Much of the work this week (besides fixing stuff) was to detail the scenes a bit more to help you guys understand the water flood and how deep the water is.
I removed the cars of the starting area, because floating cars in that place makes no sense.
You can now even see the noisy bird (what a time to be alive!)
The water in the
A new build is available on the beta branch:
Fixed character controller physics.
Added SSR effect in AI & Events maps.
Renamed "Advanced FPS template" to "FPS template".
Toned down specular reflection on crawler skin.
Updated syntax highlighting for new commands.
Fixed quaternion Slerp function creating nan values with GCC release build.
Fixed Linux mouse down/hit bugs.
Since the community has done their part and we are approaching 100 game, it's almost time to take Game Launcher out of early preview mode make it a full release. When it becomes a full release on Steam the number of people playing your games will go up, a lot.
There are still some odds and ends in the interface to finish up. The thumbnail loading routine needs to be improved. There are some changes that need to be made so it will work better with Big Picture mode. So I am aiming for a re
A new build is available on the beta branch:
Reverted to Visual Studio 2015 for final release. Information on downgrading your 2017 projects can be found here.
Added soft particle shader.
Added smoke and soft smoke particle prefabs.
Added SSR post-effect (by Igor, Shadmar, and myself).
Added trigger material and updated doors example map.
A release candidate for Visual Studio 2017 was released in November. I took a chance that the final release would be out in December, but it isn't here yet. Releasing Leadwerks 4.2 built with VC 2017 could possibly cause the program to not run on some computers, because the Visual Studio 2017 redistributable is not out yet, and there is no option yet to make this part of the installation on Steam.
Because of this, I am going to release Leadwerks 4.2 for use with Visual Studio 2015, and upg
I'm putting together ideas for a racing game template to add to Leadwerks. We already support vehicles. The challenge is to put together that looks and feels slick and professional, like a real game people want to play. The finished demo will be submitted to Greenlight, GameJolt, IndieDB, itch.io, etc.
Gameplay
First, I wanted to think about what style of racing I want this to be. I don't want street racing because it's kind of boring, and the level design is more involved. I don't wan
Hello everyone!
This is my very first blog ever and hopefully it's all readable!
So, lemme introduce myself a bit
I'm Dragonfreak and my real name is Dion, i'm still pretty new to this community. (joined late spring if i recall correctly)
I study gamedevelopment, i'm in my last year (Due some school issues it took 1 year longer than intended) i already passed my exams thanks to this awesome engine! (I keep recommending it to anyone that ask for a good engine)
Currently i'm in my 5th
A full update is available now on the beta branch.
Leadwerks Game Engine 4.2 features:
Visual Studio 2017 support
Compatible with the latest C++11 / GCC on Linux
Refraction and heat haze effects.
Analytics through gameanalytics.com
New animation commands
Spotlight texture: you can add a material to a spotlight and the first texture will be rendered onto the light (for flashlights).
New material blend mode can be used to make objects that only appear in editor.
An
A Steam client update has gone out which improves the checkout process in the Leadwerks Workshop Store. When the user clicks the "Buy" button in the editor, the item will now be opened in the Steam client for purchase. You do not have to log into the Steam website with a browser to purchase Workshop items anymore.
You must opt into the beta branch of Leadwerks for this behavior to work. This will be the default when 4.2 is released.
More information here:
http://store.steampowered.co
I though it would be best to share a lesson that I've learned while working on the networking aspect of my game.
In my game I use C sockets for network code. The server side is written in Golang. With game networking, you can't really use JSON as a data layer as the performance hits for serializing and deserializing data are too big. So the best option is to write out your data in a "file" struct format.
My game has a few types of structs.
PacketHeader, PlayerPosition, PlayerInit, Pl
Finally done moving to my new house and today I got my computer setup again. And as a start, I thought, lets give it a go for the winter games tournament.
It is a little racing game where the tracks gets randomly generated on the given seed. I think I will call it "On the road again", named after the song and because of the fact that the level generation allows you to skip parts of the track if you simple fall down on the track below you.
Ludum Dare 37 starts in 12 hours (as I type this)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/
https://ldjam.com/
Most of you probably know (I think), but Ludum Dare is a game dev competition where you have to complete a game in 48 hours from scratch (no externals assets I think).
The JAM portion of the event is a bit more relaxed and gives you 72 hours (if my memory serves me right - I really should check the rules) You can use external assets (I think - again I should have checked the rules befor
I've been working to upgrade Leadwerks to the latest Newton Dynamics 3.14, and I want to change it so the engine imports Newton as a DLL. This will allow the Newton developer to debug some of my applications when needed.
World Factions has raised an important bug / issue and this the best route to solve it.
I've been tinkering with some improvements to some of the physics stuff with promising results, but it needs more work and I don't want to say anything else about it yet. If I can g
At last, it is time for the 2016 Leadwerks Winter Games Tournament! This is going to be a big one, for a few reasons.
We're very likely to reach 100 games in Leadwerks Game Launcher, which means it will be ready to move out of early access mode and be an official release on Steam.
As an experiment, you're getting two extra weeks to polish your games, with an extended deadline lasting until January 15th.
WHEN: The tournament begins Monday, December 5, and ends Sunday, January
Blender Cloud 50% Off Cyber Monday Only
https://cloud.blender.org/blog/
For about 15 euros (think it was about 12UK pounds) you get 3 months access to Blender Cloud.
This gives you access to some decent Blender training videos and some rigged blender characters but also quite a large selection of good quality textures which from what I could gather are CC-0 licensed (no credit even required). I could be wrong on that but whenever they mention textures they seem to say CC-0 along wit
I've updated the beta branch with a full build to address the following issues:
GI / water bug where everything would get brighter (the blend mode wasn't being reset to "solid").
"Cannot blit backbuffer" bug fixed.
VC .usr file added back into template, which contains info on the default working directory. This is why games weren't launching in the right directory.
SDK version set to 8.1 since the 10 SDK isn't installing on Windows 7 (what I'm on now).
FYI, I tested on an AM
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