Beta Update available
Entry posted by Josh ·
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Things are very good on the business side of Leadwerks, so I wanted to take some time right now for some research and development so I can give you guys some new and shiny features. It's very interesting to me how the design of Leadwerks 3 has laid a foundation that allows us to do lots of new things that have never been done, and now I am getting to dig into some of those areas and explore.
I've decided the area I want to focus on is all under the banner of "outdoor rendering". The vegetation and terrain systems work together to provide a lot of powerful options that make it easy to create realistic outdoor environments. Rather than try to add one "checklist" feature at a time, I want to develop all these things together so we can get the most out of their combined capabilities. For that reason, I am going to hold off on terrain tessellation for now, and do some more research on the "offset" terrain tool idea, which would allow crags and overhangs on heightmap terrain. I'm fairly sure it will work now, but there are still a few issues to resolve.
The vegetation and/or terrain enhancements I am developing may also be featured in an upcoming book, so that is very exciting.
Changes
- Added two new terrain layer texture mapping modes, vertical and trilinear. This is great for cliffs.
- Added setting in options to control terrain clipmap resolution. The corresponding command is world:SetTerrainQuality(quality). Use 0, 1, or 2 for the quality setting.
- Added new higher-resolution clipmap (using quality=2 or "High" setting in options.)
- Temporarily disabled terrain tessellation while I figure out what I am doing with this feature. It will definitely make it in, but we need some high-quality texture maps for this, and I may be doing some work with an offset vector on the terrain, so I don't want to roll this out until I see how those work together. The terrain tessellation shader from the previous beta will still work if you want to use it now.
- When your game is launched from the editor, you can press F12 and it will automatically take a screenshot and display the screenshot uploader when the game ends. So now you can easily upload in-game screenshots, and they will appear in the Leadwerks Game Engine community hub. (This took a little cleverness to set up because the launched process inherits the Leadwerks Game Engine app ID, which has the Steam overlay disabled.) I hope to see lots of screenshots from your games now!
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