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mena joined the community
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What I mean is GTK and some other Linux libs that change with each version of Linux. There is another reason to make components optional, and that is because we can more easily update software for enterprise customers if they can skip optional components. Steam and GA would both be good candidates to make as a plugin, though I am not sure yet exactly how it would work.
- Today
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I love the engine being ready to use with any number of helpful libraries. The ones I use most are Steam and of course the zip library (through Leadwerks) which lets you access data/pak/zip files. That said, I think Steam would be easy to incorporate separately, if necessary. I am planning on using GameAnalytics more heavily but I'm not confident that I could incorporate this easily myself (it also relies on libcurl, I believe). And again, back on the other side of the coin, if there was a step-by-step incorporation tutorial for Leadwerks, I think that would do.
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As I am currently discovering Mafia 2, a game concept art built with so much fine details at all levels of game design, I'm just thinking game developers made no real progress since this beautiful creation.
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I tested a 1.5 million poly mesh and the BSP generation time was about three seconds. Not terrible given the size, but I would like to completely eliminate that annoying delay.
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We support Ubuntu 16.04. In the future I am going to use as few of third-party libraries as possible on Linux, but it's not possible to fix existing libs that keep breaking. The engine scales well, but you have to pay attention to optimization. I have seen people do things like have ten point lights constantly re-rendering a million extra polygons each frame, or a 10,000 poly collision mesh, and of course this can kill performance. Sometimes people want to just ignore these kinds of things, but optimization is an important part of development, and it should be paid attention to from the very start. The new engine I am working on does some very advanced things in order to handle the massive data the aerospace customers are working with, and I think this will have a good effect for game developers as well. It will still be possible to hit bottlenecks in the new engine, but I think most people will never come close.
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The GMF2 data format gives us fine control to enable fast load times. Vertex and indice data is stored in the exact same format the GPU uses so everything is read straight into video memory. There are some other optimizations I have wanted to make for a long time, and our use of big CAD models makes this a perfect time to implement these improvements. Precomputed BSP Trees For raycast (pick) operations, a BSP structure needs to be constructed from the mesh data. In Leadwerks Engine this structure is computed after a model is loaded. The "Bober Station: model from The Zone is a 46,000 poly model. Here are the build times for its BSP structure: Release: 500 milliseconds Debug: 6143 milliseconds This is not our biggest mesh. Let's assume a two million poly mesh, which is actually something we come across with CAD data. With this size model our load times increase 40x: Release: 20 seconds Debug: 4 minutes Those numbers are not good. To reduce load times I have embedded precomputed BSP structures into the GMF2 format so that they can be loaded from the file. I don't have any numbers yet because there is currently no GMF1 to GMF2 pipeline, but I believe this will significantly reduce load times, especially for large models. I am interested in the idea of replacing the BSP float vertex values with shorts to reduce memory, but I'm not going to worry about it right now. Static Meshes I also am adding making the engine dump vertex and indice data from memory by default when a mesh is sent to the GPU. This will reduce memory usage, since you normally don't need a copy of the vertex data in memory for any reason. void Mesh::Finalize(const bool makestatic) { GameEngine::Get()->renderingthreadmanager->AddInstruction(std::bind(&RenderMesh::Modify, rendermesh, vertices, indices)); if (makestatic) { if (collider == nullptr) UpdateCollider(); vertices.clear(); vertices.shrink_to_fit(); indices.clear(); indices.shrink_to_fit(); } } This change reduced our system memory usage in "The Zone" by 3.8%.
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Kerotemy joined the community
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Lord Peach joined the community
- Yesterday
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Quite busy with career-related obligations at the moment, I have put this project on hold for the past couple of weeks but plan to return to working on it as soon as I can.
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You probably need to install libcurl4. Try using sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
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afecelis changed their profile photo
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any news on a fix for this?
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My best guess is this yielded a 7% performance boost, across the board. I'm not going to test in detail because it takes a lot of changes to modify the vertex format.
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In fact, Leadwerks model files are usually measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes, so compressing those further would make very little difference in your game data size.
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My work with the MD3 format and its funny short vertex positions made me think about vertex array sizes. (Interestingly, the Quake 2 MD2 format uses a single char for vertex positions!) Smaller vertex formats run faster, so it made sense to look into this. Here was our vertex format before, weighing in at 72 bytes: struct Vertex { Vec3 position; float displacement; Vec3 normal; Vec2 texcoords[2]; Vec4 tangent; unsigned char color[4]; unsigned char boneweights[4]; unsigned char boneindices[4]; } According to the OpenGL wiki, it is okay to replace the normals with a signed char. And if this works for normals, it will also work for tangents, since they are just another vector. I also implemented half floats for the texture coordinates. Here is the vertex structure now at a mere 40 bytes, about half the size: struct Vertex { Vec3 position; signed char normal[3]; signed char displacement; unsigned short texcoords[4]; signed char tangent[4]; unsigned char color[4]; unsigned char boneweights[4]; unsigned char boneindices[4]; } Everything works with no visible loss of quality. Half-floats for the position would reduce the size by an additional 6 bytes, but would likely incur two bytes of padding since it would no longer by aligned to four bytes, like most GPUs prefer. So it would really only save four bytes, which is not worth it for half the precision. Another interesting thing I might work into the GMF format is Draco mesh compression by Google. This is only for shrinking file sizes, and does not lead to any increased performance. The bulk of your game data is going to be in texture files, so this isn't too important but might be a nice extra.
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Linux support has stop for now but it still work on ubuntu 16.04 am sure josh will start support Linux again later but i have to say it hard to support all version out there. i think it looks small scale of games as most of them are by India programmers but some of the stuff josh did with nasa is large scale, but you need a team of people not one person to do that type of stuff. fallout was a team of 25 to 100 people to make the game. not something one person can do forgot to say check out the zone that not bad map show what the engine can do and it a good size as well
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Leadwerks has some disadvantages but overall being a perfect choice for 3d Indie game developer. For a remaster of Fallout New Vegas, I don't think Leadwerks can handle
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So I have been considering playing around with game making as a sort of hobby but have been concerned with what engine to use. With Unreal the programing aspect is lackluster, and Unity does not have all that great performance for larger games. I got this engine on a sale on steam a while ago and have started to get a little interested, but also a little warded off. From a number of reviews and whatnot on steam, there have been a number of problems stated, although those are from a few years ago. I was wondering firstly if this engine has actually fixed the problems that developers used to have with the game. Another question is in regards to linux support. I have had a variety of reports that Leadwerks does not support Linux anymore. If I want to use Leadwerks on linux or make games for linux, is that no longer possible? From looking at the game page on the site, it seems like almost all the games are very small scale. I am trying to see if I can make a sort of remaster of Fallout New Vegas with vehicles and modifiable terrain as a personal project. Is something like that possible with this engine or will there be problems with making a game of that scale?
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Term_Grecos joined the community
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Just posting my code here for the beginning of a file export for 3ds max: MacroScript SaveMapMacro category:"File" buttontext:"A Save GMF..." tooltip:"A Save GMF..." ( on execute do ( try ( createFile "C:\\file.txt" ) catch ( format "*** % ***\n" (getCurrentException()) ) ) ) You have to add the macro to the menu via "customize user interface". I started the name with "A " to make the item easier to find in that huge list.
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ydqqgy joined the community
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- Last week
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justuncleben joined the community
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afyonluoglu joined the community
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The GMF2 SDK has been updated with tangents and bounds calculation, object colors, and save-to-file functionality. The GMF2 SDK is a lightweight engine-agnostic open-source toolkit for loading and saving of game models. The GMF2 format can work as a standalone file format or simply as a data format for import and export plugins. This gives us a protocol we can pull model data into and export model data from, and a format that loads large data much faster than alternative file formats. Here is an example showing how to construct a GMF2 model and save it to a file: //Create a GMF file GMFFile* file = new GMFFile; //Create a model GMFNode* node = new GMFNode(file, GMF_TYPE_MODEL); //Set the orientation node->SetMatrix(1,0,0,0, 0,1,0,0, 0,0,1,0, 0,0,0,1); //Set the object color node->SetColor(0,0,1,1); //Add one LOD level GMFLOD* lod = node->AddLOD(); //Create a triangle mesh and add it to the LOD. (Meshes can be shared.) GMFMesh* mesh = new GMFMesh(file, 3); lod->AddMesh(mesh); //Add vertices mesh->AddVertex(-0.5,0.5,0, 0,0,1, 0,0); mesh->AddVertex(0.5,0.5,0, 0,0,1, 1,0); mesh->AddVertex(0.5,-0.5,0, 0,0,1, 1,1); mesh->AddVertex(-0.5,-0.5,0, 0,0,1, 0,1); //Add triangles mesh->AddPolygon(0,1,2); mesh->AddPolygon(0,2,3); //Build vertex tangents (optional) mesh->UpdateTangents(); //Save data to file file->Save("out.gmf"); //Cleanup - This will get rid of all created objects delete file; You can get the GMF2 SDK on GitHub.
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ROM4NTlC .TRADIT.GG. joined the community
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I don’t know you in person, but I’m really proud of you. I’ve graduated 2 years ago, but haven’t worked in my field a day! It’s pretty sad for me, because I do love the major I’ve chosen. I’ve been talking to my friend who had the same problem and she sent me a link to top resume reviews, so I thought about working with them. Good resume can open any door! And I want this door to be opened, because I love it!
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siennawatts joined the community
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There is a very strange place I know. I might be able to sneak in, in two weeks.
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OohRahKill joined the community
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Okay, I have no idea how I missed this in the documentation previously but I've just tried it and it's amazing! Should really get this added into the FPS script so people know it's there and can take advantage of it. Will definitely be using this in my game(s)!!
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Upon final release, yes.
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Linux supported ?
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I'd love to see them!
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I plan on paid updates every 12-18 months, but you can buy one version once and use forever.
