Josh

Yes, that's the way it works. I don't really understand your description here. Can you explain more?

That would work.

I don't understand what Mono has to do with Leadwerks on Android. I know Mono works on Android, but the engine doesn't depend on C#, so it's not like that is a hurdle to overcome. Yes, I intend to support Android. I have not yet decided whether Android will be supported at launch. I do want to give it a try soon and see if I can get Leadwerks compiling in the NDK. We've got Windows, Mac, and iOS working, and it would be nice to investigate Android before committing too much code.

I am not aware of any low-cost engine that is doing well. Price isn't the big issue. People will either pull out their credit card or they won't; If people are willing to spend $100, they are willing to spend much more, if they are getting value for their money. Right now there is a lot more value people would be willing to pay for, and the limitation is the time it takes to create that product. Look at this thread, people are asking to give money in exchange for a product that doesn't fully exist yet. That's why I am putting so much effort into the art pipeline. If I can spend 100 extra hours on something that saves 10,000 people two hours each, it's worth it to them. Much better than saying "sorry you have to edit a lot of text files, but you're getting a low price". It also means in the long run, my ongoing support costs are lower because there is an established documented way of doing everything. I just have to make sure we are delivering something that's really valuable to the end users, which is why I am paying more attention to your experience using LE3 instead of just focusing on the underlying technology.

LE3 supports animated textures.

File Name: test item File Submitter: Josh File Submitted: 22 Jul 2011 File Updated: 22 Jul 2011 File Category: Models LOD Versions: Yes This is just a null item we are using for testing. Click here to download this file

File Name: Test Item File Submitter: Josh File Submitted: 22 Jul 2011 File Category: Models LOD Versions: Yes This is only an empty text file for testing! Click here to download this file

It's a challenge to handle user input on mobile devices, because they are so different from a computer. The iPhone version considers screen touches to be mouse hits and movements, so by default you get a reasonably consistent control scheme. Of course, on a PC you can move the mouse position, and on a touch device you cannot forcibly move the user's finger to a given position (yet ). I found an event queue was necessary for more advanced input like screen rotation and multitouch input, so if you need to get that info, the events are available to you.

What are you basing this assertion on?

I have no idea how they support so many formats so well, but I'm glad they do.

Why not?

Don't forget the iPad.

I like that last shot a lot.

So here's what it took to get Leadwerks running on the iPhone: Let's start at the point we had the C++ code building and running with an OpenGL 1 renderer on OSX. I was worried OpenGLES might be a dramatically different API that required a whole new learning curve, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's just a stripped-down version of OpenGL, more like OpenGL 3.3 than anything else. Making the OpenGL2ES renderer was mostly just a copy and paste operation, and then I had to comment out a few unsupported commands. Building for the iPhone simulator was a bit harder. The first problem I ran into was that file paths on iOS are case-sensitive. (They aren't on OSX.) This was problematic, because my asset management code stored file paths in lowercase, so that had to be changed. Then there was the matter of setting the application's file path. A special function had to be written to set this at application startup. The hardest part was the context handling. The flow of an iOS app all revolves around Objective-C events, and this doesn't mix well with a C++ program. What I ended up doing was creating an App class like this: class App { public: bool Start(); bool Continue(); int Finish(); }; Objective-C calls these class functions to keep the program loop running. Once the Continue() function returns false, the application calls Finish() and exits. I'm okay with using this same design across all platforms, if it means your C++ code will run on everything. of course, this is just a convention in the generated project files, and if you want you can code the engine with any program structure you want. This is just the best way to ensure your code runs on everything. The last challenge was setting up the provisioning profiles, certificate, and some other stuff I don't even remember. This was pretty tricky, and took most of the day to figure out. In the end, I just ran through the instructions a second time, and it magically worked. At the end of all that, it was nice to see Leadwerks running on the iPhone. iOS was the hardest platform to add support for, and I don't expect the same difficulty when we add support for Android: Thanks to Ed Upton and Simon Armstrong for their help and advice.

Ah, I found you now. You emailed me from a different email address, but now I know who you are.

One thing you can do to easily change this is open the oildrum.mat material file in a text editor and add a value to increase the specular reflection: texture0="abstract::oildrum.dds" texture1="abstract::oildrumdot3.dds" shader="abstract::mesh_diffuse_bumpmap.vert","abstract::mesh_diffuse_bumpmap_specular.frag" specular=500.0 However, increasing the specular value in the normal map will work better.

It should work if you lock your threads at the right time, but it's a minefield of potential problems.

Use Windows Texture Viewer. Paint.NET does not load alpha channels, apparently: http://developer.nvidia.com/content/windows-texture-viewer Here, the background color is black. You can see how dark the alpha channel is: I'm sorry they don't look the way you want, but a lot of people were complaining that the material was too shiny so I toned it down.

Generally, we make our own IP. I don't like relying on third parties unless it is necessary.

We definitely do not need SpeedTree.

Yes.

It's working here. I made a point light and turned the light's intensity value up a bit: Some people may have adjusted the normal map a bit, or have another normal map applied. The specular intensity is stored in the alpha channel of the normal map. If you make the alpha channel brighter, you get more specular reflection.

No, but that's a good idea.

3D World Studio is designed specifically for making buildings and interior scenes. It's a lot better at this than 3ds max is. The price has not been announced, but it is cheaper to buy LE2 now and upgrade than to wait for LE3. LE3 will run on your laptop. LE2 will not. There's a river script one someone wrote for the editor. We don't support it ourselves. You don't. Our forest rendering is much much better than SpeedTree: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/Products/le2/_/features/terrain-r4 You can use Leadwerks to make commercial games with no royalties due. No. LE3 runs on Mac computers.