tinyboss

Thanks for your interest, Patrick! I'll do my best to show you something worthy of it. ;-) I figured out how to load prefabs dynamically with Lua this morning. Not much to figure out there, except the MINOR detail that positions in code are set in meters, not centimeters as I was used to from working in the editor. I thought my stuff wasn't loading at all, but really it was just so far away that I couldn't see it. Luckily Genebris set me straight and now I can load my prefab walls, floors, and stuff wherever I want it. Next will be hardcoding a simple three-or-four-room dungeon and assembling it. Unfortunately, I'm moving and will be super busy for the next few days. But I'll get back to coding as soon as possible!

Oh well. I just realized that there's nothing keeping me from doing my script editing from Notepad++, so I'm much less concerned about it now than when I wrote this.

I've found that if I leave Leadwerks open while my computer is idle for a while, then when I come back and try to run with F6, I get this error: Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information. I'm not sure exactly how long it takes, maybe an hour or two? Long enough that my monitor turns off, if that helps. It's pretty consistent, i.e. if I've been gone for many hours, then it happens without fail. I'm running Windows 8.1 64-bit.

Bingo! Thanks!

Any chance we could get some improvements to the script editor? Particular annoyances: Auto-indent: This is a huge one. I'm not even talking about intelligently increasing the indent level after "do" and decreasing it after "end"--I can do that for myself. But when we press <enter> can we at least have the new line match the indentation level of the current one? Tab size: It's a personal preference, but I think 8 is a pretty unpopular choice. If we can't have a setting for it, can we at least reduce it to 4, which is much more standard? <alt-tab> behavior: When I switch over to my browser to check the documentation and then come back to Leadwerks, the editor no longer has focus and I have to reach for my mouse. Not only that, but I have to click in the right place in the editor to get back to where I was.

Note: I'm very new to Leadwerks, so most likely I'm missing something obvious. I've created a 512x512 floor block and I'm trying to load a 4x4 square of them with the following code: --Dynamically create some dungeon geometry: System:Print("loading dynamic floor") self.floors = {} for i = 1, 4 do for j = 1, 4 do floor = Prefab:Load("Prefabs/Tinyboss/floor2.pfb") table.insert(self.floors, floor) floor:SetPosition(2048+512*i, 0, 512*j) System:Print(floor:GetPosition().x.." "..floor:GetPosition().y.." "..floor:GetPosition().z) end end self.FirstTime = false (I put it at the end of the App:Start function in app.lua. I also tried running it once in the App:Loop function, but that didn't help.) When I run with F6, I see all the stuff that I've added in the editor, but none of the dynamically loaded floor tiles show up. I can tell from the print statements that entities are getting loaded and their positions are being set, but I don't see any of them. Is there something else I need to do to add them to the current scene, or something else I'm missing here? Thanks!

Two good solutions, thanks!

My first baby steps will be: A first set of prefabs for modular dungeon layout Floor Ceiling Wall Up stairwell Down stairwell [*]Dynamically build the dungeon with Lua based on a hard-coded layout [*]Use stairs to move between levels That's it for the first set of goals! Gotta keep it simple and doable. So far I've got floor, ceiling, and wall prefabs done and I'm starting to look into dynamically placing them with Lua. The textures and geometry are just whatever I could whip up easily and so they don't look great, but one thing at a time.

About Tinyboss Games Well, it's just me making games in my spare time. I've got two games published on the Google Play Store, Coinbox Clicker and Coinbox Clicker 2. These were developed with Corona SDK, which is a pretty nice tool for authoring mobile games with Lua. I've always stayed away from 3D games due to the complexity, but Leadwerks had a 50% sale on Steam and I saw that it uses Lua as well, so thought I'd give it a try. So far it looks like it'll be feasible to make a game I've had kicking around in my head for a while now, which is a... First-Person Roguelike Roguelikes, Roguelike-likes, and Rogue-lites have been hot for a while now, but I've loved the genre since Rogue, Larn, Moria, Nethack, and Angband. Ever since Ultima Underworld I've wanted to play a proper Roguelike from a first-person perspective. Some recent games like Delver and Ziggurat have gotten me excited, but didn't deliver the experience I have in mind. They're not bad games, but they don't capture the complexities of the Roguelike experience (and to be fair, I don't think they're trying to). If Delver and Ziggurat are first-person Rogue-lites, then I'm aiming to make a first-person Roguelike. That means races, classes, experience levels, skills and feats, stealth, spells, weapons, armor, wands, rings, potions, scrolls, artifacts, gods, procedural and persistent dungeon levels, and a variety of enemies. A proper Roguelike experience also means turn-based, and that's a problem for a FPS style game! I plan to tackle this with a "dynamic pause" system, which the player can toggle on and off at will. While dynamic pause is active, the world automatically freezes unless the player is moving. This allows plenty of time for planning while preserving the FPS feel (I hope!). So that's really ambitious, I know. But I think it'll lend itself well to development in chunks. My roadmap toward the first playable alpha will be in an upcoming post. Thanks for reading!

Ah, thanks!

What's the best way to make 16cm-thick walls or other boxes that don't have dimensions that are multiples of 32? The only ways I know of are to turn grid snapping completely off in the options, or to change the scale (and then the position) in the object properties. Is there a more convenient method I don't know about?

Is there a hotkey (or other means more convenient than digging in the options menu) to disable grid snapping temporarily? Or is there any way to get a grid finer than 32cm?

Imchasinyou, I applied the flicker script and tweaked the settings, and it does indeed look great. Thanks for the tip! I can see a lot of potential here for one-man-friendly development.

Thanks, Rick, the material was where I needed to look. I changed it to use "emmision.shader" and BOOM self-lit torch!

Thanks again guys, it's looking better now! I still have no luck making the torch object itself be self-lit. I can change the brightness, and in the editor I see the object getting brighter. But when I run the scene, there's no effect whatsoever. I tried it on a wall and on the floor too, and the behavior is the same.

Dan22, thanks for the quick and extremely helpful answer! Turns out I was changing the specular, not diffuse, color. Turning off specular and changing the diffuse color really improved things. I actually do have a normal map, but I got it from "generate normal map" in the Leadwerks editor. I'll look into using Gimp to make a better one. Is there any way to have an object be "self lit"? Thanks again!

First of all, I'm just getting started with Leadwerks. So thanks in advance for any help, and please don't think there's anything too basic to mention. ;-) I'm working on a dungeon environment, and I'm trying to make a torch. I made a cone, gave it a wood texture, and added a particle emitter and point light. Okay, so it's a torch, but it's really, I mean really, ugly: Here are my questions: I hate how the torch itself looks, all shiny like that. At first it was just totally dark, since I had the point light on top. Then I moved the light in front hoping to light up the torch, but it just has this hard shiny glare on it. Can I tell Leadwerks to render the wooden cone at full ambient lighting? I don't like the light itself, either. I hate the way it casts those shiny highlights on the walls. I wish I could more or less have the effect of an ambient light, in a globe around the torch. Is something like that possible? I've messed with the color of the point light, but I can never tell that it makes any difference. Is it just very subtle, or am I doing something wrong? Thanks very much!