Scott Richmond

How fitting to have this discussion during the SOPA blackout.

I'm always on the hunt for good tilable textures. Could you post a few shots that aren't completely washed out?

What are partial terrain models? In regards to PolyVox - Its a really nice lib, and one I've successfully been able to get working in LE2. Unfortunately LE2 isn't the best engine for the job as you really need Texture Array's to make the extracted volumes look nice.

Josh: I've done tests on this in the past - Your Octree OC doesn't play well with for example 50,000 cubes. It takes too long to walk the tree. I've since written my own very basic culling by only model.show() on models the player is surrounded by. Everything else is hidden. I believe we've already discussed this at length in another thread somewhere.

Polyvox is still quite heavily under development. Take a look at the examples it comes with and also hit their forums. The developers are happy to help.

Haven't really read through all of this thread, but I thought I might add that if you really need high detail decals, and they're only simple lines, then you could probably write a shader of some sort that mathematically draws the decals. That way you'd have unlimited details, like vector graphics.

Lazlo - As I stated above, I don't believe that is how MC works at all. I'm open to the fact that Notch is a fairly bad developer, but you're missing a few critical points about such a system: 1. The code is only ever traversing and displaying the outer area of the volume. Using octree's or similar you can efficiently 'walk' the volume to read only the outside cubes. A 128x128x128 volume, if completely solid, will only render as approx 768 cubes out of some 2 million. That's your best case scenario obviously, but you can see that it is a massive improvement. 2. You do not draw the entire cube - You only draw the faces of the cube that are on the outer shell of the surface. That'll cut more than half of your polygon count again. 3. If you don't plan on using models then you best way forward is to use the Marching Cubes algorithm to run a surface extraction on a volume of map data. It will give you the outer shell in one solid mesh. 4. Leadwerks unfortunately is not able to scale very well out of the box with large amounts of random entities - Its occlusion system will chew up much more time than worth while for games that implement many simple entities. You need to disable it and write your own workaround or make it more efficient by using its grouping features. Do a search on the forum - I started a thread on this some months back.

Josh is correct. Games like Minecraft apply a 'surface extraction' technique to a chuck of space and only render out the outer shell of that chuck as a single mesh. Take a look at the PolyVox library.

Ok my notes on the new design: 1. I'd still like to see a decent plugin to support code pasting and syntax highlighting in the WYSIWYG editor. 2. I love the design, however I feel like there should be some sort of line or divider to separate the white margins and the website content. Really no biggie though. 3. The 'Like This' button is a bit extreme - Bright blue and huge. 4. Notifications should notify you of your thread subscriptions. 5. Personal conversations are a bit broken - Avatar's have a long string of bullet points following the size of the post.

o/ . Nice work Josh.

Looking good so far mate.

In regards to injectors, you should take a look at the work of ENB. He is one of the most popular shader modders, with shaders for almost all games. His website is here: http://enbdev.com/index_en.html The way injectors work is that you take a slightly modified d3d9.dll and drop it into the game directory. It redirects the initial call for the games shader file to your own one. From there you can inject your own shader and then pass back to the games one, or discard it entirely.

Ah great. Can't wait to see it.

Fantastic work mate! Really cool stuff. I can't wait to get my own hands on this. You really should consider also packaging it up as an injector so people can use it on other games - Its a surprisingly popular mod type among Fallout, Skyrim, GTA, etc. I would be interested to see what would happen if you halved again the resolution depth buffer so its 1 quarter of its original size. See if you can find that point where the speed returns versus the image quality meet that sweet spot. Once you're done with SSAO you might want to take a look at this brand new AA method I read about last night, Its making a real big splash in the graphics community because its extremely fast and does almost as well as really high end AA settings: http://www.iryoku.com/smaa Open source, so you can go at it.

Congratulations and thank you on the OS release! I'll definitely look at integrating it over the next month or two when the GUI phase comes around.

Right well that equation should get you that, but it won't tell you whether it'll reach its target. You'll need to test each angle and velocity with a collision check to find one that won't hit geometry.

No I believe he will be using physics but I think he's currently programming the AI so it knows what angle and velocity to shoot the projectile at to hit the target. Gamecreator - To answer your question regarding the (x,y) I believe that they are relative variables. That is to say that the position of A is relative to that of B. So: x = targetA.x - targetB.x // That'll get the meters between the launch site and the target y = targetA.y - targetB.y // That'll get hte height of the launch site relative to the target You'll have to mess around with the order of subtraction there I'm guessing, so you don't get any negative values. Do you know how you're going to solve whether it will hit geometry or not?

One programming forum with IPB thread tagging would be solve all the problems. But that's just my opinion.

Still think it adversely segregates the community, but that sounds better than nothing.

Likewise. Really you shouldn't have to commit too much effort or money to at least grab the low hanging fruit. Simply remembering to publish your blog posts to various places would be a great start.

I just had a thought: Something I find difficult with LE is syndication of official news/blog posts. Take for example UDK - I get an email each month of the latest version of UDK with pictures and lists of changes, as well as changes to the documentation including new tutorials - Its actually quite nice. The only missing part is that I feel no connection with the dev team. For LE I get nothing. For LE I have to check G+ for your personal updates, or manually check 'Latest Content'/Blog for new information. This is generally fine, but I think you could do more to market meaningful updates: 1. Do more in G+ for those of us that subscribe to you - Link your blogs. 2. Add 'status updates' for each of your blog posts so it appears on the Forum front page. 3. You'd be surprised at the amount of people interested in the inner workings of hardcore development such as video game engines. Obviously you need to plan your time carefully, but I'd just like to let you know that there is an audience of people who'd probably buy your engine based purely on cool blog posts about cool technology you're developing. Whether its worth your time is another thing, but just saying.

Thread tagging is part of IPB - I think I linked to the official documentation when I mentioned it in 'the thread'. Regarding the documentation blog, i wasn't sure whether you were going to provide an online version that is linkable. Other than those, I can't think of much else that the site needs. Really, all in all, you've done an amazing job at fostering a community.

Good enough I suppose. Personally, I'd like to see the following: 1. Code tag integration for the main languages plus LE3D syntax highlighting. 2. Reconfiguration of the forums - I'm all for the 1 programming forum with thread tags. You've clearly had quite enough discussion on this though. 3. Online version of the LE3D manual to link to, for people asking for advice.

Hrm very interested in trying this when I get home. But I just wanted to throw my support behind smashthewindow for his internship with Josh - So many of us are developing games as a hobby behind other jobs. I would love to see someone get some real experience with Josh and his team as an internship. Those sorts of experiences make such a difference in ones life. I for one would love to see smashthewindow create some blog entries following his internship at Leadwerks - Maybe around contributing to the demo to come with LE3D, or a mobile version of this marble game in LE3D. Make it happen guys.

Perfect! I'd only add now that the last remaining thing is functionality. Are you looking at any functionality changes as part of this work?