[Next Steps]

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After that I think I will focus on the physics and navigation systems, exposing the entire API to Lua...

With Turbo and its extreme lightning cowabunga speed capabilities , do you plan to have dynamic navmesh generation to be an available feature like shown in the early LE3 dev videos? 

 

[Adding LOD to the Model Class]

This for LE4 or "turbo"?

[Clustered Forward Rendering - Multiple Light Types]

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I plan to add boxlights next. These use orthographic projection (unlike spotlights, which us perspective) and they have a boundary defined by a bounding box, with no edge softening. They have one purpose, and one purpose only. 

Aren't boxlights like area lights? Would you be able to use it for representing light coming from florescent tube lighting?

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Other stuff I am considering

• Colored shadows (that are easy to use).
• Volumetric lights either using a light mesh, similar to the way lights work in the deferred renderer, or maybe a full-screen post-processing effect that traces a ray out per pixel and calculates lighting at each step.
• Area lights (easy to add, but there are a lot of possibilities to decide on). These might be totally unnecessary if the GI system is able to do this, so I'm not sure.

Colored shadows will be nice to have again if the color can be controlled by what is casting the shadow or at least user defined per entity. This would definitely help when you have translucent objects in a scene. It just looks weird to have a completely black shadow cast by something like a glass object like we have now in LE4.

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I really want to find a way to render realistic light refraction, but I can't think of any way to do it other than ray-tracing:

If you get this working cheaply that would be pretty amazing. 

[Voxel Cone Tracing Part 4 - Direct Lighting]

You need to tighten up the graphics - that stuff looks pixelated.

[What Makes a Good Brand Name?]

Fair enough - and I hope you are correct. I'm probably in the upper age percentile of your user base, so my perception of the word 'turbo' probably has a different connotation than what maybe the other younger users have with that word. 

10 hours ago, AggrorJorn said:

However, I do see your point on the word 'Turbo' being an 'outdated' word. Like CangoJoe, the first thing that came to mind when reading the word 'Turbo', was Far cry blood dragon with its neon style. Since Josh has trademarked the engine and bought an expensive domain name, I just don't think it is going to change. 

Heh. What's funny about that is you associate it with a 2013 far cry game that is purposely emulating an 80's style whereas I am just associating it with the 80's. Thanks for making me feel old.  Then again I am sure half the people that read Josh's response about Karate Kid, first thought of that horrible remake with the Fresh Prince's kid. And I am pretty sure only a handful of people here understood my New Coke™️ reference without googling it...

In any case, I do hope Josh is right and I do agree with the decision to stay away from 'Turbo 3D' - it would be too much like a motel today promoting it has color tv's or a 2018 movie boasting to have technicolor. I would vote for Turbo Engine / turbo / TE as the possible ways to reference and stay far away from any TGE usage.

[What Makes a Good Brand Name?]

TGE - not exactly the abbreviation you want your new engine to be associated with, is it? a failed engine that died a bloated mess that became so commercially unattractive they made it open source? and wth is TEG- just stop.

On 6/8/2018 at 6:04 PM, Yue said:

For now we can only hope to see the birth of TEG.  ( Turbo Engine Game) 
 

 

Honestly, the more I say it out loud and look at this- I agree with cangojoe initial response. 'Turbo' seems dated and maybe since I'm old I can remember the 80's where everything had turbo as its name or feature to the point that it really meant nothing. It's like the 90's version concerning the usage of the word 'EXTREME'. Or maybe thats your plan. Version1 is turbo, version2 is super turbo, version3 is extreme turbo... ? Dunno. I think its a shame you are abandoning a brandname with recognition and reputation because some person might not be able to pronounce it correctly the first time they come across it in print. I just hope your idea here doesn't turn into New Coke ™️

Edit -- Not trying to be rude here, just upfront and honest with you. You seem to get a lot of fanboyish, yes-men feedback here. But if memory serves, some of the people I see posting here about how much they like this name are some of the same people that encouraged you to make LE3 initially for mobile.

[Three improvements I made to Leadwerks Game Engine 5 today]

23 hours ago, Josh said:

although I might add some new light types.

ooh! area lights please!

 

[Lua in Leadwerks 5 is Solved]

surprising you would want to walk away from your brand recognition that you have built up for over a decade by abandoning the Leadwerks name... 

[How I turned my 3D game into a VR game with eight lines of code]

Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.

[Vehicle Improvements in 4.5]

Ok, so you are saying whereever the individual visual tire models are positioned/rotated at the time of their inclusion to the new AddTire() thats where the pivots/axles will be created. Sounds good.

Will the new AddTire() also have adjustable parameters for tire size, suspension details, friction, etc? 

[Vehicle Improvements in 4.5]

20 minutes ago, Josh said:

Your assumption is wrong dear Macklebee.  All it requires is that you pass it an entity.  It matters not from whence it came.

For backwards compatibility the original AddTire command is left in place, and it will create a pivot and pass that to the new interface.

Okay, please explain how that will work. The new AddTire appears to be just using an entity and the steering parameter with no reference to position or rotation of the tire since its being assumed that the tire is already a submesh of the model and correctly aligned. So If I use the new command with separate car and tire models, how does it know where to place the pivot? And the old AddTire() has no reference to a separate tire entity, so how do you make the relationship between the physics and visual tire with the old command?

Or is this relationship built inside the editor by manually placing the tire models in the correct position/rotation and also placing tires as children under the car model parent in the scene browser?

[Vehicle Improvements in 4.5]

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You no longer have to position the visible tire models yourself to match the tire orientations, as this is all done automatically.  So we've taken a very complicated advanced system and made it very accessible and quick to get running.

What does this mean for vehicles where the wheels were not limbs of the car model? i assume that it will still require us to set the visible tire matrix to the physics tire matrix?

[Documentation Update 2]

 

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EnableMotor

This function turns on a hinge or slider joint's built-in actuator and allows fine control over joint movement. Use this with the command SetMotorAngle to control joints.

This command is not available for Lua.

 

This command IS available for lua.

[Forum Update]

Just now, Josh said:

Unrelated, but the notification / reply system on the software update is great.

Agree - beats having to refresh constantly

[Forum Update]

Good deal. I think that's always been an extremely useful feature here.

[Forum Update]

will there not be a chat any more?

[Version 4.4 beta updated]

Creating a Ball Joint causes the engine to crash.

 

Run the example in the API reference to duplicate: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/api-reference/_/joint/jointball-r732

[Documentation Update 2]

 

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Slider

static Joint* Slider(float posx, float posy, float posz, float pinx, float piny, float pinz, Entity* child, Entity* parent=NULL)

Syntax

• Shape PolyMesh(Surface surface)

Parameters

 

https://www.leadwerks.com/docs.php?page=API-Reference_Object_Joint_Slider#

[Documentation Update 2]

BuildNavMesh

 

This function builds a navigation mesh for AI pathfinding.

Returns

 

Returns a 4x4 matrix describing the tire's position and orientation in space.

hmmm this may explain why none of my vehicles work....

[Website Design]

I kind of liked the random banner pictures that were made from people's games.

[Leadwerks 4.3 RC3]

Pretty much. LE2's Editor had an altitude setting that let you bump the imported heightmap up and down but still you never could go below 0.

[Leadwerks 4.3 RC3]

I suspect your imported heightmap results in a terrain above 0 on the Y-axis. LE as far as I can remember has never let you go below 0 with terrains. Only suggestion is for you to increase the altitude of your landscape prior to creating your lake.

[Leadwerks 4.3 RC2]

Found something...

sounds promising...

[You Won't Believe what Analytics in Leadwerks Reveal]

I am aware of a bug with brush texture mapping in prefabs, and hope to fix that shortly.

Also, if possible, take a look at the issue with a prefab's child entities with a script not performing the Start() function when the prefab is loaded via code. Its almost as though the 'NoStartCall' flag is hardcoded when using Prefab:Load().

[Common Bottlenecks]

It should be a system built into the model editor, and you would probably save more performance with bones than with reducing polygons, although I would do both.

Yes, I would say the number of bones definitely has more to do with performance than the polygons - at least comparing the crawler to the zombie models. The crawler has almost twice as many polygons as the zombies.