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Brent Taylor

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Everything posted by Brent Taylor

  1. Actually, according to the changelog and official sources, VirtualBox only supports OpenGL 2.1, not 3.0.
  2. Trust me, it doesn't. I do almost all of my development in VM's and it's by far the future. Unfortunately we're still a few years off from truly usable hardware accelerated video passthrough.
  3. Again, I wasn't aware he was writing a C interface for Leadwerks 3D.
  4. Keep in mind, that I don't think he's mentioned anything about a C interface to the engine. For .NET support, you're going to have to write a full on wrapper via C++/CLI as P/Invoke won't be an option.
  5. Seriously, start pointing to some real data on this or you're just spouting bull.
  6. I agree with this. However, I don't think having an officially supported process for creating an installer is a bad idea either.
  7. You definitely want to do some more research into optimization levels and such and precisely how they effect the resulted code performance on different architectures. As for compilation time, don't confuse VS with MSVC. MSVC itself is incredibly fast, on par with GCC and faster in certain cases. VS however slows it down significantly due to the deep inspection it does of source code at compile time. You have to understand, comparing a compiler is not trivial. I'm going to quote Maciej Piechotka here: " Comparing compiler is not trivial: It may vary from processor to processor. GCC may better optimize for i7 and MSVC for Core 2 Duo or vice versa. Performance may be affected by cache etc. (Unroll loops or don't unroll loops, that is the question ). It depends very largely on how code is written. Certain idioms (equivalent to each other) may be preferred by one compiler. It depends on how the code is used. It depends on flags. For example gcc -O3 is known to often produce slower code then -O2 or -Os. It depends on what assumption can be made about code. Can you allow strict aliasing or no (-fno-strict-aliasing/-fstrict-aliasing in gcc). Do you need full IEEE 754 or can you bent floating pointer calculation rules (-ffast-math). It also depends on particular processor extensions. Do you enable MMX/SSE or not. Do you use intrinsics or no. Do you depend that code is i386 compatible or not. Which version of gcc? Which version of msvc? Do you use any of the gcc/msvc extensions? Do you use microbenchmarking or macrobenchmarking? And at the end you find out that the result was less then statistical error Even if the single application is used the result may be inconclusive (function A perform better in gcc but B in msvc). " Using a simple test application is doing yourself a great injustice and is simply naive.
  8. Yes yes, censorship for the sake of a "family" location. Think of the children and all that. I hate politicians. I really do. I'm not one to agree with censorship, for any reason. But that is neither here nor there. Back on topic.
  9. Site reputable sources for this or I call bull. Hint: I've done enough research into this to already know it's bull. So be cautious. EDIT: Since when have we had a swearing/word filter on these boards? Down with censorship!
  10. Err, I assume you mean you have someone on your team that will maintain it and release a VS 2010 lib regularly? Remember, C++ libs are not compatible between compiler versions. A VS2008 lib will generally not work in VS2010, or the other way around. The same is true for GCC libs, they aren't compatible between compiler versions. So unless we have access to the source (we don't), someone on your end will have to take care of it.
  11. See, this is a reasonable solution. NSIS would work quite well for this.
  12. Well it's pretty simple. If you're providing only a library to link against, it's compiler specific due to differences in name mangling, argument passing order and a few dozen other little things that just aren't compatible between compilers, or versions of a compiler for that matter. Much like you can't use a MSVC2008 lib with MSVC2010, you can't use a GCC3 lib with a GCC4 compiler. Just the way it is. Unity is a pretty complex beast in general, but the gist of it is that Unity is a complete sandboxed environment. Everything is embedded .NET so they have complete control of the environment. It's precisely what Josh is looking into doing with Lua.
  13. Yes, sort of. Chrome, Safari and Firefox support WebGL just fine (at least under Windows Vista and up). On the other hand, Microsoft has announced they will not be supported WebGL in IE for the foreseeable future. To be honest, WebGL is extremely insecure right now. It's theoretically possible to break out of the sandbox via the video card. @Josh I haven't looked into embedding any sort of application in a browser in years and I know a lot more security and sandboxing is in place these days. So take what I'm about to say with a healthy bit of skepticism. It's possible, at runtime, for a C++ application to call into a DLL. In fact the Quake 2 engine was designed to do this for all game content. The engine was the executable and would call into a dll that had all the actual game content. Lua does this as well when using C libs written for it. Now, again I'm unsure exactly what security measures are in place these days in the browser for this kind of thing, but I see no reason why games couldn't be compiled as a DLL with a specific entry point that's called by the engine and linked at runtime. In fact this is exactly what your current C++ headers are doing for LE2. You'll just need to do it in reverse. Theoretically this would allow your users to link in any libs they need without modifying or requiring a custom plugin for each game in the browser. EDIT: On further consideration, this is an extremely bad idea. I can think of a number of rather serious attack vectors for this kind of thing that you really can't protect yourself from. I'd highly recommend disabling the use of external C libs from Lua while in the browser as well.
  14. He's right. Targeting Facebook is a big deal right now. I'm more curious as to how he intends this to work if developers are using C++. I can certainly see how this would be fairly doable with Lua. @Josh How are you intending the web plugin to work? Strictly by Lua? For C++ users, is each game going to have it's own plugin? Are you going to use a dll hook? Something else?
  15. About what specifically? The retirement of VS 2008 Express? No article I can point to. It is however what they've been doing for the last decade.
  16. To be honest, I wasn't even aware that you were making a browser plugin available. Still, even with the size difference, it's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to any games that actually use the plugin I'd think. And as mentioned, if you use the silent installer, it requires no user interaction to install at all. This I agree with entirely. I think you may have misunderstood. The redist will be supported pretty much permanently. I'm talking about the availability of Visual Studio 2008 to developers using your engine. Microsoft only supports up to one version behind (of the Express Editions that is). VS 2011 is on the way and 2008 won't even be available for download anymore. In addition, I would not recommend GCC/MinGW on windows as the primary development environment. You're going to find the vast majority third party, proprietary, libraries are compatible strictly with Visual Studio.
  17. And this is precisely what you're supposed to do. Admittedly this is true. I can't help but think from the perspective of someone selling commercial games. Leadwerks, at least from what I've seen on the forums, is most often used for tinkering or visualizations. The engine has a lot of potential, it's just not really being used for much in terms of commercial ventures. My question is why does this fall back to you? Part of your problem is you're not using a traditional installer nor are you actually silently installing the OpenAL redist. Switch to a reasonable installer and you should be just fine. As for people distributing their own games, it should betheir responsibility to get the 2010 redist package installed for their users, provided it's mentioned explicitly in the documentation you provide. Again, it's obviously your choice. I just don't agree with your reasoning. It's not complex to get a real installation package together, nor is it expensive, NSIS and Inno Setup are both free and fully featured. I also feel that you have a bit of a contradiction here. You're largely targeting high end video hardware. Hardware that your average computer buyer simply doesn't have. Those who do have that hardware tend to have a much better understanding of what they are doing. Running an installer is much less of an issue in this case. Now if you were writing a standard bit of desktop software (say, an office application strictly for the sake of an example), I'd agree with you that every additional screen is going to scare people off. However I'd likely still argue for a silent installation of the VS 2010 redist. Please remember, in a year, there will no longer be ANY support for VS 2008. You won't be able to download it nor will the docs be available any longer. I see this as an important showstopper issue.
  18. That seems like a rather easy thing to solve. If it wasn't obvious by the name, it's designed to be redistributed with any application that is compiled against the latest version of MSVC. It's downright trivial to add a silent install option in a game's installation package. In addition, support for Visual Studio 2008 Express is being phased out. Obviously the choice is yours, but that seems to be a pretty silly reason.
  19. Why Visual Studio 2008 over the latest 2010? Did you run into some sort of compatibility issue? As for the Poll, I use VIM and a few custom scripts on any and all OS's.
  20. @Clackdor I highly recommend these: Desgin Docs.
  21. Intel's Atom processor is an x86 chip.
  22. Keep in mind he's looking for a relatively cross platform solution. C++11, while finalized, hasn't been adopted across all compilers and runtimes yet. Intel XE is x86 specific. Neither are really appropriate. Honestly I'm going to have to agree with Metatron here. Boost::thread is the best option currently. @Josh You really should look into the Boost library. Most of it is all template code and is designed to simply be included in a project and used, not dynamically linked. It's very likely the most commonly used library used with C++ outside of the STL itself.
  23. @Josh One nitpick I have is your definition for the Thread class. That was fine back in the days of C, but we have C++ now. #include "../le3.h" #ifdef WINDOWS namespace win32 { #include <windows.h> } #endif namespace le3 { enum Thread_State { THREAD_FINISHED, THREAD_RUNNING, THREAD_PAUSED, THREAD_READY }; class Thread { public: Object* result; #ifdef WINDOWS HANDLE id; Thread_State m_State; #endif Thread(); ~Thread(); virtual void Wait(); virtual bool Resume(); virtual bool Pause(); virtual int GetState(); virtual Object* GetResult(); }; Thread* CreateThread_(Object* EntryPoint(Object* o), Object* o=NULL); } An enum type is far better suited to this.
  24. I stand corrected. Now, keep in mind that the original creator does still own the copyright of the original work and therefore you would have to credit them (depending on your countries laws of course). Also, be very careful doing this. If they used any content that they do not own a license to use in such a fashion, you would also be infringing. For example, lets say they used someone's photo of one of the pyramids in Egypt to texture one of their models without permission to be bound to Google's TOS. Now it's not likely that you'd be caught, but I would highly suggest saying away from the 3D warehouse anyway.
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