[Procedural Terrain]

The final result is really impressive. Reminds me of Borderlands terrain; lots of playable plateau areas and realistic, sharp cliffs.

[Announcing Leadwerks 3]

BLaBZ, this seems like the initial reasoning behind the change. But it doesn't take into consideration a lot of real-world constraints.

 

Without offering any significant discount (who are we fooling here? 500$ is still one or two months of rent for a lot of indies) or a similar feature-set to its existing niche market, Leadwerks has to rebuild its audience from the ground up. Meaning, unlike the competition, that it has no reputation, no proven testing, and no games made (really, the contest which doesn't even pay for the engine isn't that interesting).

 

Rebuilding an audience is possible if you have a competitive product at competitive prices. In the price department, Leadwerks 3 falls short: for an independent developer with no backing investor for upfront costs, free alternatives with royalties or publish-time-licensing (Unity, UDK, and even CryEngine now) are the predominant choices. As for the features, the balance doesn't weigh towards the Leadwerks 3 Beta either: no terrain, no networking, no GUI, no high-quality rendering, etc. And most of all, no guarantee that these won't be another paid update.

 

Let's even pretend that these were free updates -- what guarantee do we have that by the time they are implemented, Leadwerks Inc. won't have gone bankrupt? As demonstrated today, prominent members of the community are in an ongoing exodus, and without investors backing Leadwerks Inc., nothing guarantees that the company will last long enough off meager launch-day sales to provide said updates or lasting support (because remember - we're buying a potentially buggy beta here).

 

So essentially, the effort Leadwerks is asking its long term customers is to purchase an engine from 4 to 12 times the price of the previous version, with 25% actual rebate, with much less real-world, output features than the previous version, without guarantee of either affordable upgrades, nor even upgrades at all, nor lasting support?

 

Leadwerks Inc. cannot expect its users to adhere to the venture capitalist, risk-taking mindset without doing it itself. Why would they? After all, indie games on little to no upfront costs have made millions.

 

(Oh, and this post does not even begin to cover the inexcusable philosophy change of the predominance of business and quick profits for an indie engine).

[Announcing Leadwerks 3]

Congratulations on the release!

I'll see if I can put aside some things to participate in the game competition.

Time to rationalize my budget for the purchase.

[One Little Thing]

Haha, I agree with Josh. Don't use your own custom, globally unknown and confusing type defs.

 

If you feel like "float", "int", "unsigned char", etc. are not specific enough and platform variant, use stdint.h (which is, you know, explicit, standardized and known by most C/++ programmers).

 

int => int32_t
unsigned short => uint16_t
unsigned char => uint8_t

 

etc.

 

http://stackoverflow...e-or-not-stdint

[Docs]

These command names are like the recognizably-shaped gift you see wrapped under the Christmas tree.

[Merry Christmas, and a look at our new headquarters]

I for one prefer a single monitor. After using duals for about 2 years, I came to the conclusion that I was wasting time managing a second screen.

[Progress]

While I agree that the "command" "pattern" (both in quotations intentionally) is ridiculous, the simple approach of saving every state of the program for each action is lazy (but that's not bad per se) and extremely memory consuming.

 

What I'd do is have a reverse action for each action, push the action to a stack, and pop the reverse on undo. Tadah.

[Progress]

Undo functionality is my absolute least favorite thing to program

We can testify.

-Every Leadwerks 2 user, ever.

[What light through yonder Windows breaks?]

"Windows supports binary files, so use them."

"For what?"

"For everything."

[Rewerking the Asset Class -or- Back that Asset Up]

Smart pointers really do seem interesting. I wouldn't want to have to manage my ref count either.

 

Think of the Lua scripters, who use this language to avoid the complexity of C++. If they don't want to deal with pointers, they certainly wouldn't want to deal with reference count either.

 

They'd want it to "Just work".

[Left 2 Do]

I just got the title's pun!

[Left 2 Do]

Josh mentioned wanting to use states. However, I can see how that can grow to a high RAM usage fast. I use something similar to the command pattern too usually.

[Left 2 Do]

So close!

Keep it up!

[Rewerking the Asset Class -or- Back that Asset Up]

The alternative to having a memory management system like this is either memory leaks or invalid pointer deletion crashes.

That's not a fatality. Yes, with people who do not understand how memory management works and do not call delete, this will happen. If you code properly, it won't. In the same spirit, using your newly proposed system will lead to invalid reference count crashes or objects that stay in memory indefinitely when they shouldn't, because people forget to call "IncRefCount" or "Release" or call them too often.

 

 

Also, why do we have the static Load() and Create() methods again vs using new? I know there was a reason but can't seem to remember.

 

Constructors are not passable through a DLL for other languages, I think this was the reason. Also, in languages that require class wrapping (Java, C#, etc.), using static classes allowed to have 'Entity::Create' instead of 'Engine::CreateEntity', which is a nice syntactic sugar.

[Rewerking the Asset Class -or- Back that Asset Up]

I agree with Rick. It seems counter-intuitive to me to have to call IncRefCount. After all, why would I? I have a texture object, I want to use it, why should I do anything to it first? Similarly, using Release() instead of delete seems just as counter intuitive. Normal C++ would do exactly as in your first example.

 

I understand you're removing internal classes this way, but for the end user, it's not prettier, not more intuitive, and will actually be a bother in the long run if we have to type this for every object.

 

In the "source purity" aspect, this has the adverse effect of making me think this wasn't designed for C++, but just patched to work with it.

[Leadwerks 3 begins closed beta test]

D'oh, missed it. Guess I should have done more game development in the past year.

[Halloween Horrors with Objective-C]

I think you may underestimate the amount of work in an undo system for an editor as complex as Leadwerks 3's.

 

But hey, it's almost over, so cheers.

[Entity Script System]

I like the "Add Component..." approach better.

[Let's Make a Game - Procedual Content Creation (part 01)]

Procedural content generation truly is the future of indie game development. Not having to worry about artists for your props, level or even characters would give developers a huge boost in base assets, and perhaps help unlock funds with the added credibility for future specific assets in their game or software.

 

I have a tree generator side project that I develop when I get time off school and other work. Here's a screenshot for the curious:

[Can you paint with all the colors of the wind? Leadwerks can.]

Expected behaviour for a fade would obviously be RGB, not HSV.

 

I can only see this being used for unicorns, gay pride, or nyan cat.

[Moving Right Along...]

FatCow includes the 32x32 version, y'know.

[A Story of IT]

The only thing I'll ever bother using for communities any more is Vanilla Forums. It's the most lightweight I found.

[Model Editor hierarchy editing]

Great. But let me complain about icons: Use one consistent set! The FatCow one I linked you has a Folder icon, and a Lightbulb icon. If you need other specific ones (e.g. 3D cube), ask an artist for help. I know a good hobbyist for this task, he probably won't charge a lot (<$100 for all your custom FatCow-like icon needs). I know he can work well with that set by experience. PM me if you want the details.

[Model Tools]

That first buggy tearpot image is pure art.

[S-M-R-T]

Actually, S-M-A-T would fit the situation better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria