[iOS 6 Blues]

Way to go Josh, we really appreciate you bridging the gap and look forward to paying you handsomely for it.

[AI: A New Frontier]

Wouldn't you want all of the objects to inherit the same type?

 

Then essentially you're applying the AI to the same type but the child class *could* utilize the AI differently.

[An Opportunity to Revolutionize Web Presentation]

Those are awesome 3d libraries if you wanted to make a game.

 

But purely for conveying information you would want to use something different, something with a 3d based GUI system that would format text.

[A tale of optimization]

Great job Josh! I'm impressed, never would of thought there'd be much of a difference between procedural code and dynamically located objects....

[Designing Characters & Concept Art]

And when I say "cost of good 3d models" im talking about the ratio of your income to cost of things in general

[Designing Characters & Concept Art]

I totally agree to an extent.

 

I'm not an expert by any means when it comes to 3d artwork, and good 3d artwork can take a lot of time, but where you invest your time can determine the cost of good 3d models.

 

I've invested a lot of time into programming to progress career wise to be able to afford a good 3d modeler. Instead of being generally good at everything(a jack of all traits) I prefer to become an expert at one thing.

 

Time and money wise this just makes sense to me.

[2 Leadwerks vs BlitzResearch - Unique But similar directions]

Good insight Rick!

 

I'm feeling more positive about LE3D

[2 Leadwerks vs BlitzResearch - Unique But similar directions]

I'm skeptical of the idea of using Lua because it can't be compiled. How secure is a online multi-player game written in Lua?

 

If I want to redistribute a framework written on top of LE3D how can I redistribute it with cross platform compatibility and security?

 

Are we going to be able to code in C for iOS with LE3D and other console native languages?

[ZombieTime]

Is this a form of A* path finding?

 

Does the nav mesh act as a grid? Would this work on a sphere? Having objects navigate the outer side of the sphere?

 

You're tickling my curiousity

[RTS/Tower Defense]

Looks awesome Rick!

 

I've been working on an RTS Engine for the last 2 years, it's turned out to be a lot more work then I anticipated,

 

I'm using A* and I would definitely suggest threading the pathing and make the main thread non-dependent on the the pathing thread to "finish."

 

If you have hundreds of units it can be taxing, I've also implemented a grouping feature that finds units in adjacent gridsquares and only paths once for them.

 

These little things make a huge difference and if you're having a fun time with the path finding as it is may be fun to optimize and add features.

[Leadwerks Visits Sacramento State University]

I really like your style of blogging,

 

Glad to see things continue to develop

[S-M-R-T]

This is a nice thought but if the tools aren't sufficient then most people won't be able to make their games. Which seems to be the consensus with LE2. Sure you'll have a couple people like NA finish their games but the idea is to reach the majority of people. When you allow your tools to be extended it gives you a better chance to reach the majority because now you have 1000+ programmers potentially helping you make community tools which has more potential to make something useful for others to reach their goal of making a game easier.

 

Spot on.

 

From a business stand point, if you think the effort in making the editor extendable is going to generate profits that were worth the effort then do it.

 

Maybe make a poll.

 

"Would having an extendable editor be a feature you would use?"

 

There are a lot of untapped niche markets Leadwerks could slam if it had this feature.

[I had an idea..]

LoL Cool idea, how top level should the engine become?

 

Maybe Josh could add a CreateGame() function

[S-M-R-T]

Also... what are you using to develop the GUI? Winforms? wxWidgets?

[S-M-R-T]

Josh, you shouldn't take offense to community asking for extendability, you should take it in a positive note... We support you enough that we don't want you to have to do everything... It seems you take this as a slap against you. Its not, at least that's how I take it... Most just see what downfalls there are in LE2 and don't want to see them in LE3.. The editor being one of them...

So you're saying the community assumes the new editor won't meet their needs, and it's their responsibility to fix it? If that turns out to be the case when it is released, I shouldn't be in business.

I think some people might be able to turn that around on you and say it frightens them that you would think you can give them everything they want, because it's not realistic. Like any other piece of software having the ability to extend it yourself is a very powerful and attractive feature. That's just the reality in today's world.

I haven't heard anyone name a single thing they want to extend the editor to do, except you mentioned you wanted to create a pathfinding system as an alternative to the built-in one.

 

Nooo Josh, completely misinterpreted.

 

What if I'm writing a specific type of game and I want the editor to reflect it to make development just that much quicker and easier.

 

For example.. What if someone was creating a FPS game and wanted the Editor to reflect something that of the FPS Creator interface

 

All I'm saying is this could be a good opportunity to make the editor more flexible, not to mention you could sell "editor modules" FPS Module, RTS Module, RPG Module etc

 

It's about taking something great, and enabling users to make it better.

[S-M-R-T]

Looks great! Is the editor going to resemble something that of Unity or Shiva?!

 

It would be great if the actual editor was extensible via LUA so community members could extend/enhance the tools

[Start of flowgraph dev]

This looks cool! I had an idea that was similar to this,

 

What's the difference between an Action and an Event? Is an action a function pointer of some sort?

[Coding:The Ultimate Goal]

To add more design styles to your bag of tricks check out this thread on C++ events http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/topic/255-c-events/page__p__1991__hl__event__fromsearch__1#entry1991

 

My examples are GUI oriented but event systems can be used in many situations besides GUI's. You can fire events when certain variables in a class change so that other classes can be informed when that happens so they can do certain things.

 

Let's say for some reason you want your enemies to know when the health of your player changes. You can either loop through each enemy and tell them the players health value each frame, or at the start of the game you can have enemies bind to the players OnHurt event. Then in the players Hurt() function fire this event so all enemies get it called.

 

There are many different things you can do with events as far as game design goes and it's another technique you can use.

 

Wow, that's awesome Rick thanks a lot!! I'd imagine using a Event system like that would make multi threading a bit easier, do you code for a living?

[1 month of Game developing]

Sweet deal! Are those college courses you're taking?

 

What's cool about learning those concepts in Java is that they also apply to c# and just about any language, just a difference in syntax,

 

I've found when it comes to AI that just following a pragmatic approach can really simplify things esp w/finite state machines

[An almost Silly Blog Post]

Honestly conquering a "language" is the easy part. Getting to know all the libraries a language has takes more time and is never ending as new libraries come out.

 

.NET is a good example of that. The language itself isn't hard, but there are tons of classes and frameworks in .NET, that will keep you busy for years and years.

 

The language of C++ isn't all that hard, but there are endless amount of libraries for it and learning a bunch of those (and weeding through the bad ones) can take time.

 

The best advice about learning the language and different features would be to read online, and ask questions here. The biggest drawback I find in this community is that most people don't want to talk about design. I don't know if they don't want anyone to steal their design or what, but talking about how you want to design some class or your entire game really helps get a wide range of views on it.

 

Doing a design yourself can be rewarding but chances are you'll miss something that if you talked about it would have come out, and you could save yourself a ton of time later on in your development.

 

That's awesome to hear! I found that once you understand one language(if it a decently capable one) picking up another language is pretty easy! Typically the only difference is syntax and a few capability differences hear and there.

 

I read a quote that said "Don't program in a language program into a language" which basically translates to "Don't make the language your limitation, code it how you would think it." So if there's something I want to do, and I'm not aware of how a language would do it, I post on a forum, and it seems like whoever designed the language thankfully thought of it before me

 

The code is now bending to my desires as oppose to me bending to the codes limitations

[Kabul Street]

Wow, that is incredible,

Would you have any advice or know any tutorials that could help me improve my texturing?

[Picking Up St(r)eam...]

LoL would you say any language satisfies you? aside from english?