Jump to content

Pixel Perfect

Members
  • Posts

    2,110
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Pixel Perfect

  1. Do you have examples of games you have completed before I could look at?
  2. It certainly is an API for programmers, which is part of the beauty of it as it allows you to build an engine around it without being shackled by decisions already having been made for you. The downside is this does indeed take a lot of work and often a major learning curve on the part of the would be engine designer, however this is the best possible experience anyone could acquire if you really want to get the most out of a game engine. LE3 should offer an easier route for those less predisposed to programming game engines but to what degree is as yet still an unknown factor.
  3. I agree too. The majority are hobbists like myself. On top of that LE2 has really only been stable since version 2.3 and it took a while longer to iron out some of the show stopping bugs. Based on that I wouldn't have expected most peoples projects to have been maturing until later this year. I'll certainly be sticking with LE2 to finish what I started but it's a way off yet.
  4. There's a selection of small games and demos made with Leadwerks in the Assets store. Otherwise, there have been other unpublished games which do not appear there and also one published game HOODWINK which uses some elements of the Leadwerks engine (mainly the renderer). LE2 has never really reached that critical mass, in terms of users, to generate many games and it's still a releatively young engine too. Maybe LE3 will.
  5. Well post #5 revealed little. I see it states 'I am totally novice in shader programming' but little else to be honest! No worries, I'm sure josh will get round to answering your latest questions when he has the time.
  6. From all these questions I can only infer you are an experienced game designer. Care to share your background and examples of previous work with us and a brief outline of what you are planning to maybe use LE2 for? Always interested in new members and what they can potentially bring to the community.
  7. That should work but personally I'd recommend UU3D as the way to go, fantastic value for money. Not everyone in the world can buy it though, depends on what country you live in due to Brad's somewhat unusual sales restrictions!
  8. 1. I believe we used to be able to, but I have not done so myself. Someone else will advise 2. You can import a heightmap and apply textures in code, otherwise its a mesh 3. Yes 4. Not without writing your own system 5. I suspect not but havn't tried that, Probably would need to amend the shaders 6. Pretty much 7. Some come as default with the engine but no volumetric light scattering, people have done their own 8. There is some help but it won't include all those features 9. No you do not ... you're on your own
  9. Very nice DH, I like the simplicity of it, I'd be tempted to leave it just as it is First version works better for me!
  10. To be honest Josh, despite your best intentions, I suspect that no change is highly unlikely. On top of that there is considerably more functionality still to be delivered over the next couple of years! Plus, virtually no one apart from yourselves yet has any knowledge regarding how to build games with this engine and I suspect even your knowledge is still limited at this point in time. A book just seems premature a present, that's all I'm saying.
  11. Josh should have got back to you on this if you emailed him your details. If not I would try emailing again to support (at) leadwerks (dor) com
  12. Agreed ... pointless until the product has stabilised!
  13. Cool idea but interesting to see the make up of the people behind this: Seemingly written with 'The Venture Capitalist's game engine we dare not mention' here are some of the key team members: Thomas Buijtenweg appears to be an experienced game developer with several games behind him. I would say a perfect example of team work with lots of programming as well as artistic input guided by an experienced game designer.
  14. Good to have you aboard Arkii ... enjoy
  15. I think that is what its all about. Good luck Roland and team!
  16. I was addressing YouGroove directly and his opinions with my own. I see no issue with that. It distinguishes his contribution from anyone elses. It's a discussion not a personal attack. Have you not noticed that a quote specifies the person directly too! It wasn't required here because my response was straight after his post. By the way ... inferring I am not intelligent by addressing someone personally is paramount to a personal attack You might want to think on that lol
  17. I think you are somewhat missing the point. Programming IS required in order to add any degree of originality to a game, no matter what engine you're starting with. It's not about pure programmers (I really don't understand this terminology anyway) wanting to write their own stuff .... it's simply still, in this juncture of time, an absolute necessity!
  18. I partly agree with you but I still think you are going to find that artists are still in a position where they struggle to realise anything but the simplest games even with LE3. Flowcharts are great for simple stuff but anything more complex becomes a complex exercise in itself! The same with scripting. In reality, for anything other than a very simplistic game, Artists and Programmers need to team up. This is why you will find programmers being a little sceptical about engines designed to automate game play functionality. I am however prepared to eat my words if need be as most of us have not seen LE3 in any form yet
  19. Really, whilst I'm all for a C++ OOP environment that does seem to be flying in the face of what a large percentage of the LE3 wannabes seem to be wanting. Are you saying that LE3 is aimed specifically at programmers again as was the case with LE2 whilst the majority seem to want less coding and more automation? Is this an interesting final twist emerging or are you simply relying on the programming community's altruistic donation of code to enable the more artistic members to realise their own game development dreams? If that's the case then that seems strangely at odds with not providing a plugin type framework which really aids community development and integration!
  20. I would completely agree with this. Even a fairly simple game engine is beyond the capabilities of most would be game designers if they are having to code it themselves and have no prior experience of writing a game engine. Whilst LE2 has some issues (what engine doesn't) I believe it is perfectly capable of forming the basis of a viable game engine and has been for a while. It is a numbers game as Rick says!
  21. If I understand you correctly you are wanting to spawn named actors in real time at given waypoints and then retrieve those actors by name? Why not simply store pointers to those objects as they are created along with the names you want to reference them as in a map container. You can then write a function to search the indexed map container for any named Actor and return a pointer to the actor instance. You could also used a named key to store the Actor name in the entity itself. You could save the pointer and class name as keys too if you wanted so you could cast it back to the the Actor Class. I'm not sure if you actually meant the waypoints (markers, dummy objects etc) themselves but the same techniques could be used.
  22. That's exactly where it is ... in the Tools section second item from the top!
  23. Pixel Perfect

    Unit Testing

    It's a law of diminishing returns. Normally far better optimization is achieved by optimizing your own code routines after profiling your code to see where the real time is being spent. It may never need optimizing, that is a real possibility if your code is written well. As already stated the gains are very small for the types of optimizations Canardian is proposing, especially in a game engine where so much time is spend in rendering cycles etc! Nothing wrong with implementing these things from the start but if you haven't its not really worth going back over your code. Generally speaking, imho unless absolute performance is critical maintainability should always win out over performance practice. For most applications CPU cycles are in abundance!
  24. I would say no. Simply call the delete function on the stored pointer when you wish to delete this object and lets its destructor take care of this. You should retain the pointer to the object for as long as the object is still required. So assuming the continued existence of the model being rendered is dependent on the existence of the object (that is the object is responsible for the destruction of the model when the object is itself destroyed) the pointer should be retained until such point as you no longer require the objects existence. If I understand your description, you have a model (possibly dynamic and animated) which is destroyed upon collision with some unspecified object/s. This model is then replaced with another model which represents the destroyed original. How you handle this very much depends on whether the new model has a separate existence as a class object in its own right, in which case the previous object could be destroyed at this point, or whether the same object invokes the model replacement in which case it would need to remain until such times as you no longer wish to display the destroyed model. I'm not sure if the 5 second timer you are referring to indicates that the destroyed models existence is planned to only be for 5 seconds and then disappears from the game? Either way, so long as you retain the pointer to the object until it needs to be destroyed it makes little difference as to whether that is still in your vector collection or held elsewhere. As I don't know if your collection has any further purpose than just to maintain a list of existing game objects for subsequent destruction, or if it is used for calling update functions for instance every iteration of the game loop, I can't really comment on the need to remove it prior to the start of the timer or once it completes.
×
×
  • Create New...