Pixel Perfect

The Island demo was what everyone associated Leadwerks with I think, it was nice, showed off the graphics capability perfectly!

A really simple example of lip synced speech using an 'off the shelf' model which was not designed with speech in mind. I rigged it with a simple set of facial bones and weighted it accordingly. The lip movement is only using about 18 vertices so is pretty limited in the degree of shaping you can achieve but even so it's sufficient to give the illusion of speech in your game. Using this technique I could pretty much animate any model to talk. Obviously models designed with facial animation in mind are capable of much higher quality. Voices courtesy of Steve from Arteria3D

No, LE2 will continue to be supported, at least for the meantime. Many of us are not moving to LE3, or at least not initially so you'll have some company

Note: Even if you find them the Island maps won't run against the latest versions without considerable alteration as I found out a while back when enabling one to run. Amongst other things the sbx file format changed!

This is a very real and serious drawback with serialization as a save mechanism!

I don't think any game is included!

Looking pretty cool ParaToxic. I like the look n feel. I noticed that if I selected a res less that 800x600 the program instantly crashes out but otherwise works nicely. Antialiasing is a must though given the way you've implemented it!

I tried using an animated door but ran into culling problems where the door would disappear whilst seemingly in view. It turned out to be a bounding box issue. If you use animated doors you'll need to take this into account. Here is the advice I was given by Josh: I settled for a simple rotation, as suggested by Mack above, in the end.

It's just as easy to find reasons for doing something as it is for not doing something ... it's just a mindset thing! This has been spoken about many times before in these forums, so it's not like its come out of the blue. No-one is saying it has to be there at the initial release. It would just be nice to have a plugin architecture on the road map at some point. The world is full of creative people, how about giving them a chance to surprise you

I thought the whole idea of plugin architecture was to allow people who specialize in areas to provide that specialist functionality. With the best will in the world Josh you can't be all things to all men. Besides, plugins are up to the end user to implement at their own discretion. There will be good and poor quality plugins for sure, but I fail to see that the use of a poor plugin reflects more negatively on your engine than someone choosing say to use really poor textures and level design for instance, which is already totally out of your control. I'm an advocate of opening up systems not locking them down, as I've stated before, and I believe it would make your product more attractive.

Same with my adventure game. Nice to get away from all the emphasis on violence! To add some interest the player does have spell casting ability in order to defeat would be enemies ... prepare for the return of the 'Chicken Morphing Spell' amongst others

Looking really cool Chris and Roland, excellent work. I really like the outline shader graphics style and the scenery looks great! Will be interested to see how this develops.

I simply added LuaJit to the build so I could make calls to pop and push values off and onto the stack and effectively move data between Lua and my framework. As Josh doesn't expose any of those functions I had no choice but do that. Using a binding library like tolua++ or LuaBind will give you a real access to your C++ classes if that's what you really need.

C++ was designed to be a multi-paradigm language and contains the entire C language as a subset (with a few exceptions). It was originally named C with classes before being renamed C++. You can argue forever (as many people love to do) about the pros and cons of any language, however, C++ has stood the test of time and remains the industry standard for gaming to this day, so for any youngster wanting to enter the gaming industry it's an invaluable entry on your skill list. Simple use of C++ to code a Leadwerks based engine is not beyond most people and is relatively easy. In depth knowledge of C++ is a different matter but is generally not required by anyone other than professional programmers. However, people should not get hung up on programming languages and what or what not to use. Most fairly decent programming languages are capable of doing the job. What is much more important is being creative and inventive in your design and solutions to problems and developing good troubleshooting skills. These will get you far further towards achieving your gaming goals than the choice of any one language. It's the person using the tools that matters far more than the tools themselves, which is true of most things in life. The only exception for the beginner is ensuring you have a good IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that provides comprehensive debug capability and good error reporting.

Cool, we'll wait for that and continue to keep testing it

Good advise. We all benefit from hindsight but it's inherently never acquired until after it's required

Input validation is often trickier than people think. You could continue to discard leading zeros except where the answer is expected to be 0. I'm not sure how your equations (questions) are constructed and if it's easy to apply a flag to them.

You're welcome tjheldna, it's a great little game! We have found another little bug though, seems it will not accept just a zero entered from the keyboard or number pad in the subtraction mode. So when we get 4 - 4 we are unable to enter 0. We can enter zero after another number e.g. 10 but not zero on its own!

Just some more feedback now my son (7 years old) has played it: He loved it and needed no help what so ever, found it very intuitive and was able to play through all the levels unaided. He enjoyed doing the maths puzzles and best of all ... wanted to know when the full game will be available, which says it all really. More variety, and some simple evolving story line culminating in an ending, and I'd say you're pretty much there!

Thanks for the thumbs up guys, much appreciated

Either capture the Leadwerks window and make it the child of another or render to a custom buffer. There are example around on the forum of doing both.

It just an image drawn to the mouse position with the standard mouse cursor hidden. Here's the code from the update procedure of my Inventory UI Manager: if(m_iMode == itemSelect || m_iMode == pickInspect || m_iMode == inventory || m_iMode == inspectView) { DrawImage(m_entHandCursorImage,MouseX()-25,MouseY()-4,64,72); }

I've never used SQLite before but generally in SQL syntax you would reference the field by the table name not the row as you appear to be doing when passing the parameter. I'm assuming that row just increments the table cursor: So you might try replacing row.Bloom with graphx.Bloom [EDIT] I just looked at Ricks example and he does seem to reference the row object so perhaps row is a container object that acts as a temp storage object for the rows returned from the SQL statement, in which case your original syntax seems ok!

Yes, the cost of having purchased LE2 + the upgrade will be less than the full cost of just purchasing LE3. Josh has stated this. Yes, it can be used for making PC games too. Just be aware of the limitations of the first release especially with the higher graphics expectations of PC games in general!

@Aggror I'll certainly consider a blog at the end of this process as there is a lot I've learnt and presumably still a lot more to be learnt @cassius Nice to read your feedback and experience. I accept it's not always possible to team up with others for various reasons but as you say it places restrictions on what you can achieve. I can handle simple modelling tasks but anything more complex is beyond me.