tournamentdan

You must of been in a coma when mobile was the only direction he was going. (do you really not remember all that mobile propaganda he would spout out) And we all begged him to include a high end renderer. If he was going to kill the mobile export, he should have done so then. Not now. How many times has this same question been asked over the last year? To many times. And each time Josh purposely ignored and did not answer those questions. Just so he could mislead people in thinking it would be supported in ALL future versions and they would buy a license.

Just because it is more affordable doesn't mean you should buy an export license at the beginning phase of game creation. No more bug fixes for 3.0 and less features. Not exactly what we were promised.

Yes. This is exactly what I did. And at that time I was lead to believe that mobile support would ALWAYS be there. I myself bought the mobile add ons to help support the future of Leadwerks. But new customers are not going to do this. For example nobody is going to go buy Unity for $1,500 and all of export add ons at the same time. No. You would buy the normal license. Try it out for some time and once you get far enough in game production. Then buy export add on. Same with new customers here. You pretty much proved my point with this comment. Now you can not do this. The potential revenue has been taken away from us.

Yeah. Its a disturbing recurring occurrence.

A lot of people did not buy the mobile add on because (A) the main engine lacked features. Why would you spend extra money when the engine lacked enough features to create a game? (b)You really do not need to export to a mobile device until you start to get to the end of production. Last time I checked, game creation can take a good bit of time to create a game start to finish. So there is no need to buy a export add on until you get farther in the game creation.

Lies, lies, lies and more damn lies. You certainly have some of the worst business ethics I have ever come a crossed. You decided to support mac and linux so you could increase your potential end users. So why are you taking potential end users from us?

Are you using cycles render in blender to create textures?

You can only program with lua in the steam version. Just a heads up since you mentioned teaching c++. I believe josh is going to have to make a system to allow people to upgrade from steam to the pro edition.

I used to toy around with iclone and have made many character models in the past the way I have explained. To better explain it check out the video and article I link. http://developer.reallusion.com/whitepaper/Maya_Template/index.html

From the sounds of it this base character and add on cloths have not been skinned. In the description it says "These costume elements are already rigged for you on the model! for ease of use." This means each clothing option has been weight painted for that character skeletal bone rig. So if you want blouse "A" you can delete the other blouses (b,c, d) without problems. I think the paragraph from arterial is miss leading. There is a bit more work than just simply showing and hiding the different groups. Yes this is how the player can select and deselect the types of clothing for their character. But after the player selects what they want. Your "character customisation editor" would need to parent each vertex group together. Each one of those "groups" has a vertex group in them. For example. The top group in your picture shows "basearmleft". At the top of the arm where the arm meets the torso. There is a edge loop on the arm. That edge loop is part of a vertex group. Each vertex in that loop has its own name. Same as the edge loop on the arm pit of the torso. That way with code you can parent the vertex group of the basearmleft to the torso. Same way you can parent bones together. After each one of the vertex groups of each group are parented. You then will have a skinned mesh ready for your videogame.

I believe leadwerks automatically converts an animated model into a skinned mesh. All of your groups are taken out at conversion to create one skinned mesh. You would need a way to override the skinning process.

As far as I remember. Dynamic navmesh was taken out due to performance problems.

I agree. This is a fairly common practice in AI engines. Instead of updating the nav mesh they create what they call AI mesh. They use multiple raycasts that are parented to the character controller. With those raycasts you can detect the AI mesh and use it for cover nodes or even nonpathable walking space. For objects that are going to move. You can parent the AI mesh to a object like your building or crate or barrel. This can be done with physics mesh also but not all areas of the map will have a physics mesh. I will be using this technique so cars and pedestrians can tell the difference between a side walk and street. That way I only use one nav mesh for both. Check out this video for some ideas.

Very nice work . I think you will find that you will get less tearing in your mesh with quads.

+1

No, its ok. I would like to thank yougroove. Thank you for finally giving me a good enough reason to hit the block content button. My only advice is to remember that you have all ready been banned from one video game engine community. You never really said it directly. But when you say... And. At least to me that means that it will not work because it will be to slow. I see that your experience with tessellation is with DX9. To be honest, I can understand your apprehension towards tessellation because of DX9. I have already answered this comment with a previous post. So I do not sound like a broken record. I"ll just quote myself. I have also previously answered this comment with... The savings are not only in memory. Vertex buffers are different from rendered polygons right. Or do I have this wrong? The whole idea of a LOD system is to render as many polygons closest to the camera. With tessellation you can render more polygons closer to the camera while lightening the load on memory. Win win in my book. @Naughty Alien: I hope you understand I am not arguing with you. Just having a discussion. I certainly like and respect you for helping me in the past and also continuously helping the Leadwerks community. @ Rick: I hope you do not think that I am trying to shove this tessellation **** down your throat. I guess I got stuck in a loop because I just felt like people were not understanding me. LOD obviously has worked over the years. I just plan to try and make large worlds that are populated with uncommon models.

Actual it would take less work to create assets for tessellation. I have to do a bunch of stuff right now. But in a little bit. I will gladly give kind of a general process on character creation for LOD and Tessellation.

Not every character or model would be tessellated at the same time or every frame. You would set distances from camera. Just like LOD. I mean you wouldn't want to change every single LOD on the map at the same time right?

You keep say that tessellation is slow and yet never provide any bench mark on this. I have. 1.6 billion a second. Which I am guessing is more than leadwerks can render a second. This is kind of bland and boring isn't it. Really? Every character the same size and shape. Just different normal and texture maps to tell them apart. If only there was a better way. Wait there is. How about use one low poly humanoid primitive. And create each and every character from it (primitive) with tessellation. And since I now have less textures,bones,mesh taking space. I create more junk to throw in a game. OpendGL4 is OpenGL4. It will not work for lesser hardware. So the fall back renderer is what we have to be "backwards compatible" for hardware on a PC. I am sorry but I am looking for graphics better than that. Unless you are talking about phones and tablets and **** laptops. Obviously traditional LOD has worked over the years. But to me, I am just kind of getting tired of seeing the same models in a game. Over and over again. The type of game depends on the systems you need for your game. LOD does work. However if you want bigger and more populated games. You need to find or figure new innovative ways.

@yougroove, you are still not understanding things here. First off you can see at the top of this picture that this model has a total of 34,327 triangles. Which is kind of high for a top LOD. For some reason when you think of tessellation. You are only thinking of a high poly count dense mesh. I have no where mentioned to Tessellate a model as high or higher than 34,327 triangles. I am saying you can go from a low poly basic humanoid shaped mesh, and at different ranges from the camera Tessellate the model to a MEDIUM POLY COUNT OR A HIGH POLY COUNT LIKE YOUR 34,327 TRIANGLE MODEL. Everything except for one thing I have mentioned is not theory. This stuff has been and are being used today. The only theory I mentioned is the ability to create a complete 3d object with a two sided plane. Let's say on a tree trunk it may be hard to hide the seams of the back to back planes. Unless you create a lot of detail in the bark. Then it would be easy to hide the seams. It would be even easier to hide the seams in a door jam or walls where they can intersect.

Take a look at this picture. Displacement map on the left, and a tessellated mesh with the displacement map applied on the right. The displacement map could be altered to make the reliefs higher in the mesh. Which could easily be used for solid indoor walls.(or a cool maze) You would still need to use the two sided face technique for the indoor doorways. The rest of the indoor outside walls,windows,doors can be created from the side faces of the before mentioned cube. Here is the link to the two sided technique I mentioned. http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/double-sided-faces-different-materials.php

This is just a small example of the huge possibility's of using tessellation for level of detail management(LOD) .

I gladly will when I get a chance. As I said before I am extremely busy right now. I am glad to say that things have been set in motion for me to reach my goals in video game land. I just need to get my development computers put back together and this darn house remodeled. As you can see my office/mini studio is getting close. @Naughty Alien You keep only thinking about tessellation on the extreme high poly count end. The poly count that we have right now in a "high poly LOD" is good enough. WE DO NOT NEED TO GO IN HIGHER DETAIL THAN A HIGH POLY LOD CHARACTER. We can however have a lot more characters in game if we use tessellation as a LEVEL OF DETAIL poly count management. Instead of cluttering up our memory with a **** load of LOD and extra textures. You said. Tessellation only works efficiently on the latest hardware.(opengl4 dx11) 1.6 billion triangles a second is good enough performance. Wouldn't you say? So if you want to reach more customers (older hardware) you will have to use the low end renderer. Which obviously tessellation will not work. In order to hit all hardware markets. You will have to use different techniques and or technology. Which brings me back to my first post in this thread.

Be careful when using some tools in blender now. Since I believe 2.6 Blender came out with a new mesh system. Which allows you to create n-gons. N-gons are great to allow you to quickly create a high poly model. You should then retopo that mesh, and be sure to use quads or triangles only. A n-gon is a face that can have as many vertice as you like. Which will not convert and be drawn into triangles very nicely. Also it's not a good idea to use both quads and triangles on the same model. One or the other.

Sorry this is wrong. You the artist defines exactly where the newly generated vertice go with a displacement map. You the artist (and me) model a high poly model. We then make all of our textures for said high poly model. You then create a low poly model. One that would be equal in poly count as a low poly LOD (or lower). You then (in a modeling program) bake all of you textures from high poly to low poly. Now you can tessellate your model to what would be equal to your medium LOD. Or if the camera gets closer you could tessellate to what would be equal to a high poly LOD. All from one model. Which can clear up a lot of memory space so you (and me) the artist can create more uncommon models. Instead of every time you go around a corner you see the same pop can or the same character over and over again.