Leadwerks Game Engine 4.1 beta is now available on the beta branch on Steam. This is the final version 4.1, barring any bug fixes that are made before the release later this month. I am going to focus on just resolving bug reports and adding new documentation for the next two weeks.
4.1 adds environment probes, which have been covered previously, and volumetric lighting. Point and spot lights can display a volumetric effect by adjusting the "Volume strength" setting, found under Ligh
It's been over a year ago since I've released the Vectronic Demo using Leadwerks. The demo was composed of assets I've made ported from the Source Engine and my lack of understanding of the API and lua scripting at the time. (I'm used to coding everything in C++) As of writing, it has 1,221 subscribers on the Steam Workshop, 25 out of 26 positive ratings, and is the second most subscribed item! So there is sigh that this as a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was a success. And again, the Game Launch
After some problems with the Game.exe ( crash ) I have at least a couple of solutions found . None good solutions at the end but still the game works.
On the one hand I had the collision system in the vegetation system off (if i activate the collision with paintet rocks and put a prefab (barrel with shape) in it, the game crashed. if i delete the barrel the collision function in the vegetation system but then i can´t implement my quest idea. So i deactivated the collsion in the vegetation sy
For the past few months, (on top of working on my greenlit mod) I've been developing a new foundation for Vectronic that will take care of all the 'internal yucky bits' such as window/context/world management, and other features and functions. I really wasn't happy how the first implementation came out as I felt like I was taking too much from the developer, and it was messy and confusing to do something simple like adding a loading screen.
LEX2 is more lua friendly, not bloated with scripts
I came across a very interesting presentation that talks about how to avoid "banding" artifacts in game graphics. The author uses dithering to add noise to an image and break up the visible lines your eye can detect. This even works with audio. When noise is added to the mix, the original tune appears to become more high-fidelity than it actually is:
I was able to use this concept to improve the appearance of banding in shadow acne in a low-resolution spotlight with a large volum
If you join the beta branch and updated your projects, you'd probably noticed that the low res Leadwerks 2 icons have now been replaced with high resolution ones that match the rest of the user interface. Decals, Particles Emitters, Cameras, and Probes now have their own icon, and you can tell all entities apart just by looking at them.
I've originally made these a while ago when I noticed that each entity had it's own material and texture, but most of them just recycled the pivot icon. I've
First, there's a lot of confusion about what HDR actually is, and I want to clear it up. HDR does not automatically mean "iris adjustment" although the two often go together. HDR, at its simplest, means that colors won't get washed out during the rendering pipeline.
Game graphics inputs are 8-bit (per channel textures). The output is 8-bit (unless you have a 10-bit monitor). So if we only perform one rendering step, it is impossible to lose color resolution. Even if our lighting step br
Environment probes are now available on the beta branch. To access them, you must set the "UnlockBetaFeatures" setting in the config file to 1, then start the editor. Environment probes are available in the "Effects" object creation category.
Environment probes should be placed with one in each room. Use the object scale to make the probe's volume fill the room. (Like decals, probes will display a bounding box when selected.) You do not have to worry about covering every single space as
A "roughness" property has been added in the material editor. This is a simple slider with a value from zero to one. (The default material roughness value is 0.5, so all your existing materials won't turn into mirrors when the update comes). Changing the roughness value will have no visible effect unless an environment probe is visible in the scene, although I could modify the lighting shaders to make this control gloss in the specular calculation:
Two new commands have also been add
I was able to work out the shader fixes and now I can show you a good schematic of how the new lighting system works. Instead of a single light source, we now have three types of lighting that are combined for the final render. Direct lighting is the standard deferred lighting model you know and love from Leadwerks. This looks great, but shadowed areas have always looked pretty flat.
The second component is the new GI ambient lighting. This is a view-independent lookup on the local cube
I've been puzzling over a problem that exhibits itself on flat surfaces. Cubemap reflections appear "jittery" as if they are been rounded off to a lower-precision float. At first I thought this might mean that our best-fit normals routine using 8 bits per channel might lack the precision needed for cubemap reflections. However, when I changed the normal texture in the gbuffer to a 32-bit floating.point RGBA texture, the problem remained. This error is also visible in Igor's SSLR shader.
Hi community !
I just announce the availability of the demo of my game TinyGom
You can download on my site http://tinygom.sdmg-studio.eu through the link provided in the email you receive after a short registration, excuse me for this.
Alternative link for 32 bits version: http://www.indiedb.com/games/tinygom/downloads/tinygom-demo-32-bits
Alternative link for 64 bits version: http://www.indiedb.com/games/tinygom/downloads/tinygom-demo-64-bits
PS: I lost my previous post by
The environment probe feature is coming along nicely, spawning a whole new system I am tentatively calling "Deferred Image-Based Lighting". This adds image-based lighting to your scenes that accentuates the existing deferred renderer and makes for higher quality screenshots with lots of next-gen detail. The probes handle both image-based ambient lighting and reflections.
Shadmar helped by implementing parallax cubemap correction. This provides an approximate volume the cubemap is rendered
After a resolving a few odd and ends I was able to create a proof of concept of the deferred environment probe idea I talked about earlier. The environment probe is basically the same as a point light. They have a range and affect a finite area. The color property can be used to adjust the intensity of the ambient lighting / reflections. Basically, you want to cover your indoor environments with these, but it's okay if you miss some spots. The environment probes fade out gradually so you do
Previously I talked about the idea of implementing a new "Ambient Point Light" into the engine. This would work by rendering the surrounding environment to a cubemap, just like a regular point light does. However, this type of light would render to a color buffer instead of just a depth buffer.
The light could then be rendered to display ambient reflections and soft lighting on the surrounding environment. While it would not provide perfect real-time reflections, it would give an extra bo
The Leadwerks Mercenary Action Figure has been released as a DLC. Previously, I talked about how the Workshop Store was not selling much content, and that we need game-ready content to be available to use in Leadwerks. At the same time, DLC sales are quite good, which seems contradictory.
To date, this item has total sales of $299 since release and cost $2000 to produce. (Additional characters will be a bit cheaper if we reuse animations.) After Steam's cut, I've lost $1800 on this proje
An update is available on the beta branch with the following changes:
Fixed System::Print() command which was printing char* values as bools.
Added optional parameter to the end of Entity::SetInput().
Add optional parameter to the end of Emitter::SetVelocity()
Fixed light occlusion culling bug.
Fixes a sound source position bug.
Yesterday I tried a plugin I've been meaning to try out for a long time, Steam Sign-in for IPB. It worked without a hitch and I was able to easily figure out how to locate a Steam ID from a forum account, and vice versa. You can sign straight into Leadwerks using your Steam ID, or you can add a Steam ID to your existing account. (See "Edit Profile".)
The gallery, videos, Workshop, and games sections will now correctly link to your Leadwerks profile page. Notice when you click on the auth
An update is available which fixes a problem when antialiasing is disabled on AMD hardware. You must update your project to get the new shaders and executables for the fix.
As described previously, the open-market model store approach does not work for Leadwerks and I am shifting my focus to providing DLCs made by third-party authors. The first thing I want to do is create more consistent branding that all DLC model packs will use. Here's what I came up with:
I'm also developing terminology to apply consistently to say what the DLC contains. The meaning of "Material Pack" and "Model Pack" is obvious. "Action Figures" will refer to charac
As discussed before, sales in the Workshop Store have been measly compared to what the DLCs regularly do. People just don't want to use it. Without revenue coming in, I can't convince third parties that it is a good idea to sell through this system (it isn't), and no new products will get added. We need a large library of content to be available for use in Leadwerks, but this isn't working. So I am moving on to another approach.
The "Workshop" menu item in the website header has been pla
An update is available on the beta branch which makes changes to the way DLCs are installed. The SciFi Interior Pack has been added as a paid Workshop item. You can obtain this item by either purchasing it through the Workshop Store interface, or buying the DLC on our Steam Store page. At the time of this writing, the other model pack DLCs have not been added yet.
To install the SciFi Interior Pack DLC you simply browse to it in the Workshop interface. If you own the DLC the "Buy" button
I've expanded the turret AI to include a visibility test. This is performed initially when selecting a target, and is also performed on a continuous basis to make sure the target stays in view. To avoid overloading the engine I am only performing the visibility test at most once every 500 milliseconds. This provides near-instantaneous updating while preventing the picking from becoming a bottleneck and slowing down performance.
Adding bullets was mostly a copy and paste job from the Soldi
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