Leadwerks Game Engine 3.6 is now available on Steam. This free update brings an array of new features along with the release of Leadwerks Game Launcher.
New Features
Deferred DecalsLeadwerks now supports decals using an advanced deferred rendering technique. Decals are useful both for bullet marks and character blood, and as a decoration tool for adding detail to maps. Leadwerks decals even work with animated characters, so you can show damage when enemies are hit.
Terrain Vertic
I'm very excited about Leadwerks Game Launcher. I think it's going to be very beneficial. I noticed a change as soon as I showed people the store page for it. Connecting game developers with an audience solves a very big problem. My goal is to bring you 10,000 players for your games and create a sort of "incubator" for your ideas.
Over the last year, our community have gotten a lot more focused on releasing titles, with help from the game tournaments that Aggror started. Combined w
Leaks of games happen, and they still happen. You can spend months and months working on your game, only for a server attack or the wrong person to share it with their buddies; which then goes public accidentally, (or intentional). Having an unintended work in progress build out there can give people the wrong idea about your game because there are people out there who think the development process is pretty straight forward.
Let's take a look at the Half-Life 2 leak. The game, and the entir
Congratulations to Type Advantage for the release of Pump-Action Captain on Steam. This title began as a Kickstarter project clearing 170% of their modest $500 goal. The team used that momentum to fuel a successful Greenlight campaign, gaining approval in just ten days. Today marks the release of the game as an "Early Preview" title, which means it's a playable work in progress. You can play it now for just $4.19.
From the store page:
Be sure to support your fellow Leadwerkers. Buy
I thought I would take a minute to write down some of the things I have learned about releasing software on Steam, in order to help with your game releases.
First of all, always wait a week after you are "finished" to release a major update. This is because you will always find little problems, and sometimes major ones, after you think you've finished everything. Leadwerks 3.6 was scheduled for release at the start of this week, as far as I knew everything was working, but I knew to give i
I'm doing what I think is the final 3.6 build now. I've got the finished decal textures from Rich, and I made some small adjustments to the way these work.
During development, I was not a fan of the "Decal Mode" material setting. It's terribly confusing, and it's unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to adjust all their materials for an obscure setting that isn't intuitive at all.
Basically decals tend to have two kinds: Big decals are used to add detail to the map. Small decal
Here are some of the things from my childhood that I still find weirdly fascinating. Bringing that same feeling into Leadwerks is something I have long driven towards. More on that later.
Most entity types will start with collision type=0 now.
Fix so collidable emitter particles won't collide with the emitter itself anymore.
Added lens flares to lighting prefabs in showcase map.
Added bloom to showcase map.
Modified the way the Flicker effect script works.
I rolled Newton Dynamics back to the version we were previously using due to some strange behavior. We're not utilizing any new behavior yet, and I don't want to spend time debugging it right now, so from your perspective it makes no difference.
Also added a check to prevent textures from reloading when they are bound to a buffer.
This update is available now on the beta branch and will be released next week on the default branch. Rich is also working on a couple of decal textures to i
Leadwerks Game Launcher is now marked as "Ready for Review" by Valve and scheduled for release Monday, August 24. I decided to allow one week for final testing of Leadwerks Game Engine 3.6, which will be released at the same time (and to try to get a few more games in before the release). The application will be released as a free "early access" software application (and will remain free). There's a good lineup of games that are pretty enticing, and the price point will gain a lot of enthusia
You may have noticed our deferred decals (presently in beta) tend to shift with distance. Something was wrong with the screen space to world space conversion, but it's a hard problem to describe. I wrote a function based on the work Igor did for his SSLR shader, like this:
vec4 ScreenPositionToWorldPosition(in vec2 texCoord)
{
float x = (texCoord.s / buffersize.x - 0.5) * 2.0;
float y = (texCoord.t / buffersize.y - 0.5) * 2.0;
float z = texelFetch(texture5, ivec2(texCoord),gl_Sampl
The 3.6 Release Candidate is now available on the beta branch. Since the last update, this adds camera render targets. You can set a texture to a camera's render target in the editor camera properties, and with the new command Camera::SetRenderTarget(Texture* texture). Render targets work both in the editor and in-game.
A terrain offset map has been implemented in the physics system, but it is not yet integrated into the engine.
After the release of the Vectronic Demo, I started to seek out how to make the game to be able to stand-alone without any additional launchers, batches, or required installations. Shortly after my last blog post, Josh informed me about Inno Setup, and it answered my questions about providing OpenAL if the user did not already have it installed. More about that here. I haven't played with it yet, but it gave me insurance about packaging it up for the final release down the road. Alternatively, St
Miniaturization has been a big trend over the last five years, but it isn't limited to mobile. It's impacted other areas of technology that I find much more interesting than cell phones. Previously, I wrote about the changing PC form factor, and how my current rig is a no-compromises full-size PC packed into a form factor about the size of a bread box.
I happen to have my hands on a few pieces of technology that are brand new, unreleased, or things I myself am creating. All these technolo
We're going to release a version 3.6 early with decals and the other enhancements I've recently made. This is scheduled for Monday, August 17th. At the same time we will be releasing Leadwerks Game Launcher as a free early preview title. So you've got exactly two weeks to prepare any other games you want to show off. I'm happy with the lineup we have of 25 games, and am looking forward to the launch so we can show your werk off to the world!
My market positioning with this product is goi
I've been lots of programming, mostly small stuff that when joined together will present the player with a better playing experience. Sadly I don't really have much to actually show currently, but in the coming weeks time provided i should be able to go down my list of to-do's
I DO have a video where I show my new test level that can be used as a playground to test all sorts of scripts and game mechanics. I also talk about what next I plan to implement.
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It's been 4 long months, I had time to think about what I wanted to do with the game and this is the result.
Before I talk about the game I would like to apologize for the huge hiatus that the game went on. Since April that you guys haven't had any news whatsoever, but know that this "Hiatus time" didn't go to waste at all. I had time to think about the game and how I want to improve it. So here's what happened.
First, all the levels have been scrapped. Yup, all of them, I wasn't h
An HTML renderer for Linux has been implemented. This adds the welcome window and full Workshop inteface for Linux. This will be available soon for testing on the beta branch.
An update is now available on the beta branch.
A new decal entity type is available. Decals are used to project an image into surrounding geometry. A decal requires a material using a decal shader, located in the "Shaders\Decals" folder. The FPSGun.lua script has been updated to add bullet marks and gunshot wounds to objects a bullet hits. You can also place a decal in a map for adding large details to walls, terrain, or anything else.
Decals are rendered similarly to the way a
The results of the Leadwerks Summer Games Tournament are in! I think you will agree, this tournament produced some very fun playable games. Each author will receive a Leadwerks sticker via mail if this is their first entry, and a T-shirt if it is their second!
So without further ado, let's look at the games, in no particular order:
Slafstraf 2
By Slafstraf
An ominous industrial setting with plenty of interesting puzzles shows the progress the author has made since the original Slafst
Well I seem to have left it till the last minute again and found only a single day to get this game done.
Turned out to be more of a prototype than a full game. Modification of the Leadwerks marble game sample.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/games/_/u-rev-r103
Single level. Collect the 10 energy spheres in the shortest time.
Needs more work, but out of time.
Here is our entry for the Leadwerks Summer Games Tournament...Beach Roll! As stated it is a just a small variation on the Marble Game Tutorial that Leadwerks provides. Our small four person team works under the name Aphelion Games and we were previously working on a 2D platformer prototype in Unity. However after some delays and that project losing a bit of momentum we decided that we needed to shake things up and get some of our enthusiasm back.
I had previously purchased the Leadwerks engi
I've got a pretty good idea of what features I want to pack into Leadwerks Game Engine 3.6, and I'm ready to share them with you now.
Just about all the simple easy features I think I can implement are already built into Leadwerks, but there are some bigger more involved things I want the engine to support. Instead of doing these one at a time, I am doing research on them all, and changing my focus when I get stuck. I've got a big block of research done that all revolves around creating ne