I have had quite an incredible journey with games. I'll start from the start. I have always been facinated with games and how they worked. Not just the graphics, but how smoothly the game mechanics worked. And I started with my friend showing me a game called Garry's Mod.
Now I had played my way around a few games before, but none quite measured up like Garry's Mod.
And that was just when the custom content and weapons were being first made, and so I got on board with Lua. It was real simpl
It has been a month since I started with Leadwerks. It was also the best month since I started game development. I made bigger and better things with Leadwerks in one month then I had with all the other engines I have used for the last couple years.
Part of this is experience. If you can learn one engine, it makes learning another one much much easier. However, a large part of this the one simple fact that Leadwerks excels at doing things the best and most simplest way.
Anyway, I thought
After a few of weeks of programming burnout I am now back in action. i think I was starting to feel a bit swamped with the increasing complexity of my project amongst other things however things are looking a bit rosier now. I probably should have sat down and made a proper plan because of all the dependencies of the various elements.
My history with Leadwerks has been somewhat chequered and I have struggled for along time trying to do stuff with it in the past. However lately things just se
The subject of spheres in 3D World Studio has been one of great levity (see here and here) around the Leadwerks community. I spent today finally implementing a CSG sphere primitive. This is a little different from creating a conventional triangle mesh sphere because each face is a single polygon with either three or four sides. Here's my scratch paper that got me through this process:
I'll spare you the mathematics and get right to the good stuff:
This completes the basic primitiv
There is only one word to describe the people of the gaming industry: awesome. Maybe it’s because we work on projects we love, maybe it’s the lack of sleep, it could be the countless hours we’ve spent perfecting our twitch reflexes, but I think the bottom line is we are 1337 (It’s probably because of the robe and wizard hat).
This past weekend members of the Leadwerks team journeyed out to the Sacramento Game Developers Meetup Group http://www.meetup.com/gamedeveloper/ to rub elbows with the
Something I have never tried before is working with terrain and placing buildings on top of it. The idea is that you can build everywhere on the map as long as the slopes aren't to steep and there is no building already placed.
The Grid.
Although you have the freedom of building a tower where ever you want, the underlying system still works with a grid system. That means that gridpoints can be tagged as "can not build". It also leaves space between buildings which is nice because I don't ha
UML diagrams, object-oriented frameworks, and beautiful modular architecture are great things to develop, but sometimes you just need to make an application that real people can use. For me, that means you start with the behavior you want, and work backwards to make the code that does it. In the past I've considered fancy object-oriented mouse tool classes, but the style of editing I want is intuitive, easy, and fast, using the fewest number of mouse clicks possible to achieve a task. I think
While waiting on fixes for the flight-model and control inputs, putting some game into the game we talked about ranges and how performance measuring was going to work. In addition we wanted to add a little variety which required working mob AI.
So nothing fancy but I managed to rustle up a simple finite state machine FSM to get some tanks and cars running around. Our design uses a group formation system (a group is a number of individual units that share common logic, e.g a tank platoon)
Leadwerks Software is now offering internships through the Center for Entreprenuership at Sacramento State University. Internships are available for programming, 3D art, web development, and marketing.
Programming Internship
Assist the development team with tools and core engine design.
Work with game development team to create a sample Leadwerks3D game.
Gain experience working in a professional software development environment.
C++ and Lua experience are a plus but not required.
Tower defense games are my favorite casual games. The last few weeks I have been spending some free time on playing several of them. Steam had a lot of sales recently which gave me no choice but to buy them. Here are a few:
Defense Grid: The awakening
Orcs must die
iBomber: Pacific
They are quite addictive and found myself buying a lot of available DLC´s.
Mutant Madness
I want to build a simple tower defense game. That means:
Build a tower on flat ground
Tower shoots o
Everyone's gone for the weekend, and I am still here, so it seems like a good time to stop and say hello to the community, who I have not been communicating with much lately.
We spent some time this week doing some market research, and investigating exactly why Leadwerks is different and unique. After that I feel like I have a much better picture of the game industry as a whole, and of our strategy going forward. That's the "big picture" stuff we CEO's do.
Meanwhile, back on the groun
I feel like I've resolved the design challenges I was facing in my last blog. A menu item is always checked, specifying what the current object is that will be created when the user clicks on a viewport. There are two types of objects that can be created, brushes and entities. Brushes are constructive solid geometry objects that can be sketched out to quickly design a building. Entities are created at a point in space, and include lights, sounds, and particle emitters. As I have described i
I have the basis of CSG editing written into the engine. It was a bit challenging to figure out just how to structure the Brush class. We have a lightweight ConvexHull entity, which is used for the camera frustum. This is an invisible volume that changes frequently, and is used to test whether objects intersect the camera's field of view. I didn't want to bloat this class with a lot of renderable surfaces, texture coordinates, vertex normals, etc. I initially thought I would derive the Brus
In the recent weeks Leadwerks has leveled up by joining the Sacramento State University Center for Entrepreneurship (CBA) and after much scanning of the talent tree, Leadwerks has recruited a new intern.
With that, I am proud to introduce myself (the intern) to the Leadwerks Community. My name is Chris Vossen, I am a recent graduate from the University of California: Santa Cruz with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science: Computer Game Design. During my senior year, five programmers and
This time, I have decided to introduce character animation control. There are several reasons for that. A lot of people asked me to give some example, and at same time, such library will be essential for following AI tutorials, so having said that, I have decided to introduce AI library, so it will be avoided confusion with corresponding command set in AI tutorials. I would like to also make note that all libraries I have released and Im planning to release, are a lite version of fully fledged f
Just a short post since I'm busy being pulled in a dozen different directions; I got roped into helping someone create a short health and safety film, drafting a project proposal, raising finances and even managed to fix a long standing bug in Combat-Helo. Now the sensors, line of sight and all that guff is now WORKING again, Hooray. A quick background on that, an engine update needed to fix some occlusion issues slightly changed the Model hierarchy in a subtle way that changed how actual filen
The Project Manager lets you manage multiple Leadwerks projects. A project includes assets, scripts, code, code projects for Visual Studio, Xcode, and Eclipse, along with your game's executable. The Project Manager lets you view and switch between your different projects.
Projects can be exported into a .zip file for easy sharing and archiving. You can even have Leadwerks3D scan all source code files and only include the asset files that your game actually uses. (I'm still adding the p
I just uploaded Swords and Skellies to the Asset Store in the Games section.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files/file/324-swords-and-skellies/
This game release represents the first milestone in the larger project I have in mind. Creating such a simplistic game serves as a mechanism for advancing understanding of game coding, asset management, and engine usage. That is not to say it was simple. There were quite a few challenges when throwing this together. There were also major
People are wondering what language they choose with Leadwerks3D. Sometimes they have some exotic languages in mind, but quite often it comes down to the decision between Lua and C++.
Recently I read an article that LuaJIT (yes, you can use it in Leadwerks3D too) is actually damn fast. It's fast, because the simpliness of the language allows for extreme optimizations. It might even come close to C++ speed, or in some cases even exceed it. That's how fast LuaJIT 2.0 is. But it's still in beta,
Lua's debug hooks are a little funny, because they don't appear to allow line-by-line calling of your own function. The description here is pretty vague:
http://pgl.yoyo.org/luai/i/lua_sethook
The line and count hooks look like they might be what I wanted, but the docs have one big caveat:
This makes me wonder what the point of these hooks even is. The way I have it set up now, "Step" continues to either the next Debug:Stop() call, or to the next point where a Lua function is called. N
In my last development blog, I wrote about some design problems I faced, and why I wasn't sure how to proceed. I've resolved these issues by building the debugger and game output display close to where they will be most likely to be used, the Script Editor.
I was pleased to find that my Lua debugger code I wrote about a year ago works perfectly. This allows breakpoints, code stepping, and the display of variable values in your game. It works with any Leadwerks3D executable, so you can e
I know it's a little late for Valentines Day. Excessive flapping, bumping and separation is discussed in this priceless US Army video from 1980. If only they had "RotorCam ™". The Apache has a fixed rotor, mast bumping isn't an issue but it's all part of helicopter theory.
I've been forced to continue hunting for other employment to deal with a mounting debt crisis. As a result work was put on hold the past two weeks (hence the lack of updates). I apologise for letting my post sli
Leadwerks has been accepted into the Sacramento State University Center for Entrepreneurship. The mission of the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Business Administration (CBA) is to develop and nurture innovative business ideas and to capitalize potential entrepreneurial opportunities, both from CSUS and local entrepreneurship communities.
The Center will provide entrepreneurs with the skills and resources needed to launch a venture and to identify and cultivate solutions to en
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