As I have been developing the player editor for Elemental, I have come across a number of unexpected difficulties that were not initially obvious. I had a challenging time figuring out some of these bugs in my code so that I could get it just right. I really wanted the weapons to look like they are being held properly and armour pieces to deformed with the player without clippings like you would expect it to.
There are two main types of mounting that I'm going to cover and one takes much mor
The design of the Leadwerks website involves organizing a lot of different kinds of data that are continually growing, including forum posts, blog entries, gallery images, videos, and downloadable files.
All this information was organized in categories, and sub-categories, and in some cases, sub-sub-categories. The depth of categorization made it impossible to follow all the information that was flowing through the site, and users frequently posted in the wrong place. We recently underwent
Leadwerks
It has been quite a while since I have been active on werkspace or with Leadwerks. Still, even after working with severall Engines and Frameworks, I allways come back to Leadwerks. I don't know what it is. The coding? The Visuals? The ease of use? The lighting? Anyway, I had some time of, since homework was fairly quickly finished. Spare time has been scarce so I am glad I can finaly make some time werkspace...
Year 2
Year 2 of Game development is an enormous improvement on the f
Sometimes I run into situations where I don't really know how to structure things. I don't mind this, because it usually results in some really elegant design once I figure out what to do. I just play with ideas and try not to force anything, and when the right idea arises, I will recognize it.
Explaining a problem to someone else can help facilitate that process. How many times have you solved a difficult problem right after you posted a description of it on a forum somewhere? The proce
The concept is simple: give a player paintbrush that will draw dungeons, cities, and dangers. What type of world would they create, and how detailed would their worlds be? The project will allow each user to collaborate by building their own realms, forming adventures for other players through this advanced tool set.
The new game in development is called "Dungeon Painter 3D".
These semi-transparent blobs are actually the beginnings for one of the first dungeons created with this r
I've got orthographic viewport navigation done. I decided to build some grid commands into the camera class so that the graphics driver itself can handle the grid rendering, rather than having the editor make a bunch of OpenGL calls in a callback function. The grid can be rendered from any angle, and the math was a little tricky, but I got it worked out. I paid extra attention to showing the border where the world ends. The sliders that pan the viewport are very accurate, and stop right at t
I'm dreaming of Leadwerks3D, and while waiting for its release in June, I have already many ideas what I want to do with it. Then I realized, it's actually much more than just a 3D game engine, because it allows to have a OpenGL context on all devices, including Android, iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, Linux, and more in future. In addition, it allows you to code in C++ on all those devices, which means that also high level languages, like my SuperBasic will work on all platforms, because it uses a C++ c
I'm happily starting out on the CSG editor. The first step is to add a grid in the orthographic view modes so that you have a frame of reference. In Leadwerks Engine, the editor used some callbacks to call OpenGL commands to draw the grid. In the new system, Leadwerks3D, I added some per-camera commands to control the grid spacing, resolution, and colors. (You may safely ignore the mysterious black cube in the center.) This way the editor never has to call OpenGL commands directly, making r
To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries.
Leadwerks Related Blog Entry.
Meet The Flockers.
I haven't actually had the Leadwerks3D editor running on OSX Lion until a few days ago. There were some underlying GUI issues that had to be updated to handle a few new ways that OSX Lion does things. The first run was pretty frightening, with random crashes and all sorts of visual inconsistencies. However, careful testing resulted in these issues being resolved one by one.
The most peculiar was a bug in which the editor would crash when a file request dialog was opened if, and only if, it
Online games... The unsavoury types are always drawn to them. As a game admin, you simply kick them out of your game, or ban them if you're in such a mood and that's the end of it. But now looking at it from the developer side of things, I can't help thinking a bit more about it.
It's one of UDP's advantages over TCP. When you get a known trouble maker trying to join your game, your server can either tell them to sod off (in the nicest way possible), or it could pretend that it never even go
I generally categorize every aspect of Leadwerks as either "absolutely required" or not necessary. If it's categorized as the latter, I don't bother with it, and if it's categorized as the first, I pursue it with a dogged determination until it is done. This has served us well in many ways, like our vegetation rendering system and character controller.
However, this assumes I have full control and mastery over the product, or at least have someone working for me who does. This is almost a
Swimming was one.
Setting up controllers in XPlane is another.
Yes the things you thought were going to take a few days which turned into a week and a bit (you could almost say 'two weeks'). Josh at Leadwerks gave me a leg-up on how to put an MMO style launcher together and I've almost done wrapping up all the security for the necessary database, key code generation, CVS style updates and all the stuff we need to match individual content to clients. We'll make available downloadable cont
To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries.
Leadwerks Related Blog Entry.
Revamping A Modular Assets Idea.
You can drag entities around in the model editor to rearrange the hierarchy. Now I just need to add an option to collapse a hierarchy, and the basic art pipeline will be done.
I had a difficult bug that was causing model hierarchies to be duplicated. At first I thought I was saving files wrong, but it turned out my entity copy routine was duplicating the hierarchy twice! Oh well, problem solved.
I just recently purchased Driver-San Francisco. I did like the concept of the game, but it reminded me on how I like to race around and crash into things. I think I finally decided that I would like to make a Driver/GTA type of game. The only problem that I was coming up with was that I could not afford to pay to license thirty different cars and I did not want to make a bunch of cars that nobody has seen before. So I did a little research.
I did not know that recently the supreme court sided w
The articles database makes a triumphant return with a beautiful new template:
http://www.leadwerks...e/page/articles
The front page shows the most recent articles. Clicking on a category on the right gives you the entire list of articles for that category:
http://www.leadwerks...s/_/programming
The new template I designed will help organize and present articles better. There's some great content written by the community, but I haven't provided a very clear specification for the arti
I apologize preemptively for the title.
So I picked up a Samsung Galaxy Tab today, for testing...yeah, that's it, "testing"...
I installed the USB driver for Windows, restarted my computer, and was able to start debugging Leadwerks3D on it with no trouble at all. However, the rendering showed black objects that ought not be black.
At this point in the game, having such a basic issue is very scary to me. I tracked the problem down to the lighting uniforms being passed to the sha
From an Australian gaming mag (and those guys are tough cookies) at the bottom of a review of Take On Helicopters...
Thanks for the mention guys the picture is a bit out of date though, but what the hell.
Source
I've never coded much polygonal modeling routines, instead focusing on constructive solid geometry. I wanted to include some tools for modifying surface normals and texture coordinates. I came up with a normal calculation routine that actually uses four different algorithms, depending on the settings specified.
One thing I learned right away is you want to do away with n*n routines. That is, NEVER do this:
for (i=0; i<surface->CountVertices(); i++)
{
for (n=0; n<surface->
To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
Quick 3rd Person View Character Test.
It was over a year ago we were notified that some of the models we had purchased from Dexsoft might possibly have been stolen. After a period of investigation the probability was quite high this was the case and Dexsoft contacted customers to offer new packs. However months later I was unable to get a reply about these replacements and only in November when doing a review of outstanding assets and licensing we had to either press again or do a re-build.
Dave elected to take it upon him
If you're not familiar with the Pareto Principle than you may have heard it referred to as the 80 / 20 principle.
The Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is a pattern that can be seen in many places such as income, sales, wealth, etc.
I've continually found this principle to take effect in my game development projects. Once I'm about 80% complete the effort to push forward seems to be just that much more.
Continually inspiring my
SCP
