Approaching Winter

I've recently been experimenting with texture shaders provided by Shadmar (user on Leadwerks forums). Crysis pioneered the technique with several other texture-based directional effects, and have since changed the way developers create models. This effect is now common place, from Skyrim to Guild Wars 2.

Here's a test using the model from my previous posts.

Rounded Corners

Throughout the lifecycle of several projects, many were brainstorms of much larger projects of which seemed unimaginable. The rush to dive into the development of these games, seized the potential from these projects because neither creator nor artisans of the trade properly planned each step. This caused previous projects to crawl to a halt, which ends now.

Several project members have left the team, and in-turn a new project (or phoenix) is born once again. There will be public alphas, video updates, and additional stages that will give the public the chance for feedback. The new game in development is called "Dungeon Painter 3D".

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 the"Dungeon Painter 3D" tool set.

These semi-transparent blobs are actually the beginnings for one of the first dungeons created with this real-time paint tool.

Progress so far:

- Core algorithms

- Basic Dungeon models

Up next... textures, stalagmites, and treasure!

Crates Updated

I've refined the details of the Crate set and modified the broken pieces to better suit customers. I'm working on eliminating several polys that are unnecessary, and hopefully will have these posted on the Leadwerks Asset store soon!

Crate Mania

I have been incredibly busy during the last couple of months! Creating a pathing library written in LUA, Several models, and concept art for my multiplayer game. Here is a sampler pic of an item that will go on sale soon on the Leadwerks website.

This crate has a script that will explode into a handful of broken pieces with random rotation and velocity, shown in the picture below.

The lower resolution crate only appears when the camera is 200 units (or farther) away.

(Pieces, Hi-res, Lo-res)

Modeling Practice

The Leadwerks community is in need of some quality models that are professional grade. My next project is to create a construction set for caves, made from only a handful of pieces. The pictures below shows some of my progress.

AI Path Finding

I had a challenge last week from my partner for this game project. Allow an NPC to come up with a quick way to navigate to a particular place, even if the environment around him is dynamic.

Some high-budget games use static node path meshes, which must be a final step in production for each map. A combination of theses meshes in different formats have been used in different games, and some use smoothing algorithms to make the web of node seem more natural. I wanted a different approach that didn't require a web of objects hand placed into the world.

I came up with a rotational path collection.


On a pivot, a box would rotate several degrees and create a collection of distances from the target. After the closest one is found, it adds this entity to a PathCollection, then moves the pivot to this new closer spot.

The cycle repeats itself until the radius is close enough to the target.


I used a collection of Entities to avoid storing a minimum radius, and calculated terrain slope to manage where NPCs can actually travel. Changing the rotating radius and amount of degrees for each iteration can be used to create a low-density path compared to my example.

The best part about this approach is you can store these paths in memory, removing the data as necessary.

2.3 Evaluation Kit

Josh has Released the 2.3 Evaluation Kit. The only sandbox where you can render God Rays, SSAO, and Tens of Thousands of trees on a Single Core 1.2GHz Processor.