Leadwerks

Leadwerks

Any one tried this engine and is it any good the stats looks great:

Rendering

* Unified per-pixel lighting system with dynamic soft shadows; Every object casts and receives shadows.
* Point, spot, and directional lights.
* Masked shadows for tree and plant effects.
* Specular reflection and normal mapping.
* Parallax mapping.
* Fast instanced mesh rendering.
* Dynamic visibility determination, requiring no pre-placed portals or compiling.
* Hardware skinning for fast animation.
* Bloom, depth-of-field, motion blur, and other post-processing effects.
* Fast hardware particle effects.
* Seamless transitions between indoor and outdoor areas.
* Adjustable rendering viewports.
* Support for ambient occlusion maps.
* Render to any graphics context to create Windowed applications and tools.
* Render to texture.
* Lens flare effects.
* Dynamic shader management chooses from thousands of variations and compiles requested shaders on-the-fly.
* Open-ended materials and shader system.
* Use existing shaders or add your own.
* Optimized rendering pathways for Shader Model 4.0, with render fallbacks for older hardware.
* Features can be scaled to accommodate older hardware.
* Load textures from .dds, .png, .tga, .bmp, and .jpg files.


Meshes

* Load .obj, .md3, and .gmf meshes, or create meshes from scratch.
* Support for animated meshes with fast hardware skinning.
* Create box, cylinder, sphere, cone, and plane primitives.
* Support for arbitrary number of LOD versions.
* Fast mesh rendering using GPU instancing, if available.


Terrain

* Huge landscapes with up to 33 million triangles.
* Dynamic lighting and self-shadowing terrain allow day/night cycles and weather effects.
* Modify terrain in real time.
* Vegetation layers can simulate millions of plants.
* Alpha-blended tiling terrain.


Animation

* Hardware skinning for fast animation.
* Blend animations, or mix hard-coded actions or physics with animation.
* Attach weapons or items to animated limbs.
* Attach physics bodies to limbs for animated collision and locational damage.


Physics

* Support for multi-core CPU acceleration.
* Simulate thousands of rigid bodies.
* Create complex machines with ball, hinge, corkscrew, slider, universal, and fixed joints.
* Physics vehicles with any number and configuration of tires. (In progress)
* Extremely fast solver, with far greater stability than any other physics engine on the market.
* Collisions with polygon meshes, convex hulls, boxes, cylinders, cones, spheres, chamfer cylinders, and capsules, or compound collisions made up of any combination thereof.
* Player controller simulates player movement while participating in complex physics interactions. (In progress)
* Customizable collision system with support for any number and scheme of collision types and interactions.
* Powered by Newton Archimedes®.


Audio

* 3D sound positioning, spatialization, and attenuation.
* Load .wav and .ogg audio files.
* EAX audio effects like reverb simulate different acoustic environments.
* Seamless sound looping.


Programming

* DLL version can be used with virtually any programming language.
* Scripted engine requires no external language.
* Programmable in BlitzMax with a BMX module.
* Procedural interface allows full access to all features while maintaining a simple and straightforward API.
* Headers available for C++, C#, VB, and other languages.
* Abstract file system with no pre-defined folder structure.
* Load files from .zip packages directly into memory.
* Automatic caching and instancing of media files.

We were talking about this in another thread.

Stats are stats, every engines got em, it's which engines that use them effectively.

There's a great thread on it here.
http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=74807

Although it's supposed to make life way easy on the programmer, currently version 2.0 doesn't offer the source code, so there could be inflexibility issues for some. There's also no AI functions as of right now. It's still in its infancy in a sense. @.1 has much to offer though, and may release the source.

TGEA still seems to be the top gun as far as indy engines go, however Leadwerks should soon surpass it. TGEA doesn't have the best stats or performance, however it offers the sources and most of the serious users can add the elements they want. If you check Leadwerks boards you'll see some of the users still use TGEA for that reason.

Leadwerks also isn't targeted at economical hardware, which indy gamers should target. However if you are like me and plan on finishing your game in about two years or so, then that hardware will be become the norm and you should go with next gen stuff.

I actually plan on purchasing this engine as soon as I can upgrade my PC. One of the biggest reasons for me is that Newton is already integrated.

There is a source code license available for Leadwerks. Have to email Josh about it, but it's there.

I bought the engine 2 weeks ago and still play around but my impression
so far is:


What i like:
- The engine in general is easy to use (but see comments below!!!)
- The render results look great with small effort
- The shadow generation is fully automatic (including models)
- The WorldEditor shows lightning, shader effects and physics immediately (only postprocessing is missing)
- The terrain support is great for really large terrains
- Physics (Very easy to use)
- You get good support from the community
- You get a lot for the price (which is also true for gamestudio)

What i dislike:
- The documentation is still very basic or simply not existing
- Many features are not self explaining and it is hard to understand the usage without documentation
- The current target platform is BlitzMax basic (there is no tutorial for C++ at the moment)
- Many features move to shaders instead of providing API calls (e.g. fog, water)
- The Import from the WorldEditor is still very basic (you have to post process it in your source code)
- Many features i got used to in gamestudio are missing (e.g. pathfinding, GUI, Trigger ...)
- The engine is based on OpenGL which i see critical in regards to future support of drivers ... (my opinion)
- I do not know how many developers are working on the engine but it appears to me the team is relativly small (Future Save?).


So as my current summary leadwerks is a very interesting engine but in my opinion still work in progress (documentation, features...). But i have to say there is a lot of good progress at the moment.
There is a good set of feature and a really good rendering engine but you need more recent hardware.


Again this is only my opinion but i hope it helps.


Image from the Leadwerks Demo:


Image from the World Editor:


One of the models of my game in leadwerks (shader and shadow assigned automatically from leadworks):

@tkunze

Yeah, the points you bring up are exactly why I'm not interested in buying the engine right now, however most of the features are exactly what I want for my game, especially Newton and the shaders. I totally agree with you point about open gl and the drivers issues (which are only getting worse), however you can't rule out how may more customers you'll have with the cross platforming capabilities.

While the selling point for me is the pretty looks and large environments, the one thing that keeps me from trying it is the lame documentation! As others have stated on here so many times documentation can make or break on engine. Who cares how great it is if you don't know how to use it.

This is one of the reasons I picked up A6 five years ago. The documentation was fantastic and it was easy to pick up. I had no ambitions back then though, and now I need something that will achieve my goal.

TGEA probably still has a serious edge here. It may not have as many features, but it's still affordable and their community is fantastic. Like with what they did to TGE they will probably use the open source to implement the missing features.

TGEA ? Are you just blind ? No seriously man ... TGEA Is no match with leadwerks when it comes to graphics. Now if had to choose between c++ and blitzmax I would rather choose blitzmax. Anyway I think if you are working on a7 why would you switch to tgea ? It's a shame that guy on this forum are only looking for package instead of framework. It's a bit harder but then you don't have to wait for the feature you want, you just build it. I'm not even a developer even if I'm now working on xna. But this a bit off topic.

I've just seen the gears of torque and it looks like a good ps Game. tyou shoudl try gamecore maybe it suits you better.

Dude I actually had a hard time understanding you in that last post. How do you know what I'm looking for in an engine? For the game I'm working on TGEA is wayyy more capable of running it than A7, especially since I'm have huge environments. Gamecore are you kidding me? Well you don't know my project.

TGEA looks very nice, maybe not as good as Leadwerks, however if you actually went on their boards you would know that a lot of their users are still sticking to TGEA because of its documentation and because of the fact that Leadwerks is still missing many features. As far as I know it'd be pretty difficult to finish a game with Leadwerks since most of its functions have yet to be documented.

@FoxZero:
Michael Perry (GG Employee) works on a new documentation system for all Torque Engines.
Currently GG is on a critical point. They want to merge the code base of each engine to ONE code base (codename: Juggernaut). Also Matt Fairfax is evaluating new techniques for future versions. After that they will work on Torque 2. So it is hard so say how GG's Engines will work in the future.

No matter, i am working with TGE and it is a lot of fun. But i am also interested in TGEA.

@tkunze:


A very very very important statement. I totally agree!!!!!

So if TGEA is so great why even bother creating a tread about other engine ?

Leadwerks seems interesting and you can program it in c#. I'm going to stick to ogre and xna.
But just tell me why gears of torque is so ugly ? It's nice, just check the video they provide. Anyway do you have any game example from you or other guy from tgea ? Just curious to see what's this engine is capable of.

cheers

http://www.stickmanstudios.co.uk/buccaneer.html

http://www.dreamlords.com/home.action

And a video:
http://www.stickmanstudios.co.uk/movies/BuccTeaser_1.19.wmv

thanx I've to admit those two game are nice !

Can you make game with TGEA? Or do you have to get another program to render the source code?

TGEA of course is the solution to all of your problems related to game development. Only thing which remains is to think of sth. cool and then press the "make game" button.
Ask our Torque saints here in the forum

/sarcasm