What is the crowd's opinion of Leadwerks?

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Hi pawxy! It's true that the Reddit community isn't as active compared to the forums that /u/tipforeveryone2 just linked. I was also surprised how easy it is to learn this engine, while also being so lightweight compared to Unreal and Unity.

If you need any help, you can visit the tutorials and API reference pages, or feel free to make a post on the forums. :)

You should definitely take a look at Leadwerks. It's a 3D engine with an active community including Steam support. If memory serves correctly there's a demo you can try out for 30 days.

I've been working with it myself and I'm liking it for the past 4 years. Still using it today for an RTS game I'm making. You can also code in Lua if you like. C++ is supported as well.

Ahh I see. But you know dependencies can be satisfied anywhere. And also leadwerks does work on ArchLinux as well as other distros (works, not supported) http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/10338-leadwerks-engine-on-arch-linux/ . Also rolling release is as stable as you want it to be. And you don't have to compile anything that is in AUR, it's all automated by a single command, and you can even use AUR helpers. And if you need commercially supported why not try out fedora, or CentOS.

Also this isn't an OS change. No no, you'll still be using GNU/Linux just not the same DE or the same package management tool.

Also I am in no way trying to say Ubuntu is bad, or even get you to switch to other distros. Everyone is comfortable under their own skin.

> So how is it workable on mobile? Assuming FOV is similar and target rendering etc...

Gear VR uses a smaller render target size by default (1024x1024 per eye instead of 1182x1461) and the refresh rate is 60 Hz instead of 75 Hz. That's 125 Mpixels/s vs 259 Mpixels/s. The FOV is also a bit lower than the DK2 (96° vs 100° diagonal).

> The only way it would be workable is by having much lower detail graphics

Yes, Oculus recommends using much less draw calls (50-100) and polygons/vertices (50k-100k) among other optimizations to be able to attain 60 FPS. The author of Titans of Space even had to remove stereoscopy in most of the scene to be able to attain 60 FPS.

In Battlefield 3 there are typically 1500-2000 draw calls and 3000-7000 in heavy scenes, that's x30-x70 compared to the Gear VR limit. Also a single 3D character in BF3 has ~15,000 polygons, with 3 of them displayed at the same time you'd already be at the limit of the polycount on Gear VR.

This is all good advice. I'd just like to add another option that's more along the long of serious game development. Leadwerks is a Linux-first cross-platform game development solution with Steam Greenlight support. However, you're looking at $99.99 for the indie edition (available in the software center) as the cheapest version.

30gb was enough to do it badly. If you need twice that just to make it look acceptable then that's still bonkers.

It's far more sound to have a system that manages the texture almost as if it's a giant Illustrator file rather than a JPEG: you don't store, for example, the pixels of a wall covered with the same graffiti all over it: you store the information to recreate the effect. From there, you just read data relevant to whatever surfaces are in view and output that to the models. Easily scalable, still allows for unique surfaces, doesn't require a monster rig and won't take up more hard drive space than a decent sized movie collection.

There are even a few game engines that already do something akin to this for terrain rendering. Check out this blog post on the terrain system for the Leadwerks engine: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/blog/41/entry-1112-virtual-texture-terrain/

This is called "Constructive Solid Geometry."

Your mind seems to work like the Quake2 Engine. All lines and planes are actually infinite. I think what you're seeing is not actually "lines on the floor" but just the place where selected perpendicular planes intersect with the planes on the floor. In the game, if you have 2 shapes touching, the planes of those two objects will be imposed on each other.

Interestingly enough, this is why when you map for Half-Life or quake or most other games, you are not allowed any concave surfaces. Also in these games, each "square" surface is cut into a "triangle."

Here is a good primer on this.

Here is a view of how the game engine breaks it up. Imagine that not everything is broken up into triangles.