9 replies to this topic

[Blacklight28]

I have been looking into game engines and I came across Leadwerks 2.0

I want to know what other people have to say about this engine (pros and cons) before I think about buying it. Is there anyone here who uses or has used this engine?

[starstutter]

I personally like it so far and I'll give what I've collected.

- It uses deferred shading, which will give you a lot of light and shadow capabilities, but perhaps at the cost of some material quality.

- The engine seems capable for indoor environments, but the outdoor demo was quite slow, even for a next-gen card and the visuals, while quite good, didn't seem to justify that. To be fair however, this is most likley an art problem and not a tech limitation. Keep this in mind with all engines: if you are rendering bad art in the game, you can even manage to make the cry-engine look like a steaming mound of crap. I would investigate deeper.

- as far as I know, the development is ongoing. It looks very promising, but currently incomplete.

[Blacklight28]

I actually expected more about this engine. Is starstutter the only one who has something to say? or is the engine not as good as I thought?

[Wiredbomb0]

I can't really say much about it, but it said something about being related to 3D world Studio, and I have used that, and that was pretty good. They claim it does 'up to 33 million triangles', so that should be good enough for most games. The best thing you can do, is actually try it out. Not going to kill you!

[JarkkoL]

Wiredbomb0 said:

They claim it do 'up to 33 million triangles', so that should be good enough for most games.

These kinds of statements are marketing BS. For any graphics engine which isn't total piece of crap (i.e. doesn't send the geometry to GPU every frame or do some triangle level work on CPU) it's not the engine that's the bottleneck but the graphics card. You can render single 33 million triangle model and your engine ends up doing nothing in the frame. So, if an engine has an upper limit for triangle counts, it makes it sound very dubious.

[alphadog]

Blacklight28 said:

I actually expected more about this engine. Is starstutter the only one who has something to say? or is the engine not as good as I thought?

Why did you expect more? DevMaster is a relatively low-traffic (but high signal) forum with a plethora of different visitors, from AAA-title devs "working for the man", to indies, to total "Hello World!" n00bs. The number of people who a) tried Leadwerks, tried other engines, c) frequent this forum and d) have enough time to post a compare&contrast for you is pretty small...

[starstutter]

JarkkoL said:

These kinds of statements are marketing BS. For any graphics engine which isn't total piece of crap (i.e. doesn't send the geometry to GPU every frame or do some triangle level work on CPU)

Kind of off topic, but I've heard the stamement "send geometry to the GPU every frame" a lot and I'm a bit confused as to what is meant by that. Do you mean modifying vertex buffers? Draw calls? Some process Im not aware of? Im certain this is one of those cases where I know exactly what you're referencing, but I have never heard it put in those words.

[JarkkoL]

That was a bit misleading, I agree. I mean sending the vertex/index buffer data over the bus to the graphics card memory every frame (i.e. dynamic vertex/index buffers) instead of constructing static vertex/index buffers and using those. If a graphics engine keeps sending the data over the bus every frame even when the geometry is static (like is the case with 99% of the geometry), it's piece of crap design and needs some serious architecture overhaul (:

[starstutter]

haha, ok, now it makes more sense :)

I was thinking "you mean we aren't supposed to do draw calls every frame? 0_o" But now it's clear, and yes, that is a craptacular design.

One thing I hear from (probably outdated) graphics articles is the "big batch" method in which you send geometry to a very large vertex buffer and then can render almost the entire scene in a single draw call. Some of them made it sound like it was supposed to be sent every frame. Was this rule slightly different for previous generation graphics cards?

[Pancakes]

Hi I've an amateur who's used CryEngine2, Blender Game Engine, and Blade3d along with Leadwerks. I've also messed around in some others too.

Leadwerks is currently on it's way to 2.3. There will be a lot of fantastic developments in 2.3 such as model level scripting to the point where you can write your entire game in Lua script!

This is a big big big deal to me as I am not a programmer and I find dealing with compilers undesirable. I do have Javascript and Python experience and Lua is pretty similiar to Python I gather so I'm really looking forward to not having to use C++ or Blitzmax or some other language like that.

The Sandbox is going to be vastly superior to the one that is the current version. And the 2.3 is currently in closed beta so I haven't tried it yet but I've heard good things from the beta testers.

As far as how powerful is it. Well this engine is probably the most scalable of all the indie engines just by the way it's designed. Don't ask me why because it's a lot of technical stuff that has to do with the way hardware works and stream processors work and I'm not an expert but that's what the man who wrote the engine says and he's pretty reliable with the stuff he says take that with a grain of salt.

The terrain in this engine is HUGE. I mean. Like jawdropping HUGE. It makes Crysis maps look like a smurf. to be technical it handles 4096x4096 maps just fine. And with the automatic occlusino culling feature as long as you don't clutter all of your detail in one spot the performance is really good provided your hardware is current. As I said, Leadwerks is very scalable, but it has a higher overhead than some others.

Example: My old 8800GT gave me 26fps on highest settings for that island map demo on 1680x1050. Same settings on a GTX275 and I get 52fps. This engine seems to love stream processors.

Right now as I await the release of 2.3 which is rumored to be targeted for November or December release, I am playing around in Sandbox and I can easily have 2 million polys on screen at once while maintaining higher than 30fps. Which I think is really good.

It's just a very powerful engine. That right now needs more work on the usability department for nonprogrammers such as myself. But as I've said 2.3 is said to do a lot in that department and you don't have to take my word for it look at this.


Video Overview of Some of version 2.3's improvements: http://www.vimeo.com/5700094