Tuesday 18 November 2014

New Dynamic Light Script Commands

Aside from some basic reflection tweaks this morning, the major addition was inspired by one of our premier alpha testers, who wanted once and for all, control of the dynamic lighting. To this end a new script command was added called LightSwitch.lua using two new commands HideLight(e) and ShowLight(e). Basically you can now add a dynamic light, associate it with this script and when you get near it you can toggle the light on and off by pressing the E key. Simple stuff, but long awaited and opens the door to the 'rest' of the dynamic lighting commands via script.

The biggest chunk of work however was last night when I finally fixed the annoying shadow flicker issue, and made some good improvements on the visual side such as dynamic and static lights working nicely together with the pre-bake scenes.  Also gained some extra performance points along the way for various reasons, and now my Escape level easily tops 60 fps at the start and the GTTR level tops 90 fps as well which has never happened before now.

I also found a way to speed up the Editor IDE for levels which have a lot of entities, creating a smoother scroll and entity selection experience.

Been a long day on the road this afternoon so not much energy left for much coding, but I have my email open, my code standing ready and a juicy bug that relates to 100 characters so might do one or two more before it gets super late. In other news, and exciting news at that, we've just received the release authorization for the forthcoming launch of our App Game Kit 2 product on Steam, penciled in for this Friday.  For those not in the know, AGK2 is our cross platform development language which allows you to write apps easily and deploy them instantly to all the popular devices. We have already had mucho success from apps we created with this tool, and now you can tap into the same power house of functionality for an amazing price. Watch this space for news of the Steam launch and a great early bird discount to get you coding mobile apps sooner and making your very own iOS, Android and Windows hits!

P.S. Sorry for the lack of screenshot today, it was pretty hard to take a shot of 'not flickering any more and a lot faster' :)

9 comments:

  1. Great work Lee,engine sounds better every day.Looking forward to trying the next release.

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  2. Speaking of AGK2. Is that ever going to build to html5? I think it would be a great alternative tool for developing games on the Wii U instead of Construct2 and the other offerings.

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  3. the GTTR level tops 90 fps as well which has never happened before now.

    Was it not over 100 on Monday ;)

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  4. Been over a third of a year since last update. Long wait

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  5. well you could have posted a screen shot with the light off :)

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  6. Lee, I cannot say it enough, good work.

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  7. Do the player defined static and dynamic lights still go through walls?

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