Looking great doesn't make up for any lack in stability or optimization. "Leadwerks" (You're Josh, correct?) from what I've been able to collect you were able to pull this engine together within one or two years worth of time, while that is great, that does bring together the idea that it is highly unoptimized, and unstable. Of course the same thing could be said for DBP, I don't quite support either engine. Your engine uses OpenGL, I see, however OpenGL is quite slow on the newer cards. While display lists and vertex arrays, and by extension a notion of vertex buffers, help OpenGL's speed problems I can't help but imagine that any true support on Windows would have to be that of third party drivers in the future. Leadwerks currently only supports Windows, so why not use Direct3D which is obviously a better choice for a Windows-only 3D engine? Microsoft has not been keeping OpenGL up to par, and OpenGL has serious speed problems under Windows, while Direct3D obviously doesn't. That's not to say OpenGL is bad, OpenGL is fast under operating systems with true support for it, with the exception of graphics cards which support Direct3D over it.
I'm curious as to why you've built Leadwerks this way. It is not my intent to offend you, nor put down your engine in any way, I'm merely trying to query answers to questions you are likely asked all the time.
Here are some reviews:
hanglide, Feb 17th 2008
Quote: "This is really more of a graphics a engine at this point. The specs listed above are WAY off base. The author of the engine has been aware of the vast discrepancy between the specs posted here and what the engine actually does for ~6months. Your guess is as good as mine as to why he chose not to post a disclaimer here.
I used "average" for all the ratings as my intent was not necessarily to rate it but rather to correct the misinformation posted above.
Here are the specs directly from the leadwerks site.
Rendering
BSP geometry (brushes).
Static meshes.
Alpha-blended heightmap terrain.
Hardware-accelerated animated models.
Brushes
Automated texture mapping with adjustable parameters for offset, scale, and rotation.
BSP acceleration for raycasting and collision an order of magnitude faster than linear methods.
Meshes
Fast batch rendering can handle many instances of high-polygon geometry.
Convert .x, .3ds, or .b3d meshes to Leadwerks .mesh format.
Terrain
Alpha-blended texture layers.
Arbitrary subdivision and detail levels (LOD).
Automatic edge turning to smooth out slopes.
Lighting
Lightmaps on bsp geometry and terrain.
Vertex colors on static meshes.
Dynamic shader-based lighting on moving objects.
Projected shadows.
Built-in lightmapper.
Physics
Physics system based on Newton Game Dynamics.
Support for interactive objects (rigid bodies).
Hardware-accelerated physics on compatible graphics cards.
Textures
Load .png, .jpg, .bmp, .pcx, .dds, or .vtf textures.
Material settings for blend mode, transparency, z-sorting, collision, occlusion, etc.
Optional shader program per material.
Shaders
Support for pixel and fragment GLSL shader programs.
Normal maps with specular reflection on all lighting types.
Support for reflective and refractive materials.
Water shader.
Effects
Particle system with control over speed, acceleration, particle size, etc.
Projectors cast an image for light and shadow effects.
Sound
Sound system based on OpenAL.
Sound management prevents too many simultaneous instances of the same sound playing.
Support for EAX on compatible hardware.
Editor
Load 3D World Studio files directly.
Set up interactive worlds using entities without editing source code.
Programming
Write and compile a script program with no external programming language.
DLL for use with any programming language."
nihonlv, Jul 3rd 2008
Quote: "*** NOTICE ***
The features listed above are NOT accurate. There is NO networking at all. There is no AI. Additionally many of those other features are not available.
I would first like to say that the rendering engine in Leadwerks looks great. Unfortunately that doesn't make up for the fact that is about all it is. It does include physics, which are quite advanced. One problem that hasn't been fixed is the player controller. It remains broken.
The author of the engine is against the industry standard formats (Collada, FBX, etc.) and chooses to use his own format which no one supports.
So while the game engine looks okay. The pipeline is lacking, which is why I gave the ease of use an average rating."
From
here.
It should be noted that there are also several good reviews.
Cheers,
-naota
I'm not a dictator to those that do stuff for me by will. Only those who don't.
