How can you cut down on drawcalls with texture baking? How can you save disk space with multiple UV sets? How can you use pre-rendered lightmaps and still retain the ability to edit individual surfaces? Let’s find out!Read more …
One of ShiVa’s biggest strengths has always been its cross-platform nature. No matter if desktops, mobiles or game consoles, if it exists, chances are that there is a ShiVa engine port for it. And if you are running an OS or processor off the beaten path, you can always try HTML5/WebGL. Web distribution might not be what you had in mind though… Maybe there are ways to make your web application fit for offline distribution!Read more …
Dear ShiVa Community, we are happy to announce the release of ShiVa 2.0 Beta 9, just in time for the holiday season! While this is mostly a maintenance release, it still comes with a number of important updates which you should definitely try out.Read more …
ShiVa is a C++ engine with a Lua scripting interface. While this works great for calling API functions, it does have its pitfalls when it comes to organizing and storing data. Since tables are the main (in fact, the only) data structuring mechanism in Lua, these pitfalls become especially apparent when trying to combine ShiVa tables with Lua tables.Read more …
ShiVa games run natively on a large number of platforms without the need for the developer to adjust anything. Our STK + engine architecture was designed with the “build once, run everywhere” philosophy in mind. There are times however when you want to use a feature that is native to your target platform, in which case you have to write your own plugins.Read more …
iOS 11 has been released and 32 bit app support has officially been dropped. Do you need to update your ShiVa-powered games on the AppStore? Are games built for iOS 11 apps backwards compatible? Let’s find out.Read more …
Welcome to the last part of our multithreading tutorial series. In part 3, we are going to have a look at the unique challenges in Object AI threads and think about scaling our system from a single consumer (User AI) to potentially hundreds of objects in a single scene.Read more …
Now that we are familiar with spawning and detaching threads, know about data races and lock_guarded mutexes, it’s time to put all that knowledge to good use and make all those threads do actual work in your ShiVa game! In this tutorial, we will be looking at two possible design patterns for currentUser() AIModels, while next week will have a look at multithreading in scene object AIs.Read more …
Lua Coroutines, which we discussed before in other tutorials, offer a nice way of running long calculations step by step every frame over a period of time, so your programs do not appear to be stuck or frozen while you wait for those functions to return. Unfortunately, Coroutines do not offer true multithreading, which means that your expensive multicore CPU largely goes underutilized. Thanks to ShiVa’s underlying C++ core, Lua Coroutines are not the only way to design parallel operations. Using the power of the C++11 STL, you can achieve true concurrency via std::thread().Read more …
Last week, we introduced the fundamentals of working with ShiVa’s networking and wrote a simple program that connected to a remote server session. This week, we are going to build a simple chat application that allows 2 or more clients to exchange text messages.Read more …
