I'm writing this in the programming forum because it is a message just for the Leadwerks community.
We've put up some new website pages here talking about Leadwerks 3:
http://www.leadwerks...space/page/home
The goal for Leadwerks 3 has always been to build a cross-platform game engine with a fast art pipeline. I think it was generally recognized that good graphics could only get us so far, and that a revision of the art pipeline was needed. I think most people would also agree that you can't rely on just Windows anyways for game publishing. Mobile is the fastest-growing game platform today, and it's open to indies, unless the consoles.
Everything in Leadwerks 3 has been designed to be forward-compatible with a next-generation renderer. We built the renderer itself as an abstract class that can be swapped out with OpenGL ES and OpenGL 2 renderers, and an OpenGL 4 renderer later on, although this will take time to develop.
When getting ready for the initial release of Leadwerks 3, we had to ask ourselves some very difficult questions. Where was the value in this product? What kind of people would want to use it? What do we offer that no one else does? We had to consider these things and decide what to focus on so that we could put out a consistent marketing message and reach the people we hoped to reach.
We looked at Shiva and Unity's websites, which both talk a lot about being "cross-platform". In fact, Shiva is on a lot of platforms I've barely heard of, like Bada and Meego. We're not going to out-Shiva Shiva on platform support, so we didn't want to go that route. Instead, we chose to focus on mobile, for now, because that is where I think we can win. We're the first game engine to bring native code support to mobile, so you can develop for mobile with the same straightforward OO API you enjoyed in Leadwerks Engine 2. In fact, our C++ support in Leadwerks 3 is much better. Leadwerks 3 is written in pure C++, so you can directly access the engine classes with our static library, with no need for any wrapping code. We've implemented debugging hooks so you can set your own breakpoints when a crash occurs. The API has also been cleaned up with a more consistent naming scheme and use of static functions and members, for creating objects and global class constants.
If there's one group of people we want to reach, it's developers who want to write mobile games in C++. We can expand our marketing message later to include other segments, but this is the one group we want to reach right away, where the biggest gains can be made.
Our message in the future will change to promote the scalability of the engine, with great graphics beyond LE2 on PC, and decent graphics on mobile. However, we can't talk about what we are going to do; we need to talk about what we offer right now. For this reason, I wanted a really focused marketing message that centered around mobile, for now.
We're working hard to bring you Leadwerks 3, and I am looking forward to the future the first release will form the foundation for.