An update for Leadwerks 3 has been released, bringing new graphical enhancements to mobile games.  Building on the efficient art pipeline and user-friendly tools of Leadwerks 3, the engine now supports projected shadows for characters and other dynamic objects.  This technique works by casting a shadow onto the surrounding world geometry, to provide real-time shadows that run fast on all platforms.



To enable dynamic shadows on a single object, just select it in the editor and choose the new "Dynamic" option in the "Cast Shadows" property.  You can also do this in code by calling Entity::SetShadowMode(Light::Dynamic).



Leadwerks 3 has also gotten a visual upgrade with the addition of post-processing effects.  In Leadwerks 2, all post-processing effects like volumetric light scattering, screen-space ambient occlusion, depth-of-field, and bloom were hard-coded.  That is, they were written into the core engine and it was difficult to customize the renderer.  Leadwerks 3 has added a new command, Camera::AddPostEffect(), which allows the user to attach a shader right to a camera, to automatically render post-processing effects.

Leadwerks is a fast and flexible development platform for building mobile games with native code.  You can download a 30-day trial version on the website here.