Ogre in Blender (snailrose)

[Mohij]

I found this here:

[Blender GameEngine is going to have some big improvements this year. 2 big improvements that are planned and worked on are: - plugin architecture, to allow external game engines. This will help Chrystal Blend, but also Ogre3d and other engines. - integration with Ogre3D. Charlie (snailrose) is working on this, and has some preliminary results, running Ogre3d inside Blender

Is there any more information on this available?
What exactly is snailrose doing?
I ask this, because I plan to do a bit a similar thing (just search all post from me on the OGE Forums and that would make no sense if two are doing the same twice.
Greetings,
Mohij

[Jedrzej_s]

Yes !!! This is great idea: Ogre3D inside Blender !!! Good luck

[LetterRip]

Charlie is making the GE system pluginable with OGRE as the first plugin, also he and Erwin will add parts of the Blender GE to OGRE so it will be a complete system.

There is a project similar to OGE - YAKE which uses OGRE as its graphic engine but adds the rest for a complete engine.

The YAKE project has a Blender exporter already,

LetterRip

[jazzroy]

that's wonderful news, it would be nice to see an official thread about the development

[Mohij]

About whose project snailroses or ours?

[erwin]

We are currently migrating/replacing/improving parts of the Blender Game Engine.

The primary Physics engine will be Bullet, and the primary graphics engine will be Ogre3d. The logic system and Python will initially mostly be compatible with the current system. Apart from that, there is the plugin interface, that allows external game engines.

Charlie/snailrose is focussing on the Graphics and plugin, and I'm focussing on the physics.


I don't know about your project, but we should probably get in touch to see if there is enough overlap between the projects. Also, perhaps best to post such questions on the Game Engine forum:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=12

Thanks,
Erwin

[Mohij]

Originally Posted by erwin and the primary graphics engine will be Ogre3d

So I will definitely not have to program an Ogre viewport, right? That's great, because the biggest part is out of the way for me then. I hope you keep this as generic as possible, because I do and will not try integrate the tools for a specific game type into Blender, nor integrate a beginner friendly allround game maker into Blender. I just want to enhance Blender with the tools that you would need when creating game content (level creation is the part where Blender lacks most at the moment) in general, nothing specific.
Because when you want to create games professionally you would never use a game maker that tries to do everything at once (alias "create fps game", "create strategy game" or "create rpg game" button), you would either use an engine and the tools that are exactly made for the purpose that you want to achieve (for example the quake3 engine, GTK-Radiant and a modelling package when you want to create an indoor shooter) or you take a generic engine and generic tools and adapt them to your purpose.
And till now Blender has been a great (generic) modelling package, but is not that good in some other categories, for example in level editing.
That is what I want to change.
I hope I didn't take you by surprise with this answer.

Originally Posted by erwin I don't know about your project, but we should probably get in touch to see if there is enough overlap between the projects.

You should probably post on the OGE Forums in here
Greetings,
Mohij

[kakapo]

wow, ogre (and also crystal space) in blender sounds incredibly cool!

i am very interested in machinima movie making and i think this would make blender _the_ tool for machinima.

when will we see a first version?

[antont]

would it be easy to expose the (py)ogre api for blender game programming, or at least parts of it by proxying or something? i don't see fully yet all of what that means tho.

~Toni

[cekuhnen]

those 3d engine generated movies made a big hit at the ottawa animation festival two years ago. however the movies shows where quite weak because they were too much a tech demo.


however i agree that blender will be great for it, it offeres the animation tools for it. the price tag will be also a selling point!

[The_Warder]

I would love to have these implementations, can we expect this by the next release?

[Mohij]

Originally Posted by The_Warder can we expect this by the next release?

Definitely not from my side. I still have to get to know the Blender source code and I started learning C only half a year ago, so it will take some time...

[The_Warder]

I'm fine with that. You ever need a tester I am ready.
windows xp home edition
256mb ddr ram
fx5200 128mb
p4 2.4 gig

For now can someone tell me what I need to download to use the ogre engine sdk files or windows source.

[Genjix]

whatever happened to crystalspace? Ogre is only a rendering engine and is not suitable for using in the game engine- you still physics, sound, entity management, ... crystalspace offers all of this.

[orion119net]

I think Ogre is going to be used for graphics.

[maccam912]

I'll also be a tester. I've always been hoping that the blender GE gets a lot better. I've seen ogre, and it looks amazing! I also like the fact that it's sort of a drag and drop GE, versus a C++ one.

Computer stats:
1 GB ram
Windows XP/Fedora 5 Dual boot
NVidia
AMD Athlon XP

[Mohij]

Originally Posted by erwin I don't know about your project, but we should probably get in touch to see if there is enough overlap between the projects.

How? (just some filler to make this message long enough)
moHiJ

[ashsid]

Hi, Snailrose and Erwin.

I have currently started to work on plugin that provides access to game data in Blender from Python scripts - that means physical properties of objects, sensors, controllers, actuators, that aren't accessible from Python API at this moment. It's intended to provide base for exporting game data to our game engine.

Do you have already finished the similar part of your work? Is implementation of this functionality available for download? Or can I help somehow with design and coding?

I don't want to do duplicated work but I need to get this plugin working really soon.

[OTO]

Hello
Great news
Count me in to help making a Demo/Game for the release
Bye and thank you for your work

[p00f]

Cool, Ogre is a nice rendering engine!

I am liking the Bullet physics in the existing blender and the beta builds too.

What i am wondering is why use Ogre over Crystal space?

I have the newest Crystal space walkktest binary beta, and CEL and the blend2CS blender plug-in. I make my stuff in blender and hit the export button, and I have a full blown walk test.... with a little python scripting I can have a simplistic game in a few minnuets.

But alas, there is no logic block export This is why I am looking forward to this project..

What i am reading is that it will be plug-in based . Will this mean that other game engines can make a plug-in for blender game engine, like Crystal space, and Irrlicht?

another concern is how recently the GLSL was introduced to the blender game engine. It dosent allow non programmers to use the parallax shader without scripting.
Not only dose this alienate the non programming artist, it is also slow as hell to manually type in a script. (especially when blender had all the stuff for the GUI already made in the material system)
Please make the new game engine simple to use like the Crystal space plug-in... if the CS plug-in sees that an object has a material with the NOR button pressed it assigns it as a simple bump shader... if it sees both NOR and DISP pressed it makes it into a parallax shader.
If the Normal map has a Alpha chanel in the texture, the cs exporter will use the alpha channel as a specular map.

well to make a long story short, please take a look at how simplistic the CS exporter is making some very common tasks, like materials, shaders, terrains, lights, Etc...

It really is nice as an artist to concentrate on how my art work looks. Complex game engines that require me to script, and other manual operations really slows me down, and sometimes Excludes me because it is way more technical than it has to be.( I only learn redundant things when there is money involved , otherwise I just wait for the better mousetrap to be invented)

One of the biggest things that attracted me to the blender game engine was the use of logic blocks... it made things very simple and easy to understand. It seems like more and more that the logic blocks are getting left out of the loop. Simple things like mouse movement, to make the joystick logic blocks work correctly, and the use of armatures require programming/scripting knowledge.

Just for the record, I don't use game engines for games... I use them for Architect visualizations, I also have a lawyer friend I help sometimes to with real time presentations. (we are offering a reward for anyone who can implement a rag doll template into a physics engine for us)
Simple things would be nice to be able to use like joystick controls, and mouse movements with logic blocks.
Sorry for the Novel
Have a nice day everyone