Erwin, the compiled exe was working great. It opens pretty much every blend on my hard drive, (even my million poly art blends) Any plans in the near future for supporting non texture face materials and lights?
Thanks for your work Erwin ! Great that the gamekit is released free under the zlib.
We are working also on a free open source software under the zlib license.
Irrlicht is a great choice.
I just got around extracting IpoCurves, and ListBase objects in general, so any data can be extract from .blend files now. If you like to see some feature, please add some feature request in the gamekit issue tracker.
I’m currently considering creating some iPhone .blend viewer first.
Cheers,
Erwin
I didn’t know you were still going with this erwin. That’s very exciting.
Glenn
Hi, Erwin.
This project is fantastic, and I’m glad your working on this. However I noticed a few bugs (nothing major, though).
In particular, here are a few bugs:
1) parenting / large object bug:
Problem: the orientation of parented objects are incorrect. Also, it seems large objects (which are more than 50k) are not loaded.
2) Texture assignment and scene management bug:
Problem: Scene management may or may not be a bug, but it seems all layers and scenes are loaded at a the same time. However, (as you can see in the image) when more than 1 scene is loaded at a time, textures are incorrectly assigned to the faces.
Still, this is great work Erwin. Keep it up. =)
BTW: Do you plan on supporting a feature to read Logic Bricks / Python scripts in the future?
Thanks for taking time to read this, DeltaSpeeds.
Will this support all Blender GLSL features as Blender would show them? For the newest crop of BGE games using GLSL including those using custom shaders and 2D filters (built in or custom), this is critical.
does this support a larger blender game without lowering framerates drastically
The discussion came up previously regarding switching from LGPL - one of the arguments was that it could be a problem getting all contributors permission so far ( what if a contributor has passed away - what if 99% agree, 1% disagree with the change ).
Very interestingly though, OGRE3D ( imo easily the best open-source 3D engine out there - note that the Blender GE is imo the easiest to use 3D game engine ) is about to change from LGPL to the more commercially acceptable MIT license, so it can definitely be done, even on a fairly large project.
http://www.ogre3d.org/2009/09/15/ogre-will-switch-to-the-mit-license-from-1-7
Here’s the text…
OGRE Will Switch To The MIT License from 1.7
This is a very important announcement: from the upcoming new stable version of OGRE, OGRE 1.7 aka “Cthugha”, we will be switching to the [MIT License](http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php). The MIT license is a simpler and more permissive license than the LGPL, which we have used so far and will continue to apply up to and including all releases of OGRE v1.6. OGRE v1.7 is currently available as a preview from Subversion, but will slowly become the new stable version in the next few months.
We arrived at this licensing decision in the last month, and decided to make the community aware of it in advance so you could incorporate it into your plans. After the jump there are more details of the reasoning for this decision, and answers to some common questions.
We hope this announcement will be received positively by the community, and that the simpler licensing arrangements will provide even more incentive for people to get involved in using and extending OGRE in the future.
Why are we doing this?
The MIT license is short, easy to understand, requiring only that you include (simple) copyright & license declarations in your final applications. We hope using it will make it an even easier choice for people to use OGRE in their projects in future, thus driving even greater adoption of OGRE.
Won’t this mean people can ‘rip off’ OGRE in proprietary software?
The LGPL already allowed OGRE to be used in proprietary software, and this is something we’ve always encouraged. The main difference between the LGPL and the MIT License is that there is no requirement to release modified source code; only to include our copyright and the MIT license text in the final product.
While not requiring modified source to be released might initially seem like giving up an important motivator to contribute code back to the community, we’ve noticed something in recent years: 99% of useful code contributions come from people who are motivated to participate in the project regardless of what the license tells them they have to do. It’s our experience that a certain percentage of the user community will always participate and contribute back, and therefore encouraging adoption via simpler licensing is likely to result in more contributions overall than coersion via complex and restrictive licensing does. In addition, people who are internally motivated to participate tend to provide much higher quality and more usable contributions than those who only do it because they are forced to.
Does using a more permissive license weaken OGRE’s commitment to open source?
This is something of a political question. Here at OGRE we’ve always identified ourselves as ‘open source software’ rather than ‘free software’, reflecting that our primary purpose is to promote an open, active, participatory community around our shared code base. Our goal is not, and has never been, to require others to adopt the same licenses for their own software if they use OGRE – the LGPL has always been a ‘fire break’ to that, albeit quite a complex one. Our goal is to make OGRE the best it can be, and to encourage people to get involved in making it better and building ecosystems around it, and pragmatically we’ve decided the best way to do that is via a simpler, more permissive licensing approach based around voluntary contributions.
What does this mean for the OUL (the alternative commercial license to the LGPL)
The OUL will be phased out from 1.7 onwards. It will continue to apply for OGRE 1.6 and previous versions and will be available on request should people require it.
Can I apply the MIT License to OGRE 1.6 (or previous versions)?
No. OGRE 1.6 is licensed under the LGPL (with static link exclusion). The MIT License will only apply from OGRE 1.7 onwards – this is the clean break point between licensing conditions.
Can you, or anyone else convince all copyright holders (including NaN?) to re-license the BGE and all its dependencies to BSD/MIT/Zlib style license? I’m happy to support the BGE if the license changes. Until then, one realistic feasible way is a new player such as GameKit, re-using existing software when possible such as Irrlicht, Ogre, Bullet, readblend etc., that can play BGE .blend files.
Sinbad, the OGRE3D author, had full copyright on all of OGRE3D because of his contributor license agreement, so it was easy for him to change the license.
Re-licensing BGE/Blender seems highly unlikely and unrealistic from all the discussions with Ton so far, so what are your points?
Erwin
GameKit is still in early stages, and those features you mention haven’t been implemented yet. So no parenting, objects larger than 32k vertices (due to Irrlicht using short int indices, this has been fixed in a recent release), active scene is ignored, several ways of texturing are not supported yet. I hope to add some initial conversion of some logic bricks soon.
Do you mind submitting an issue and attach the broken .blend files (32bit, little endian) into the gamekit issue tracker?
Thanks,
Erwin
Those news are still exciting.
thank you for the work done.
So soon you can make the game in blender with logic bricks/python and model texture everything. Then just run it in the irrlich engine for better framerate. Is that is correct, it’s really great news 
A “GPL exeption license” is not sufficient. GameKit provides a way to play BGE .blend content on any platform of your choice without being restricted by the (L)GPL license. And that includes all platforms, such as Windows, Linux, OSX, not just embedded systems.
I have very good experience with our Bullet Physics Library, it got adapted for professional/commercial purposes thanks to its liberal Zlib license. Developers contribute back because they want to, even through the license doesn’t require it.
Hopefully my GameKit effort will get some momentum too, at some stage.
Thanks,
Erwin
sounds good to me.
Thank you so much Erwin. I was tinkering with Irrlicht already for some time, cause OGRE is way to complex for my poor programming skills. Looks like i made the right decision. Thats an awesome project, please keep it up if your time allows it. I consider that an early christmas present. Coool.
Hey Erwin,
always good for some interesting things 
I really like the idea behind gamekit, I only wish you would have choosen a different name.
Carsten
Well…this looks totally AWESOME…but I have no clue where to get it or run it or anything. Do you even have any running versions of it?
Man, I’m so psyched to see this still going. BGE portability gets me the most excited. I can’t really help at all … but I’m awfully good at encouraging you by waving my pom-poms!
*now if Irrlicht got ported to the Dreamcast, I’d be a very happy person
Just a quick update: the first rigid body constraints are converted and working in the GameKit!
http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/source/list
This version only shows objects in the active scene, using the proper layer mask. Also ‘q’ will quit, and ‘w’ shows wireframe.
The data extraction from the .blend file is very easy now, so adding the first simple logic bricks is going to happen soon, hopefully 
Cheers,
Erwin
please please please add logic brick support!