all of these are possible, decals are just a second uv layer…
Baked lighting - check out baked lighting for the bge on youtube.
Dynamic materials (for lack of a better word- moving rain on outside windows, random UV offset on inside windows) - this is something you can do yourself , node materials are very nice, and so are vertex color based splat maps.
Decal textures- second UV layer
God rays - GLSL or clever tricks
Higher framerate - this is dependant on the coder… geometry instancing for grass etc is availible in UPBGE, and LOD and mark invisible/visible are availible in the normal BGE.
Possible, sure. But convenient? Easy to implement? Not a huge hit to performance? Not at all. Why would I want to spend hours trying to work around the limitations when I can use a different engine where I don’t have to?
perhaps you could revisit it, and any time you hit a wall, just ask for help?
Well this is the problem. When someone finds a wall in another engine, the wall is eventually destroyed and erradicated by the devs, implementing the functionality that gives problems. Here instead, we find a workarround and forget about it, until someone else hits the same wall again, and again, and again…
Or, in another engine, they could ask search/ask on forums or answerhub and someone is likely to have had the same issue. The BGE community is a bit smaller.
Anyway, to try to really answer the original question, I think one of the main reasons people dislike the BGE is that they have been turned off by it when using it. Maybe because of a lack of documentation/tutorials or lack of examples.
One thing I like in UE4 is the content examples, basically you have a map with lots of different levels with content examples for all of the features. So, for example, you open the lighting content examples map, you can run around in a room with some different types of light setups with text that explains what is making this lighting happen. Then you can exit the game play to the editor and see what kinds of assets are there and how they are set up. Here are some docs: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/
You could probably do the same thing in the BGE. If you’ve found a solution you can make a simple example of it with some documentation, then share it in some thread and it could get consolidated into a content examples bge game or something. That way you can share the systems you use instead of everyone just stumbling around in the dark until you solve something by yourself.
Maybe something like this already exists though, I have no idea. But if it doesn’t it’s something that could be useful for newbies and experts alike.
Yep Totally UE4 really has alot of content in terms of how one can create games.
The only thing the BGE really has to improve on is the in game Lighting and as well
as the shadows we need High Res shadows that will not limit the Frame rate of the
game and also to really try and stay away from ultimate Lag !!! Lol yeah ive spent
basically like 3 months Last year really thinking hard on how to really reduce the high
consumption of Ram especially when it comes to Games made on blender. So basically im worried about some of the optimization techniques blender has and it seems Like blender Provides very little on that. Because content is fine im jus tryina make a game that runs smooth with HD Graphics.
But on the other hand blender is nice and Easy to work with !!!
What I really dislike about BGE is that no one can tell what will happen to it. For how many years has it been on hold now, three, four? C’mon, say something about it, pull the plug or write a plan.
What I really dislike about BGE is that no one can tell what will happen to it. For how many years has it been on hold now, three, four? C’mon, say something about it, pull the plug or write a plan.
Because blender just needs a few tweaks as far as platforming is concerned. We just need to be able to render games on mobile platforms and also console platforms if possible. And we just really have to push up a bit more on our Graphics thats all because these types of graphics are achievable:
With GLSL shaders we can achieve NFS graphics, no doubt. Even better, we can achieve Driveclub graphics:D Or GTA V type of open-world graphics. However, the other question is framerates. Propably we WILL have good framerates, it depends on UPBGE project and how will it be accepted.
