Blender and BGE on Android: who is interested?

Some existing Blender developers are considering porting Blender to run on Android devices. So far this is in the early stages of investigation. There are some risks, e.g. it may be too difficult to port Blender to run on SDL and OpenGL ES.

If it appears to be feasible, would anyone be interested in supporting the project? If so, I would like to organise fundraising to buy one of the developers a tablet.

The BGE on the Android platform it would be amazing.

I’m very interested in Android BGE. Wish there was more information, or blog regarding Gamekit stuff.

I hope this is not to offtopic, but i always thought i would be nice to have something like a modelviewer app. Basically it lets you open your .blend files and zoom and rotate for presentation purpose on an android or iOS device.

I would say that blender would not make sense for a mobile device! But the Blenderplayer for Android would be awesome!!!

@C-106, GameKit is not a drop-in replacement for the BGE, it doesnt use python and games made in blender wont run on it without having their logic re-written.

Also, having the BGE run with OpenGL ES2 will allow it to be ported to other mobile platforms - WebOS, Some mobile handsets (Pandora).

@ Campbell
do you know if there will be other bf-projects that cover the developement of the bge? This would be awesome!!!
I see so much potential in the bge! It just needs a bit of polishing!

Would be nice, to have it all integrated into Blender. Use python, and link it to android’s NDK.
This would be a competing solution to Unity and Shiva, and others.

@CG_Tiger, there wouldnt be much to having good integration - just like there is an ‘Export Game Runtime’ addon, we would have something similar for the BGE, probably less then 100 LOC, just to dump the blendfile(s) with the android binary and libs in a dir.

A good ideea but other thing it is to resolve the license. The “.blend” it is user license where BGE is gpl ?! So the BGE must be made compatible like BSD or other license that permits .exe and android app to live with the .blend.

For IPAD and other Tablets with Android etc a blender player with play animation function will be right solution. But even that will be to cpu eaters for them.

BGE export to .exe , android app , osx app , linux binary -> good ideea.

Regarding modeling , i don`t think it is usable , Blender now needs minimum 1 GB Opengl 3.0-4.0 video card to run.

Gamekit looks that does not support GLS , logic , some texture option … sounds very limited to `99 era games.

The main ideea is that everyone to be able to do games. Lots of game designers were not programmers , iet they had friends programmers.

@Numarul7
Re: GPL, This has been resolved - the GPL does not apply to you’re blend file, or scripts within the blend file using blenders API’s.
http://www.blender.org/education-help/faq/gpl-for-artists/

Not sure why you think blender needs OpenGL 3.0? - It still runs for me on an old OpenGL-1.4, laptop (6+ years old) - as well as windows XP software opengl from 10 years ago - no GLSL but otherwise it works.

Blender has compile time options we can use to produce smaller binaries - recently I tried to fit it on a floppy again :), but didn’t quite manage - even so got it down to 3.1mb compressed - since newer tablets/phones are more powerful then some of the systems which run blender I don’t think its an issue.

Would be cool if Blender Foundation did another open game project like apricot, except the aim was to target iphones and android phones.
Even, extend apricot to mobiles. The assets are present, it probably just needs tweaking, and linked to SDK/NDK.

As the computing power of tablets increase, some huge jumps in performance are planned, full fat Linux will become a useful alternative to Android on this platform, check out current KDE development for example. When tablets support simultaneous touch and stylus input properly, Blender has great potential on this platform for reasonably priced Cintiq style interaction for vizualisation, modelling, painting and sculpting. IMO time converting the viewport to run under OpenGL ES would be time well spent. Would you even need to? That an improved BlenderPlayer and the simple creation of distributable stand-alone game executables for platforms other than PC would be a huge bonus for BGE users goes without saying.

There has been a port of Blender to OpenGL ES, to make it run on the Nokia N900 - see here. Unfortunately the code doesn’t seem to be available anywhere.

No, please, no! I am planning on dropping my Droid phone when I get a new phone.

Really? Can I have it?

@skykooler, regarding the n900, Really doubt this was using GLES2, since porting blender to this is a lot of work.

Probably they use Software OpenGL (or some full opengl driver that I don’t know about), so while its possible - I seriously doubt they did a GLES2 port of blender.

Come to think of it though, it may be possible to get software opengl working on android and have blender running on that - even though it would likely be painfully slow, its more a proof that it can be compiled, load blend files, be packaged etc, we could even just try to get blender running on android headless, so it could render files but thats about it :slight_smile: - this is more of a way to do the porting in bite size chunks, ofcourse its not really interesting to users until its fully functional.

Or use the new platform of flash 11 ?! http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer11.html

About modeling , maybe it works but without this modifier : subsurf , and only for animation / texturing /basic blocking of animations. Like making a scene with moving cubes , characters from cubes > planing short movie development on the road.

Guess a limited version of Blender Mobile can be feasible. Even with the name “Blender 3D Mobile Edition for IPAD , ANDROID tablets”

A dual-core ARM processor at 1 ghz cand handle it.

Even some games can be made if you think more… o.O

WoW. Blender on Nokia.
i suppose its not Symbian based.

BGE will.be more suited for Android than porting blender as a whole. The poll tells this.

Nokia will be microsoft only in December. All Symbian development is off. So porting Blender to that is like porting it to ms-dos.