blender 2.8 game engine?

in the upcoming blender 2.8 is there an update for the game engine or no game engine at all?

this is being discussed in another thread. the BF wont be doing any updates, but UPBGE branch is planning on merging into official. at least i know that upbge is making big steps to 2.8.

yupā€¦ nothing definitive yet

official details: The Future: Blender 2.8 (read well & be aware: If itā€™s not written itā€™s not featured!)

Threads on BA:

Ton and ideasman seem to want to ditch it,

but there are thousands of bge users and eevee literally is just getting fast
(apparently the profiler was wasting most of the render time)

now its 40% faster

we need to kick out a amazing game in upbge and show everyone what is possible.

we need to fight,

I vote for removing it, blender would feel much cleaner. Itā€™s not like the engine will ever compare to free alternatives out there. If people want to continue developing engines they can do that since blender is open source. That is for the better, because then in time everything could be designed for game design, the UI etc. Instead of having everything to fit within the framwork of the main blender program, scram game engine and good luck but weā€™re more into cycles.

Have you ever made a high quality unique game from scratch?

sure you can buy parts in ue4 or unity, premade assets and easily crap a game out,

but have you made a full game from scratch? itā€™s one of the hardest things a solo human can doā€¦

[Real]game dev is hard no matter the engine.

Iā€™m more into cycles blue, into the arts not so much platforming. I think game creation would be quite easy if you understood coding, the hard part is spending 6 months learning programming.

the hardest part is all of them.

And how exactly would removing game engine make Blender "FEEL CLEANERā€™. Who is ā€œWEā€™REā€? Maybe ā€œWEā€™REā€ more into game engine than cycles, over here on the game engine part of forum.

The BGE source code is separated from the blender core!

Removing BGE will cause Blender to lose a lot of users instantly. Actually Iā€™m not sure what percentage are BGE users. But I think this is the single and most important thing for Blender Foundation, when it comes to removing the engine. Nor games nor the engine state matters, only users.

Do you have a recent source for that? I am just asking because I havenā€™t read anything like that recently from them.

This prediction may or may not pan out when noting the current situation in terms of FOSS game development.

For a long time, users of the BGE could make the argument that it was the only real solution that both played well with Blender and was developed under a truly open source model. Now we have Godot, which is as every bit as open and non-corporate as the BGE (no splashscreens, no limits, no paid tiers), uses open formats for I/O unlike Unity and Unreal (far fewer export headaches), and actually allows even more freedom in game publishing since you donā€™t have to give away the source (no one can simply do a quick re-skin and sell it as his own).

The only argument left for the BGE is its nature of being a full part of Blender, but thatā€™s not enough and UPBGE will have to compete with Godot on features (which will be very difficult when comparing the commit rate of the two). That said, I would actually like to see the UPBGE project achieve its goal of integration in 2.8 as the new BGE, but I havenā€™t seen a lot of recent news as to actually doing that (as in actual integration beyond the current experiments with Eevee). This forum for instance is seeing far more discussion on whether the BGE will continue to exist than on what the UPBGE crew is doing to achieve that goal.

Here: http://pasteall.org/560891

It seems like most of the disagreement from hardcore users stems from the desire of the core team to have a BGE that really feels like a part of Blender rather than tacked on with separate systems (so you have one unified codebase and development that benefits everyone).

The issue facing UPBGE then (if it remains a separate module but with seamless I/O) is that developers of other open engines can eventually use formats like glTF to get very close to that same approach (and make UPBGE feel like a redundant and inferior solution in the process). This has not happened at this time because of the use of closed formats like .fbx, but the new formats should allow for such tight processes as one-click exporting of entire scenes to an emerging crop of competent FOSS engines (meaning you potentially have a vastly superior engine at your disposal at the cost of just a slight lengthening of the pipeline).

Thanks!

I am still curious to know where they mention that they want to ditch it. Ton even mentions that there are funds to make the game engine compatible with the dependency graph. If the goal was to ditch it, funds would not be wasted for it!

My impression is that Ton is clearly interested in bringing the game engine forward and also in working togethere with the UPBGE team in order to achieve this. He clearly sees the potential and has a vision. At the same time, he is realistic about topics like maintenance (just like Campbell). My impression is more that there is no real interest from the UPBGE team to work together with the core developers and to plan the future.

There are very likely artists who want to set everything up in Blender. And as soon as e.g. physics is being used, the one-click export is only going to work in theory. I can imagine quite a few use cases for (UP)BGE. Actual game development being the obvious one. Architectural visualization for which addons could be provided e.g. through the Blender Market. Physics simulations which need a quick iterative workflow and visualization, e.g. for client work where which needs to be flexible and adjustable at any point.
There is quite some potential, especially because the gap between realtime and rendering is getting smaller.

@Dantus: Iā€™m not proud about this discussion. About depsgraph, do you know what you are talking about? As far I understand, depsgraph for Blender is like scene graph for bge. Scene graph in bge is rarely a bottleneck unless you has thousands of objects moving at the same time (or special cases when you have too much objects in your scene). As far I understand, they use DEG_id_tag_update, we use NodeUpdateGS when it is needed to try to avoid bugs like that: https://developer.blender.org/T43325 . Scene graph is designed for the bge. The bge handles multiples scenes, multiple layers (active/inactiveā€¦). I donā€™t know enough the new depsgraph to know if/how it could be used in the bge but as scene graph is not often a bottleneck, I donā€™t see why we should change.

About maintenance: panzergame prooved he was able to maintain an entire fork of Blender last 2 years.

About the future: I donā€™t share the same vision, itā€™s clear. But I have a vision too. Funds doesnā€™t make everything. BGE is an enormous engine which has been coded by many developers during many years. If something is writed from scratch, maybe this can succeed (I have adminration and respect for the talent of Campbell Barton and the core developers and Ton too, even if I have always a bad mood and paranoĆÆd tendancies and Iā€™m not very kind with them), but I fear this will take years to begin to look like a real and fun game engine.

We work since 2 years to refactor game engine code, update it, fix bugs. We have a leader. We have already the engine writted (with all logic, physics, animationsā€¦) As I said in this conversation, I think logic bricks are more a strength than a weakness (This makes the bge so easy to learn!). We have a fun API. BGE is not only a great game engine, it is also a nice and fun tool to learn/teach. We can do python, openGL, GLSL inside, this is awesome.

I think we donā€™t share the same vision of what is a ā€œbetterā€ engine.

Then youā€™ll tell me, why not continue to fork and why try to join Blender Foundation? Because I think we have more chances to have volounteers who will join us, talented devs who can assume the role of module owner if panzergame leave the project (if he find a job in game industry for example after his studies), more users to test and be involved. We have a chance to make bge as fun as it was/is already, but with better graphism, keep the fun, the good old spirit, and make the project more consistent with modern game engines graphisms.

Well, I donā€™t know if Iā€™m right to call people to defend bge. I prefer to do that, even if it sounds ridiculous, even if I take the risk to be considered as retrograde, and even if it leads to nothing. I prefer to do something, than do nothing and regret it after. I prefer to do something to try to keep bge alive, than to do nothing and take the risk it wonā€™t be replaced with a true and fun game engine, as much as fun the current bge is.

This is the words of a bge ā€œfanboyā€

I understand completely youleā€¦no one wants to lose BGEā€¦and I get frustrated when all the devs seem to see is ā€˜cyclesā€™ for exampleā€¦but Ton did say, and he is correct here, that the new 2.8 lends itself to interactivityā€¦as long as I can make a game in it I do not careā€¦and I would be fine switching to bpy from bgeā€¦I think in the end it would just open up far more featuresā€¦

In the end....we will just have to wait and see.

I donā€™t think many will miss the game engine, few have made much with what is there already, the current versions arenā€™t too bad for a hard work scratch made project.

If it is kept, good for those who want to create a small game.