I’m usually out of this kind of discussions, but after reading this a few thought come up.
This is not another engine war, so avoid “i like blender” or “udk is the best” comments( but “we need new features NOW” is more than welcomed ).
After the change of the royalties of UDK, we should think why we use an engine…
For an hobbyist use, both engines are free.
For a commercial use, you have to pay 99$ to Epic, while blender is still free. Btw, with blender you must release the changes you do to the source code, and there are always doubt about the licences for the executables files(many topics have been opened around this subject). In addition, right now there isn’t an official easy to use way to protect your content.
Epic starts to ask for a 25% for each dollar earned by the developers, for gains over 50000$ (under this threshold you just pay the 99$ una tantum fee)
So this kind of royalties gives a lot of possibilities to small teams, and i really think the advantage of the “freeness” of blender is not that strong any more against UDK.
So, why is the industry using this kind of engine?
Let’s not start talking of the features like “faster rasterizer”, “better physics”, etc.
The engines are different, but even bge can archive very good results.
I start to think that the “problem” of bge is that it is “just” an engine. Ok, it is well plugged into blender, but blender is not a game editor, is a 3D suite that is developed for animations, modelling and all the other cool things blender can do, but not with the bge in mind.
So other engines start to be more interesting to indie companies(and there are a lot of them “making money” with udk) because there is not just an engine, but maps editors, presets and other game specific tools that are not strictly a part of the engine are bundled with it, making the production more easy and fast.
Do you think blender can have all of this kind of features(accepted into trunk*)? Or maybe if bge would be an external engine, more of this kind of tools can be bundled with it?
New engines are starting to be very competitive even for small developers…
On my side, i appreciate the open-sourceness of blender, since i can learn a lot about coding from it, but i don’t think this thoughts can be extended even to artists…
*having a patch that is not updated, distributed, maintained, etc doesn’t make sense…