First I want to congradulate Ton for getting back his baby. I’m sure that everybody in the Blender community is happy for you.
My only wish is that you will concentrate on modelling and animation features rather than the gaming engine. I was really into Blender way back when and then my interest dropped off because the modelling and animation features weren’t being advanced. Also, forget about crazy stuff like Blender for iPaq!
Don’t get me wrong. I still love Blender and want to see it advanced as a great OSS modelling and animation package.
before this develops into a insultathon, I’d like to point out that the development of blender will be contingent on the community, not what NaN used to prioritize. Therefore, if the community wants to build more modeling/rendering/animation features, they will most certainly be built! since “we the people” will be the developers, it only follows that we can contribute features we think are important!
You have to look at it with regard to what other stuff is out there, which Blender can be compared to, when it comes to the game engine. The game engine is not the part that makes Blender great at the moment, just remember the future lies ahead.
What will be developed will be developed. I can imagine that the community will have more say in what goes on because the community will be codeing this thing.
We will see where it goes, I hope for more modeling/animation features, but that is only because I don’t want to make games.
Those who want to make games are hopeing for more realtime features.
The only way you can please both at once is to develope both at once, which will slow it down, but will make Blender even more versitile and interesting.
When this thing gets organized, there would have to be a seperate team for the game engine, the rendering engine, and the modeling engine, as these three things are very different beasts. Not developing in one of these modules probably wouldn’t slow it down, it’s just that different types of programmers may be interested in working on a different module. The three teams would have to work together though, to ensure that the three modules work together. I for one am hoping for better exporting as my biggest feature, because with good exports, you can use blender with whatever external renderer or game engine you feel like.
But the game engine in blender is still a pretty cool thing, just becuase the blender interface is very well suited for games, and there really aren’t any other game creation systems as quick and fun as blender, for the same price. The engine however, is quite slow and unoptomized as well as not being very powerful, any work in this area would need to focus on the engine’s capabilities, and not so much on the creation side of things which is pretty robust.
Ok. Everybody is interested in Blender for their own reasons. I can understand that. But working in too many different directions can sidetrack any project. I think somebody mentioned that there would most likely be different teams working on different modules. This makes sense.
I just hope nobody spends time creating a port to the X-Box or some new fangled cell phone just because they can!
