What do you mean by joystick support for Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers? I’ve already used a PS3 controller with the Blender game engine. But you always need a seperate driver for a PS3 controller. :rolleyes:
@aliankid10, From talking to Ton, blender should support graphics cards up to 5 years old. (whilst not being a graphics card) Win2K is almost 10 years old now! - Support for these system depends on developer interest and user-base.
Though with GLSL disabled I’m sure the BGE will support very old systems for quite a while.
@kay_Eva, off topic too! I do graphicall auto builds but they have the BGE disabled to keep the size down and avoid python version problems.
Aside from that, Being skeptical is fine but since there is an increasing list of improvments to blender from this project I dont see what there is to complain about 
- See the threads on autodesk buying blender and youll see how naive this concern is.
If you dont like companies using blender for their evil purposes - checkout http://www.linux.com/feature/118380
No no no, I’m not saying that you’re all lying and pulling our legs… maybe skeptical was the wrong word. Just imagine how you’d feel if you got told you’ve won $100,000,000,000 and you’ll know what I mean :rolleyes:
Do you for some reason think that the computer that you use now will be the last computer
you will ever use?
P. Monk
Awesome, awesome news! Power to EAR and bring on the code!
@ MatrixNAN - How is the whole “games using the BGE are automatically GPL” issue being delt with here?
This is fantastic news, and it will hopefully answer Blendiac’s question in a good way.
Congratulations to everyone involved!
Hey. we hear some good news over here and yet people act like the sky is falling.:eek:
Anyway. If this pushes through then many thanks EAR.
A few people may disagree here, but honestly, ton and ideasman (campbell?) are right. Supporting legacy hardware/ software isn’t really feasible when adding the latest technologies and i think it’d be better if blender progressed further with new technologies rather than be backward’s compaitable with outdates hardware and software. It’s easy (altough sometimes expensive) too upgrade hardware. It take’s alot longer to update software, best make use of that time for upgrades/ improvement’s rather than making it work with old technologies.
That’s not fair, I’m having a P4, 3.0 Ghz, with 3 gb of ram and a nvidia card and BGE still slowly in my computer, so it really needs a big optimization, cause the same scenes in other engines runs fine in my computer.
Well after 2.5 is released, would it not be possible to make future releases require a more updated system?
As 2.5 is sorting out the code base, 2.51 - 2.60 is likely to be new features and if we have amazing developers as the ones who started then this thread, then that seems more plausible?
Ok after spending the last day and a half struggling with bugs and undocumented features with my companies internal game engine it got me thinking how to speed up a game artists pipeline
a) ability to set texture filters. E.g. mip mapping, anisotropic. See the results in viewport and game engine http://www.blenderstorm.org/qapoll/ideas/idea/643/
b) LOD node? or GE brick. Works in viewport and game engine. Be ace if you could interactivly set switch in/out distances. Fade level of detail would be icing on cake.
c) A texture palette where I could display all textures relating to a single object or even a whole scene. Textures could be displayed relative to their size and maybe tinted a colour to indicate how expensive they are to draw
thanks for taking the time to read this
ok yes it’s just one of those thigns that seems too good to be true, I’m not skeptical of your honesty or anything
It’s just I can’t get my hopes up about it until I can actually download the blender builds for myself =)
hopefully that will be possible soon ^^
You can get your hopes up, the improvements they’re talking about are actually starting to come in, like in my thread about Ben’s major new commit
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152858
More than a pipe dream:D
Has anyone besides me used words from the first post in this thread in combination with google? I’m getting the EVO Smart Console this month by the way!
EDIT: In conclusion, your PR and me suck.
From what I can see, its being delt with by releasing their source code 
The artwork (maybe also scripts?) can be closed source and put up for sale packaged in the BGE. Once these changes are incorporated they would just have to include a link to blender.org to satisfy their GPL requirements.
The Blender community gets an enhanced production ready BGE, their company gets access to a code base, a pool of skilled devs, and a fanatical army of testers and guerilla marketers. Pretty good deal for everyone involved if you ask me.:RocknRoll:
Oh yea, and more paying Blender jobs for Blender devs!
yeah but when/where do we get to use it
I hope it’s accessible even for those who aren’t used to programming and building from source :o
Hey Everyone,
The source code is in the SVN Blender Tree and very nice people do builds for graphical all of the time. Our team has to get some of the builds through graphicall because the devs can not build for every platform. That would just be unrealistic to ask of them. The community has a fast very good build system in place, so I can not see a reason to change this.
We are also giving away our scripts too not just the BGE code that is being developed. If you don’t believe this then just go download it because we have already posted some of it.
Link:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152343
We will be offering downloads off of our site after awhile. We are redoing our website for the Blender community and for other involved parties.
Micheal W.
“They thought that the days of technology being an advantage were over and that it’s the strength of content and concept and creating new and original franchises were the key to success.”
Yeah we are thinking the same thing.
Mr. Smith
“What do you mean by joystick support for Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers? I’ve already used a PS3 controller with the Blender game engine. But you always need a seperate driver for a PS3 controller. :rolleyes:”
The previous version before Campbell’s mind blowing fast update only allowed for 2 joystick sensors on a single controller. After his update it allows for 4 joysticks sensors for a single controller. The PS3 and XBox 360 have 3 joystick sensors per controller so that was the problem. We are very excited about Campbell’s incredible work he is almost not human he is so fast. Actually the same could be said about Benoit and the rest of the development team also. They are such a great job and so quickly. I can’t say enough good things about these guys.
Fobsta
b) I agree LOD with fading would be ideal as it would avoid popping. I hope we can do that we will have to look at performance of many objects with fade as alphas are not too cheap. This is a non-issue for smaller games and scenes but for massive scenes with many many objects this may be an issue. Node would be nice and its the direction we are wanting to go. We will have to see in the short term.
a) Does not sound like a bad idea. We have a good sized list of things that need to be done above and beyond what has been posted. This might end up on the roster if a better solution is not found.
c) I can understand why you want this. You kind of get this interaction now with the nodes, but of course the nodes are slower for the shader development. Its something I will have to run by the art team. At the moment it wouldn’t be a high priority because there are a lot of very pressing developments that need to be done first.
Benantic jrs100000 is right only we are also releasing the scripts that we are doing too. The art is actually copy righted along with our Intellectual Property idea that makes up our game. We are actually planning on having it to where people can fully mod our game in the community, but you can not sell our game or mods you do of our game. We are giving out all of the source code and the scripts so if you want to make your own game based off of what we are doing for commercial purposes nothing is stopping you. BGE makes for the ultimate mod game development tool to build a community around so this is very appealing to us.
"From what I can see, its being delt with by releasing their source code 
The artwork (maybe also scripts?) can be closed source and put up for sale packaged in the BGE. Once these changes are incorporated they would just have to include a link to blender.org to satisfy their GPL requirements.
The Blender community gets an enhanced production ready BGE, their company gets access to a code base, a pool of skilled devs, and a fanatical army of testers and guerilla marketers. Pretty good deal for everyone involved if you ask me.:RocknRoll:
Oh yea, and more paying Blender jobs for Blender devs!"
The army of testers is very nice not to mention should allow for very stable releases of the game without time crunches at the end of the production trying to deal with a load of problems and errors. Rather we can have most of the bugs ironed out as we develop before we ever encounter the end of the project.
The devs in the community are incredible so hiring them to develop up the BGE free to the community makes a lot of sense because there is not a large time frame of retraining involved. Also we are not having to build a game engine from the ground up we only have to tweak and add on to an already working game engine. The fact that the BGE is integrated with Blender or is apart of blender makes it the ultimate editor since a full blown 3d package is at our disposal.
This also means we don't have to develop a ton of very stripped down game editor controls along with a lot of retraining because the game editor is not like a full blown 3D package which means retraining for an art team. On top of all of this we also get all the benefits of what the community develops and what other companies develop in the Blender community so its just a win win all around.
We are hoping to break the cycle of constantly re-inventing the wheel and paying out a ton of money for a game engine for every production. Not to mention if you want to do a fast turn around its not cost effective to the investors for a return on investment. By going the Blender open source route we open the door for future productions with a much larger return on investment for investors and a lower risk assessment. Its harder to fail when you have an entire world wide community behind you. We take more risk up front in doing this since we are developing a game engine but its minimal since its an already working game engine.
The long term pay off is much better for all future developments not to mention the forward movement for all other companies since they don't have to develop an all new water shader, SSAO, or you name it. Now they can just focus on what they need to do for their game production and we benefit from their developments also. This also lets us avoid paying large sums of money into a game engine owned by another company that can then significantly lower the cost of their production and get a much higher return on investment from their games because they are getting so much money from selling their game engine to other companies.
At the same time this also increases the cost of production for the companies that are buying the game engine from the other company which of course lowers their return on investment. At the same time it is fully understood that buying the game engine from company A is useful because its less risky and normally less costly than to develop one from scratch. By going the Blender route though we are not developing a game engine from scratch so it makes that point mute.
Hopefully this explains how we are thinking and hopefully this will make things more clear to people that are in disbelief.
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
Artistic Technical Director
Twilight 22
Hey Nate,
I really am hoping you guys have looked at this and found a way to make this work, as development of my favourite project and community, the BGE, would benefit insanely from what you guys are doing. I really want you all to succeed and if you do, will likely be first in line to buy a copy while cheering about your game in the streets to anyone who will listen. I just hope that you understand that there are untested legal issues of using the BGE that people on this forum have been struggling with for quite a while now. To understand what I’m talking about try reading this thread (or pass it on to your legal team). You can skip the first 15 posts. A few older threads that may be worth looking at include this, this, this, this and this.
In short, it seems a case can be made that if your code can’t run without GPL code (such as Blender / Blenderplayer’s code) then your whole game (yes, including your art, scripts, levels and everything) may automatically be GPL meaning anyone can give your whole game away for free. Everyone has a lot of opinions on this both for and against, and my intent here is not to start an argument interpreting the GPL (not on this thread, please everyone!). I just want to make sure that you guys don’t run into trouble with legalities you didn’t know existed. If you’ve found a solution I’m hoping you’ll share it so the community can get over arguing about it and get on with making great games.
As I said at the start, I really want this to succeed, both for you, the Blender community, open source. I’m sure it would open the flood-gates of commercial Blender game development which would lead to rapid improvement in Blender and a world class reputation for open source in 3d. Your last post just troubles me as it doesn’t sound like you’re aware of the possible legal landmines, and your game is far too important to Blender to not make you aware of them.
Here’s another question : How are you guys going to approach the lack of sound support in the BGE?
There seems to be some legal issues holding back Mp3 support, it will be interesting to see how you overcome this.
@Nate, glad you see this as developing a tool pipeline for future projects too, having so much work go into a single game seems a waste. Allowing modding within blender is also a big +.
@Blendiac, Ton has proposed a GPL exception that should solve the issue with blender/GPL/art/scripts and commercial games. details on bf-committees mailing list.
@AD-Edge, Blender uses ffmpeg that supports mp3, h264 etc… otherwise would OGG support be ok? :), according to Cyborg-Dragon someone wrote a patch for this but I couldnt find it. Otherwise we can add support for loading compressed files.
Im a bit bemused as to why so many of the replies to this post are trying to find problems.
Are you the kind of people that would start a project but first think of all the reasons it would fail??
- Cant use MP3? - Use OGG
- Cant release commercial artwork bundled with the blenderplayer? - dont bundle it.
- Blender dosnt have “X” feature? - Add “X” feature or find a workaround.
Its simple problem solving you have to do all the time when running large projects, I cant speak EAR, but I dont see blender being a roadblock.