Afaik, CS implements quite capable shaders. Also, quality like this, usually comes from render artists. (note the texturing techniques used)
^
If you look at it with all of that in mind, I think that you too will come to the conclusion that their methods are much better suited to produce better looking content for CS - as opposed to our “faking tricks”.
Of course I will be excited when the game is released. Of course I will download it and play it (if my computer can support it). However, I’m currently rather non-plussed by the project. I mean, it’s nice to see Blender being used for something like that, but I feel a bit upset that the BGE is not being used. This is such an excellent opportunity for our Game Engine to be improved (in much the same manner that Blender was greatly improved by the demands of Project Orange), but I feel as if the BGE is being cast aside as a sub-standard toy or something. If the people behind this project really considered the BGE to be a capable game engine, they would be using it instead of Crystal Space. I think the choice to go elsewhere speaks for itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Crystal Space is great (even though it performs even worse than the BGE on my computer), but I just wish for once that the larger Blender community would stop treating the BGE like trash and talking about how “limited” and “poorly written” it is and actually do something about it. What better opportunity is there than this? I’m sorry if this seems like a rant, but I’m just getting tired of the fact that there are totally capable people who could be making our game engine better, but instead they are leaving our small team of dedicated developers to fend for themselves while they go off to greener pastures.
I thought the point behind these projects was to make Blender better. I don’t know. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation.
And as for applications, I don’t think I’m qualified for this one.
I was very disappointed to hear that the BGE is not being used. IMHO, The Blender Foundation would be much better off investing money in a project to improve the internal real-time engine, as others have suggested. Especially considering the efforts to upgrade BGE using OGRE, this makes very little sense to me.
Given that there are already efforts underway to combine Ogre and Blender doesn’t it then make sense to also do something with another engine? It is not the intention of Blender to focus on one engine alone. Blender should be a good modeller for more then one engine.
Greetings,
– LostinSpace and C106Delta :
don’t get me wrong : I consider BGE as being capable of lot of things, and it’s the reason I’m still using/learning it, but if it comes to realy do some high end gfx game, it shows its limits compared to last gen commercial game engine …
I think they realy want something that people will not just see as “another free game”, but something that people would say “wow I never thought opensource gaming would be capable of that !” …
BGE is limited by a number of things that would put that goal out of range in the timeframe Apricot is projected.
With CS, they know the engine works, and that it can already do bloom, hdr, multipass GLSL, etc with lots of objects in the scene… BGE would need a special development prior to the making of the game in that way, and it’s something they choosed not to do… or that they could not afford…
I would have been happy with BGE being choosen end developed, but I think it’s a question of “reliability” that led to CS.
sometimes it’s better to take some longer but surer path to arrive at the goal… (wich is here placing Blender into the game pipeline, with or without it’s game engine)
I think the GE is a bit too far behind technically speaking. It’s great for learning how to use it, because it teaches you the fundamentals of game design. But too many neccessary features are missing or too slow. For one, the elephant in the room is poly count restriction. I think the poly count is great for making PS1 or N64 looking games, but that positive is also a negative in many people’s view.
In this day and age, unless it looks something like QUAKE 4, then the graphics just aren’t good enough within a competitive market place.
However, for games like Monkey Game, I think the GE is almsot perfect. ALthough still a bit too restrictive. But we does what we cans with what’s we gots.
I think they should have focused on Ogre myself though…
But I do beleive that focusing on CS rather than the GE is the wiser choice. You have to remember that we are the zealots for GE.
well if they plan on doing it using only blender in it’s current form they had better fix the 3d texture paint tool to show the size of the brush in the 3d window… and sort the rendeing of normal maps to the correct texture space and the ability to map from a high poly model to a low one… oh and the list goes on… if they’re really serious about using blender to model the game content with… No offence to blender but it still a bit slow to be churning out game content at a rate of nots… but it needn’t be this way. plus tweeking the way the scuplt mode works to you can add in more verts in specific areas would help a lot too…
But building good looking content is not really that hard if you’re doing it from concept art and have good reference.
What about the game physics…? I’ve looked around at other engines and Bullet still is way better than anything else in Crystalspace and Irrlecht (at doing the physics at least)… it’s way better than ODE. But I suppose you don’t need it to make a good game technically.
The hard part is getting the character animations working with realtime bones and making sure that the LOD works really well with all your effects so you can get a fast frame rate… quite a hard balancing act. Well I’d be keen to help out if they wanted any… but using only blender …ouch… a bit hard 
I’m interested to see what come of this… I also agree that it’s frustrating that they continue to ignore the current BGE… but if this project lets me make games where I can have better graphics and create my own logic bricks I will be happy. guess I’ll have to wait and see.:yes:
Note that Crystal Space also supports Bullet. The plugin is not finished but we do support it to some degree. If we decide to go with bullet for the Apricot game then we can enhance it.
Greetings,
hey jorrit thanks for the info!!
If you look at the announcement on Blendernation, Ton has a comment near the bottom that explains why they chose CS.
Maybe I’ll get my shaded textured viewmode outta this project. :-. It’s useful for game dev I say!
I’m definitely gonna be watching Apricot’s progress with great interest.
-Stefan-
World of BlendCraft… Second Blend…
I say they should make it a MMO, with free to play and optional subscription to finance Blender development…
Main problem being the fact that MMO infrastructure is certainly a bit out of Blender foundation’s reach…
it seems like blender will have to make a firm commitment at some point. If the developers are eventually going to simply replace the bge with crystalspace, then why invest the time upgrading it? same with ogre.
I think that now (not soon) we should make the choice for the future of bge so we can focus on what needs to be done.
anyways if you wanna learn about the differences between crystalS and ogre check this
http://www.arcanoria.com/CS-Ogre.php
venar303: That’s an excellent quick link that people should check out. I think alot of people here talk about Ogre vs. CrystalSpace without actually understanding what they are.
I don’t understand why everyone thinks they are replacing the BGE with CrystalSpace. They just happen to be working with the CrytalSpace people on a project. That’s it. CS seems to be a much more robust enviornment for game development than the BGE, so it makes sense to go with that.
Maybe a bit down the road when Ogre is integrated with the BGE, they can do a smaller fruit named project focused on improving that aspect of Blender.
by: Olm-Z:
don’t get me wrong : I consider BGE as being capable of lot of things, and it’s the reason I’m still using/learning it, but if it comes to realy do some high end gfx game, it shows its limits compared to last gen commercial game engine …
Just because you haven’t been able to create a high quality game doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If you “put the puzzle together the right way” then you would get a high quality game out of it. If all the bugs in the GE were fixed, a lot more can be done. But even with the bugs there are ways to get around things. What “limitations” are you thinking about? Give us examples and prove your answer.
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Does Verse work with Crystal Space?
I am thinking Blender 2.5+ would include a CrystalSpace and Verse plugin, allowing worldwide joint game development! That would be so cool to be able to work with other people on a game.
Yes verse works to some degree (with external verse plugin). We have integrated CS + Blender + GIMP with verse in one showcase some time ago.
Greetings,
Hy Jorrit, thank you very much for your contribution. It is a honor to have your participation in this topic. I was at your presentation in Blender Conference 2005 and i really apreciate your efforts to make a bridge between Blender and Crystal Space.
I wouldn’t mind using CS if verse was there to communicate data between the two programs in real time, you see the level and objects in Blender and see the code in CS. Then you play the game, CS takes the Blender level and objects and runs it.
Or have the level preview show in CS and it gets updated whenever you make a change in Blender;)
Looking back at it, I think I spoke rather rashly earlier. Mostly I was upset from comments made by a programmer a couple of weeks ago along the lines of “I could fix the speed issues in the BGE in a very short amount of time, but I won’t.” I guess I have great expectations of the what the BGE could be, and I ask myself “If it’s that easy for someone to make it better, then why don’t they just do it?” But the fact is, no one has fixed those “lingering issues” yet (though I’m really excited about this effort that malCanDo is spearheading), and Crystal Space is a much more capable and more mature game engine.
I’m excited for this project, and I’m sorry for acting the way that I did about it earlier.