Despite the fact that I love Blender’s internal visual game engine because it means I don’t have to do any scripting, I find it a little more than lacking.
I would love to see the greatest extent the Blender Visual Game Engine can go in game play, and know what I can and can not do with the engine, so as to plan my next game. I would also love to know if there are alternative 3D Visual Game Engines out there that are very capable.
Thanks.
There are alot of engines out there that are very capable, but I have never seen one that has simplified things for non-programmers as Blender.
Ogre - but that’s pure scripting, I believe it’s the raw rendering engine, with some interface.
UDK - classic suggestion, though I dislike it because almost everything is already made for you, so apart from the radically different games actually made by epic games and their hired showcase devs, it’s just a level editor imo. (Yes that’s right, I’m complaining that they helped too much :/)
Unity - Drag and drop support - never tried it, but was a bit annoyed when the In-Browser game hammered my stand-alone in most respects, more advanced features - sky backgrounds, particles (I know, xmmiter particles (that’s wrong but I can’t make the spelling look right) :D)… (though it’ll cost you for stuff like filters, outrgeous.
XNA - C# programming/scripting in the SDK, modelling/texturing/rigging done in blender, sorted.
Gamekit - I found it hard extracting info from the wiki/sourceforge (forget which) style host, but it looks like a compilation of different open source libraries.
Then there are countless (inferior to) Blender counterparts.
Maya, 3DS Max CRINGE. glad I got that out the way…
Plus, in blender, the only barrier is performance and skill. my case to support that? Martinsh.
Technically if you compare all development solutions to Blender then you will find that Blender is far more superior from them. Blender is a bit more experimental to let you be productive (not essentially good, but it’s OK it works) but it needs more manual hacks to achieve that, while other commercial products offer these features out-of-the-box (for a decent price). But in any case this is the beauty of open source, because the demands are defined by the majority of it’s users, you won’t find ANY features that suck, every feature implemented in open source IS useful. It’s a matter flexibility and speed, Blender is very flexible (full python support, full 3D editing capabilities, open source) also it allows you to create stuff with great ease.
I think what the OP was asking for was an engine with a “good” visual programming type interface. UDK’s Kismet is alright and there are plenty of tutorials on it. Although, I think (like the BGE) if you’re really serious you’ll learn the scripting side too (UnrealScript). If you can rely on builtin components (or components you find on the web), Unity might work for you.
I don’t know how you can classify Maya or 3DS max as a visual game engine, as 3D modelling software its decent, minus the price which is why i use blender.
Ive used almost every game engine going, Unity was a good choice minus its limitations, for a free product and support blender is definately the best imo if your willing to put in the work. I haven’t found a feature yet which your cant implement yourself.
If you are wanting to take your game seriously with any Game Making package you are going to have to learn to code to some degree even if its implementing small snippets here and there.
on the other hand take a look at Unity Free.
python comes to be the biggest problem of blender. It is too slow for serious game.
I don’t have exp. in UDK cos’ I have read the licensing terms of it.
So far Unity is the most balanced according to the abilities, easiness and licensing terms.
As one of the developer of BGE had discussed in another forum, Blender’s license is not suitable for commercial game development. That’s why he start the project gamekit. You should know it.
I use Blender for rapid prototyping. I can get a mechanic working in five minutes using hack 'n slash logic bricks, on the fly assets and python. It would take me well over two hours to get the same sort of result in Unity/UDK and days/weeks in XNA.
Ultimately the inability to port to non-pc/mac/linux devices and poor asset management bottlenecks it for me. People complain of performance issues, but that’s only when trying to do AAA stuff.
Has anyone tried out Quest 3D? It has some sort of node tree type system. Not sure how well it works for games, but some of the demo’s look fantastic.
It’s stupid expensive… but I guess you can get a free trial version.
I’d be curious to know if anyone has tried this.
M
It looked okay, but the inability to quickly download it kinda killed it for me (I didn’t go to the Buy tab, just the Downloads tab). The house demo (in the forest) looked pretty good, but they could release a ‘Quest 3D Lite’ for people who want to just check it out, or use it with limited features.
Did you look here? At the top of the page, in the Downloads part of the menu.
http://www.quest3d.com/index.php?id=13
It’s a demo version you can down load.
According to them:
“This special version will allow you to test all the features of Quest3D for an unlimited amount of time. You are not able to save your work.”
I’m gonna see if I can install it here at work. Hope nobody notices.
M
Whoops, sorry for asking the wrong questions here. I was actually going to ask something else here, but I guess I got carried away…
Thanks for the support! I was looking at Unity for a long time, but its big download size kept me away, because I don’t have much drive space left, and I don’t want to waste so much time on downloading and installing such a big file that I might not end up using…
Haker23 told us that Unity has some drag and drop support, but I’d like to know how flexible and capable they are. I’ll try to do some research of my own too. Also, realistically, how much scripting I’ll need too.
I had a peek at Quest3D, and it actually looks pretty awesome. However, the price is a little drawback, and I am a bit worried.
Again, thanks for all the support!
Unity uses scripting, which is also intepreted. If bottle necks are identified, this is the code that need to be optimised in a compiled language and used as a module. Games need to be made in Blender to find these slowdowns and once identified the bottlenecks can be removed with judicious coding. Huge concurrency using Python is possible. Take a look at stackless Python that the coders of Eve Online leverage for this. Many of the other AAA game engines out there use scripting and certainly Python is better than any of these, just maybe not so light on resources and has a huge amount of modules available that can be used with Python to improve performance.
Aah. Looks I can’t get away from scripting can I? I’ll have to learn something then… So you guys are sure there’s no way I’ll get away with it?
Hey! I’ve found RealmForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/realmforge/
RealmForge was an open source game engine that was later used to build Visual3D. I have no idea if it is a VPL or not, but it looks pretty convincing… But does anyone know how to set it up? I just can’t get mine to start.
Thanks.
There’s 3DVia Studio (formerly known as Virtools)
This (along with Quest3D) was among the engines that I considered using before I started working with the BGE (when I wanted to make 3D games and was attracted to the idea of visual logic and physics in one package), unfortunately I didn’t have a modeler to make assets in and they were too expensive at that time.
Ouch, $185 for Visual3D. RealmForge doesn’t seem to be actively supported anymore - I can’t find a forum for it anywhere. I found an interesting engine called Grit, but it’s pretty rough around the edges (no player controller-type objects, and it’s all scripting).
Basically, Largo, it’s looking like you’ll have to script somewhere - there doesn’t really exist any free, visual 3D programming language game engines out there (except for, maybe, 3D Rad, which was very poor, to me).
Interesting… Thanks guys! I’m checking 3D Rad and VirTools at the moment. I’ll report on my findings later…
im gonna give neutron development kit a go
Neutron… looks really interesting. I just started looking at their tutorial videos.
Pretty neet.
M