BGE - Is it worth it?

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
#1

Greetings,

I am pretty new to blender and decided to learn how to use it becuase I wanted to move into the 3d world of video games. I had spent countless years using the “Game Maker” www.yoyogames.com software. That software was not intended to make 3d games (although it has some basic 3d functionality). After becoming quite proficiant with GM I decided it was time to move into the 3d world for once and search the web for my next move. I discovered blender and am really starting to love working with it. I have done a lot of tutorials on modeling and a few on the BGE basics. I have not started learning python yet but I think I intend to. I have been researching if teh BGE is going to be worth while to learn and use to create 3d Video games. This brings me to my question:

Why is it so hard to find any finished video games made with blender?

Yes there is “Yo Frankie!” of course but I really never find any finsihed game made with blender. There are a TON of WIP or people with that big idea, but I am pressed to find anything finished out there.

Is this a sign that I am barking up the wrong tree? Shoudl I be looking into something else to make 3d games? I have seen lots of comments of “Blender is good for prototyping games” (What ever that means) Is that kind of comment because blender just can’t produce games of today’s standard? (PS3 or the like) I have read that blender is good for making say equivilant games to XBOX or PS2. (Which at this time is fine by my standards)

Again, as I stated before, I am enthrawled with blender and all it can do. Being new to the whole 3d graphics world, maybe I am just start struck right now.

I assume I will be getting some bias feedback being this is blenderartists but I value what the knowledgeable community has to say about this.

Is the BGE worth my time? Or should I place blender as modeling software and look elsewhere for (low budget software) game creation software?

#2

The problem with no finished games, is that the majority of BGE users are young (11-13 years old) newcomers to 3d who also thinks they can make halo in a few months. They dont have the motivation nor the vision to complete the project.

BGE has a bad reputation (among some flaws) that keeps serious game makers from joining the club…

I dont think you are barking up the wrong tree. The BGE has many features that would make it perfect for newcomers to 3d and I assume programing?

BGE doesn’t require programing knowledge to make games. It can use Logic bricks which is a visual logic editor thingy… :rolleyes: And if you want to extend the functionality, you can use python to do some pretty advanced stuff.

About the graphics: Its about par with the ps2/xbox. Just keep in mind that a badly made game will run slow no matter what game engine it uses. I get a lot of people telling me that the bge sucks because it cant run their game, but when I look at the game, its filled with tons of highpoly objects and as many lights as there are stars. Of course its going to run slow!

Hope this helps! (and I hope my half rant doesn’t affect you :wink: )
Ex.

#3

I did a lot of programming with GML (Game Maker Language) which was object oriantated progaming which python is I believe, so I figure I could learn python easy enough.

#4

I didn’t expect you to respond so early hahaha so this is just a notice that I added more info on my first post.

Hope it helps!
Ex.

#5

Thanks for your feedback. I am excited about makeing some 3d games. Hope I can accomplish something with blender. I have been at it for about a month now and started playing with logic blocks recently. I try and do tutorials almost every day so I can learn the interface. I jumped into 2.5 pretty quick becuase it seems so much “cleaner” of an interface, and haven’t had to much trouble translating tutorials from oder versions. Who knows…some day you just may see a 3d video game with my stamp on it. Time will tell. Again, thanks for you input.

P.S. At least I am not a kid with big ideas…well I may have some big ideas…just been on the planet for a few decades to come up with those ideas…

P.S.S. Also, your half rant didn’t cause me any greif… more solidified my suspicions of the things I have read.

#6

Blender, to me, is awesome. The reason you don’t see much finished games is because of what excaliberr said… Most of us are 11 - 13 years old. Only a few of us, (11 - 13) year olds are taken seriusily on this forum because they have actually contributed to the BlenderArtists community.

I, myself, am 14 years old, and have a huge project, that I started almost 1 year back, and I am proud to say I stuck with it! Not many can say they have been working on a game for almost 1 year. Most people lose motavation and get bored.

Don’t blame the game engine, for all game engines you need skill at something, it makes no difference what game engine your using, it’s how you use it. Unity is good, but if you don’t know what it takes to make a game, then you won’t get very far in a project… You need to remember, Blender is no different from other game engines, infact, it’s one of the easiest game engine out there! The ability to use logic bricks instead of programming is amazing!

Blender is a great way to start your video game making career, it’s a good path to another game engine, because you get the idea of how everything is suppose to work.

I say stick with it :smiley:

#7

All of a sudden I feel old looking at the young ages of people in the BGE forums (I’m 21).

There are finished games, but most threads are of projects that were too big for people to handle or too complex.

I have 5 games that I could consider complete (one of them have an open ended menu design for 100’s more scenes, but I could wrap it up and call it done).

I also have projects I haven’t completed because I either get bored with them and move on to one of my other incomplete ones or I get distracted back to making artwork using the non GE portion of Blender, not because I don’t have the skill or the BGE can’t handle it (the 2.5 BGE at least).

One of the best places to find finished games is the BGE contest pages on the Bullet Physics website.

#8

One thing that you may consider is that blender
is a really easy application to learn.

I mean, it’s as hard as any game engine, but most documentation is free & well done
and there is ton of peoples fighting to help you first.

of course, if would be foolish to say it’s the best game engine ever.
if one day you have the money, I suggest you buy a great game software like Unreal or Crysis.

but for learning, nothing is worth blender’s game engine.

#9

Yes, the language of Blender is the problem. You simply can’t write a program that’s good for everything. When you see a game like Battlefield BadCo, you’re seeing literally a year of expert programming or more, and that’s just the engine. They use tricks to imitate graphics in a very efficient way, and they do so in C++ language. Ie; they use their own cad, stripped down like a Nascar to run fast and efficient. We wont be able to use Blender to make online games that are complex enough to be fun until chips are 100x faster, and memory is 100x larger (ram) for the same price.

#10

Something else that no one seems to have mentioned is that BGE had not been updated since NAN until yo frankie, so for a very long time the BGE was seriously out of date, and i believe had some issues due to changes to other pieces of code (the issues could have just been existing ones or i may have been misinformed)

#11

The BGE was updated periodically between NaN and Yo Frankie! Just not very often (and the BGE was getting major fixes and updates starting in the cycle leading to 2.46)

2.26 - 2.32] - nothing, the BGE was removed from Blender in 2.26 and remained so till 2.33
2.3x (2.33 - 2.40)] - some features like split screen functionality was added and a small handful of remedial fixes
2.40] - Erwin returns and the new Bullet Physics engine is introduced in the BGE
2.40 - 2.45] - 2D filters were added, display list option sped up significantly, some bullet updates, but logic bricks broke and memory leaks came in, by 2.45 the BGE was about unusable for really big games due to memory leaks.
2.46] - Benoit Bolsee does a BGE fix-a-thon and the 2.46 GE became known as the fixed BGE, other goodies like reduced memory consumption by Ovidiu
2.48] - GLSL shading, logic goodies, python goodies, and other features came in for the Yo Frankie! project, Bullet physics were now able to do about everything the old Sumo physics could do.
2.49] - more features, major speedups, API changes, fixes
2.5] - Sumo looks to be removed, game in Blender now as fast as the runtime, not many new features other than basic dynamic loading, but the fixes still trickle in
2.6] - BGE math library modernization complete? (replacing the current library with Eigan2)

#12

I didn’t read the other comments, but this is just my opinion.

Many of the people in WIP section are very inexperienced. I read some of the very first comment and he said that it was about age. Age honestly doesn’t make any difference in this world. I have seen younger users create staggering games. Although, you do have it right about how many of the people in WIP section just have “big ideas”. The truth about that is that those people have all the strong ideas, they just don’t have the brawn to back it up. I don’t post in WIP section anymore because I just think that its a waste of time.

Also, you should check out our last contest that we just had. Most of those games are quite amazing.

Many games that the more experienced people make unfortunately end up staying with them. I my self have 5-10 games that I should really release but either don’t get the time, or I am just really not proud of enough to release them. I guess its an ego thing.

Another point is that if you are used to GM, I don’t know how much your going to like Blender. Blender is probably the easiest solution for making games because it has everything built in. Things like Unity and such actually require you to go in and insert other resources from programs like Blender, which can be time consuming and annoying to learn.

The thing with Blender is, is that its going to be very time consuming and very hard (at first), you just really need to get some practice.

I am going to tell you this now, because its something you are going to need to hear.

If you want to be a real game maker, you are going to have to forget Game Maker and start doing the real work.

By that I simply mean that Game Maker and such programs are great for lazy people, because they don’t give you too much control, and they lay it out for you. I am not calling you lazy, I am simply saying that real quality games take real time, and real effort, and if you are not willing to give that, then yes, Blender is probably not for you.

Programs like Blender, because they are open source, allow you to get the support and help you need.

I emailed a 3D studio max guy 2 years ago. Guess what? I still haven’t gotten a reply.

I hope you don’t mind the long post, I also hope that it helped a little.
-Sunjay03

#13

I read some of the other points and remembered some thing.

Its not the program that makes bad or boring games, its the people.

Very important.
-Sunjay03

#14

For the record, I’ve used GameMaker for about 5 years total (starting at age 14 with GameMaker 4.1) and made around 21 games. GML gives you a heaping amount more control than just the Drag and Drop, but it doesn’t change the fact that GM is meant for 2D games and creating your level with tiles is limiting compared to the sheer freedom of shape and form of making a platformer in the BGE with an orphographic camera and 3D geometry (similar to Flash with GLSL and texture stacking goodness).

Some elements of a 2D platformer are trickier in 3D than 2D, but with the right tricks it can be done.

#15

One of the more important reasons (from my perspective):

Logic bricks lack the generality, flexibility, and (perhaps most important of all) manageability of well established programming languages. There is a python API available, but its implementation is rather poor, as it depends quite heavily on the logic brick system; it’s very hard to properly leverage the OOP facilities of python in that kind of environment, and you’re essentially confined to writing a complex controller for the logic brick system.

Now, it is possible to program your way around these impediments, but it becomes a matter of writing an engine within an engine, and that’s when it becomes pointless, because the whole idea of using an engine is so that you don’t have to waste time writing your own.

That said: You won’t waste your time in learning how to use the BGE. The python implementation sucks, but it’s still python, and if you use it to solve common problems in the BGE, you’ll be able to use it in other engines as well.

Unlike logic brick skills (if we can even call them “skills”), general python abilities are highly transferable.

Actually, I think that’s largely what happens now: people use the BGE to learn the basics by making small demos, and then they move to “all by code” engines that provide better flexibility/manageability.

Except that Flash plays in the browser, and that the flash player is guaranteed to be on virtually any machine connected to the net.

#16

Lol, @Ace Dragon: I must be ancient at the ripe old age of 33, with a wife and 3 kids.

I love blender, and most of the pertinent points have been made. You won’t find another forum aside from this one that will teach you, help you, and critique you(positively mind you) better than the one you just posted in.(Wow that sentence had alot of “you’s”.)

The extent of your progress with blender, like all of us, lies on your own shoulders. The tutorials and resources are here, and if they aren’t someone will point you in the right direction.

Wasting your time as with all things is up to you.

Welcome and I hope to see that your previous experiences translate well here.

Kuro.

#17

Over the years there has been a large number of finished games. Check the finished games forum, and the threads for the last two game competitions. Before these, there were many but by now most of the download links in the forums will have gone bad.

Every free game engine out there will have a large amount of WIPs, it’s a good thing.

#18

I have seen lots of comments of “Blender is good for prototyping games” (What ever that means)

So far no one has clarified this statement for you. What people mean by “Blender is good for prototyping games” is: Blender contains every tool needed to develop a video game within one program (excluding a good image editing tool). The game engine is launched with the press of a button §. Since you can model, unwrap, animate, and program within blender the time it takes to make a game is significantly reduced (It’s a big difference).

This being said, the BGE is not a top of the line game engine. Your finished product (If you ever finish your game) will not be the same quality as something made with a better engine (unity, cryengine, unrealengine, to name a few). Since you can’t create a top of the line game with the BGE, it is used more for prototyping (testing ideas) than creating full games.

The BGE is a sort of stepping stone into 3D video game development. You can create a fun game in a short amount of time, by yourself (A task that is nearly impossible with other engines). You can also use the BGE demos with impressive graphics to show off your artistic talents (Though not at a good frame rate). The BGE is a great engine for hobbyist developers, but it’s only use for professional companies is “prototyping games”.

#19

Logic bricks lack the generality, flexibility, and (perhaps most important of all) manageability of well established programming languages. There is a python API available, but its implementation is rather poor, as it depends quite heavily on the logic brick system; it’s very hard to properly leverage the OOP facilities of python in that kind of environment, and you’re essentially confined to writing a complex controller for the logic brick system.

Ironically Moguri just wrote a new patch that expands the python API so that you would not need keyboard and mouse sensors for keyboard and mouse events, dependence on the brick system will now not be quite as much compared to 2.49.

About the argument that the BGE is only good for prototyping, I made and completed a marble game a number of years back based on one of the demos for the first Bullet competition, that was back when the BGE was buggy and a bit slower (though my computer also wasn’t as powerful). It showed even back then I was able to complete a game with the BGE, but now the ability is much greater than it was.

You may think the BGE can only do games to the level of Yo Frankie! but a number of WIP projects here surpass Yo Frankie! in at least one area.

#20

ive been successful with BGE. its a good engine to make short fun games. alot is possible with BGE with extensive predevelopment, but i will admit its a bit dated. however the engine isnt what makes a game fun though, the game is what makes the game fun.

What can be best said about blender is that the games you make better be focused on being “fun” rather than visually stunning compared to todays games. blender is capable of ps2 style games with enough of a production team, and can easily surpass ps1 games without a production team.

plus the skills you learn from BGE can be translated anywhere. for example, at work i use BGE to prototype functions before i put them into the company’s native engine. usually ill even take the models from blender straight into the product were working on without even touching Maya!
and whenever i use the Unity engine, its always directly compatable with Blender.

if your operating as a hobby level game designer, blender is perfect. its free.