It’s already in the post. I added the PDF for convenience.
Interesting list. But i also like your 5 dot remarks as they underline the current lack in knowlege transmission
Personally i learned very much from the little cube-coin-collector game tutorial i found on youtube… that game introduced - as far i remember - those elements :
- scene managements, layers, collisions, motions and sound actuators …
I think that if one can do the same for a FPS template but split the FPS showcase into many little sub-games ; so the learner can understand things step by step … Each wiki page should come with :
- Text
- Pictures and a video
- But also the .blend file so people can directly play with it and learn.
There’s many little showcases which can be made for a thing such as a FPS :
- camera, AI , straffing while shooting, climbing … etc
Basicaly, try to structure the show cases like in pyramid so people can learn up to finally be able to understand what the FPS template does . After that, the learner can dive into Python and modules people created on a wiki page.
The problem with people making modules is that they made them , then throw them on a github page hoping people will guess thats something new around to discover … All the problem is that NO context is given on github . Github is to collborate with people who knows already what they talking about. With a Wiki, you can quicly understand the current context : very important to guide your learning
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I agree partially, mainly with the idea of splitting it into “sub-games”, which I usualy like to call “minimal example” instead, as these files/demo showcase one specific technique which can be applied cross-genre or even in applications which are not games like robotic simulations or other interactive visualizations - think of digital dashboards in a car or cockpit instruments in flying vehicles.
That’s where my “partial” agreement in the first sentence comes from. You are focussing on some first person shooter template, which is very specific to a) games and a genre. Except that it sounds very useful to have something like a Wiki with *.blends. But as the BGE is discontinued, I guess it will be harder to find people willing to invest their lifetime here.
I dont understand why its so important for people that a game engine has to be not discontinued… Are they going now to massively invest their time into GameGuru, CopperCube or even RPG maker ? lololol . Seriously, indie games have like 10-15 years lag behind commercial games ; so BGE body would be warm for another 10-15 years. And above all, the engine doest make all. The game design is most important.
Most good projects have a github wiki + markdown files, but then again it tend to happen when a lot of people contribute and use the project. And even then, the documentation is rather high level, as in:
“this library will help you do X, here is how to do”, but almost never document how it works internally. Which also means that the contributors often have to dirty their hands and just do something, and not wait to be taken by the hand.
Documentation takes time to write anyway, for so few people that may use it on the BGE.
That has been said already.
Bugs that aren’t going to be fixed, and documentation that won’t be written.
The first collaboration project is the engine itself, but it ran out of developers.
BGE as a tool for making games had some documentation, mostly written by the core devs again.
But I agree that an engine without devs can still be fun to use, to some extend…
I posted a link to the new documentation which has to be made for UPBGE now, still going to wait for a non-existant dev to write something?
BGE is already 10 years behind compared to the others engines. TBF I don’t really know what is the exact quantity, but there is a significant gap, and bridging that requires some serious dedication and skill.
I don’t want to be the overly pessimistic guy just to make things clear.
The thread idea is great, yes to more documentation, yes to more projects (well documented too I guess), yes to a better engine, yes, yes, yes.
Now that the idea is written, it won’t happen by itself, there are a lot of challenges to overcome, and I am not sure some people here really understand the kind of investment that requires.
I am not ready to give my body and soul to the people of that community. What I do is that I barely do what I want, lead my own stupid fights against the engine design and bugs, and publish everything I do publicly. In my opinion that’s more than enough.
Just taking my multiplayer development thread, I cannot just make schemas and stuff, just coding the thing takes me all of my free time. It has been a month now, and I am still knee deep in the implementation. No time to try to explain how the web and sockets and async programming works from the ground up. I just tell you it exists, go find a tutorial and then come back to my thread to see how it all interconnects. If anyone wants to make documentation for multiplayer in the BGE ask me anything, but I won’t write the doc from the ground up until I’m done with the prototype.
Good documentation is lacking and it is a fact indeed, but I wish I saw actions taken instead of debating an already answered question (is documentation missing?).
How are you actually going to remedy to the problem?
But just look at the thread i made on Godot ; a ‘serious’ engine with no serious game yet . lol
No 3D games yet, but the engine has proven itself for 2D, and people like the core engine features, so they have all the resources to design the 3D API from the ground up now (mostly good code/editor concepts and people to work on it)
The engine is rather well designed/maintainable, focuses entirely on game making, and targets a lot of interesting platforms (thanks again to its design).
Try and compare that to BGE’s design in Blender and how easy it is to contribute. It is not as easy.
And that plays a lot in the potential of a project: How easy it is to get people started contributing.
Godot wins there (people see a future in it).
(I like the BGE, but I don’t want to tell myself lies about it).
I have spent an enormous amount of time making sure shuvit is easy for collaboration. I believe my setup using git , git lfs, and the organization of my assets works very well.
Anyone who would like to work on shuvit is welcome.
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We should lure BluePrintRandom for your project he is really magician with Python scripting. 
Hope he will be so kind to help.
Godot has terrible performance due lack of optimization.
A game template has a few requirements:
- it is a fully working game by itself
- it needs a very clean and easy to understand structure
- it needs to be robust
- it needs to be easy to modify and extend
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yeah Also, i was talking about FPS template. But it can be easily extend to something like a Tomb-Raider-Like game … fps is just a camera setting
I might be ignorant, but could you make see a differnece between an indie game made on unity or on BGE ? ( If it’s made with the same assets and same man power )
This is a question of interpretation:
FPS = First Persion (view) + Shooter
Both requirements are pretty simple. The compelxity comes with what is not told :D.
Pretty similar to “Point and click adventure”. It mixes a genre with an input method. The input method is simple … the genre is not even specific. Regardless of that it implies quite a lot of epectations in my head (I guess different expecations ain your head).
Sometimes it is enough to get a simple working concept to enhance it iwth own content, Therefore a well desinged template can be a very good help. Either as starting point or as reference.
I think you see things like a climber looking up the mountain. The idea of wiki is to let the things go and everyone can contribute , add page, subjects and so on. Time to time, someone has to take a step back and put some order in the articles . It takes time, but it will grow organicaly.
The only thing which has to be concerned in the first place is something like a table of contents .
Don’t see all the work. This can be just a very exciting exercise to put some order in all the things done, experience learned on BGE. Making a solid template ( FPS, 3th person view game, beat em up, Architecture Viewer, Racing game, Flight Simulator … well GTA to be short) .
When you think about it , maybe people would start to consider using that template are more easy choice to start an indie game rather than using UE or Unity if you consider also the fact they can make assets in Blender directly.
Also, if one make a solid template, maybe this can give ideas for the Blender foundation for its Interactive mode … who knows ?
It’s also fun to conceptualize a game system : The tricks one can use to simplify the game logic, the logic one can aggregate . For exemple : what is the difference between driving a car and a plane. Can one use the same control module … etc. What sensors can be used all the time for everything. In my game for exemple ; why is there any difference between hitting and getting hit. For an human perspective, its very different. But in a game perspective, it’s just a matter of reversing the hp countdown .
When do you expect to start working on this template?
Or do you rather prefer working on making the new official documentation?
Link again: https://github.com/UPBGE/UPBGE-Web/tree/gh-pages
What are you up to?
I will first finish setting the grounds of my game, create a wiki on it and invite people to enhance the game in order to start a template on it. By making the game, im already making things generic in order to separate as much as possible the artistic from the technic so it helps me thinking about the topology of assets ; how can i group things and which proprieties do they need at least to be autonomous ; what are the minimum of sensors an NPC must have - the proprety sensor is very useful by the way ; how do i manage delay in pulses.
But i need to make my game nice looking in the first place ; thats how its possible to attract more people in the project. And i think that everyone trying making a serious game on BGE should try to make a wiki page to explain his views so then one can start to aggregate all together and pick up clever ideas .
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