This question may have been addressed but I want to know if blender can handle a dragon age inquisition type of rpg game with massive fantasy landscape. is that stuff cached in ram or blender compartmentalizes loading of a large landscape. is there anyway to divide up the level.
Do you mean Blender itself (for creating assets), or the Blender game engine (which was removed from blender years ago) ?
Or something like UPBGE, which is Blender-based ?
I don’t know much about blender-based engines, but games like DA uses very advanced tech and pipelines. Not many engines outside the big ones can handle that, especially for open-world.
well, there may be away to divide up the world map into loadable sections to be more manageable. what about a game with fairly large map.
The premise of the question is misguided and ridiculous. Let’s see this for what it really is. This is really more of a question “Can I make a game like that if I use UPBGE?” Which is not really meaningful. Let’s look at the game. There is this Wikipedia article about it. No idea if all information there is true, but the gist is:
The game cost “tens of millions” of dollars to develop.[51] More than 200 people worked on it, including eight writers, 70 artists, 75 game-testers, and more than 30 actors.[51]
So, the answer you are actually looking for is: No. You cannot just make a game like that alone. Obviously. The game engine isn’t even the main problem, it doesn’t matter that much here.
i just wondering if the engine can handle a game like that. i could at least make a small demo to drum up interest maybe later kick starter it. it’s difficult to put together team without a budget. it’s not impossible that people can collaborate a project. I am simply asking if the blender game engine could handle large environment if a project like that would start.
being someone who actually made a system to theoretically handle worlds of ludicrous sizes in upbge 0.2.0, no. id say no. the amount of time spent getting the engine itself to that point is astronomical, either learning my system or doing one yourself. the bge has too many other issues to make all that effort worthwhile.
that’s why i am thinking about dividing the map up with load script scene management. i could try a smaller level sized map structure like resident evil village level but have level 2 be a underground dungeons with 5 different load scripts. theoretically this could work given how the game engine is structured. it’s not looking at a big map like oblivion but medium size map. maybe some type of false fast travel load function to loads different parts of the level. i feel like you can fool the game engine into creating a bigger game
I would say don’t waste your time on this. How long are you into this? 2 weeks? A month? Why would anyone want to be in a team led by you at this point? Nobody starts with that! It’s just not how this is done. Read the article about the game on Wikipedia. Read about the company. BioWare is a huge game company founded in 1995. That wasn’t their first game.
Start with something realistic. This is a waste of time. You may still get knowledge by chasing unachievable goals, but failure is not very motivating. Why not set a realistic goal and make the absolutely smallest and simplest game you can possibly think of but make it really well first?..
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not every team starts of with 10 million seed fund and hiring spree. all project start somewhere from something small. not everyone is handed the silver spoon. most normal plp have ambition may get lucky from investor. i don’t have the luxury. i actually running a streaming channel on youtube for something small. but ultimately, i want to attempt at something more ambitious. i am not trying to set my goal to work at the dollar store for rest of my life. i understand your view point, but i have simple projects going on on the side. but i would need a more ambitious project to be more motiviated. making flappy bird, i could do that, but where the challenge in that
you go to realize bioware probably had an initial investment from investors to even think about going big. I could be looking at seed funding or kickstarter but I don’t have the luxury. I am really hiring people local if that’s possible. I don’t have a big bank account but that does not preclude me from taking a try at this
It seems they started with $300 000, not 10 000 000. Their first game if you believe Wikipedia was Shattered Steel That’s interesting.
Well, actually it absolutely does. Massive world games rely on the size and to have that size you need a lot of assets and extremely complex systems for the player to interact with the massive world and those need to be made and you cannot do that alone. So it absolutely is a problem.
It would be the same as me saying “I want to start making jewelry and just because I don’t have any money, that doesn’t mean I cannot work with gold and diamonds”. But obviously, if I don’t have money, I cant buy the gold and diamonds. So you cannot make the massive worlds either. That’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?
What you could do is concentrate on the game aspect of this. What is a game? What’s the definition? “An activity that one engages in for amusement or fun.” That’s plenty ambitious. To make something that is fun to play.
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300,000 is not even going to pay the light bills. a team of programmers need probably 10 million to work for 5 years without profit. do the math. 60 grand is low for a game programmer. you have to realize a video game dont make money in the development stage. it’s only early access that you get money per download. there has to be an initial investment way more than that. you probably looking at millions over.
i am trying to put together a small team with company stock options. who knows, i may get a check from venture capital funding who knows. but to close your mind to the possibility is premature i think.
I just think with your ambition, you have quite a bit of homework left to do. You should certainly not have questions like this before you start putting a team together. You are rushing things if you are already trying to put a team together and still have questions about Blender game engine handling massive world RPGs. I think you should start with smaller steps. Have you seen a precedent where the steps where:
- No money, no skill, no knowledge
- “Dragon Age: Inquisition type of RPG game”
It might be rude of me to assume no skill. But let’s face it - the fact that you asked this question is sort of a good indication. It means you are not familiar with game engines. All I am saying is maybe try it with something simple first. If you think you will be able to pull off something of that level, what is it to you to make a smaller game as a test run? And if you do, you will not have questions like this, because you will find out how the technology works.
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You crawl before you walk, you walk before you run.
You’ve gotta Commander Keen before you Doom.
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What do you think are some of the biggest obstacles in making huge open-world game work with UPBGE? Is it making physics and objects disabled when they’re out of simulation/view distance? In terms of rendering alone, does Blender handle it itself good enough when setting clip distance on camera?
lack of explicit memory management is a huge one. i have a container system that can load and unload whole chunks of the scene depending on various lod factors. just because it ends an object doesnt mean its freed from the memory to allow more things.
the other big issue is how black-boxed the logic, physics, and render steps are. it very difficult to work around all the pre-determined steps. yes you can use pre-draw, but somethings like shadows arent done at the same time causing shadows to lag.
origin shifting is another solution i have which tries to keep the scene origin near the camera where all the important precision sensitive calculations happen. i got this one working pretty well, most of the time you dont even notice the world shifting 1000m. this plays well with the container streaming which disables physics at distance prevent floating point errors.
ive done some looking into godot and the “node” system (their version of objects) allows you to easily inject code into the logic loop in a predictable way.
then theres the bugs, lack of big vision, waning interest, difficultly of merging updates in the fork, and lack of builtin secure networking, gpl issues, no easy way to secure assets or even platform build tools.
the bge is a fun toy to play with, but if you are serious about making a game and getting a team, you need something thats more well known.
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well, I understand where you coming from. That’s why I am trying to run a streaming channel to drum up some interest. I also want to see if I can make a 3d trailer of the game to start out small. the way i see it, I can always modify my strategy. If not, i could always develop the skills to work for a big company if i can’t create one.
I like the integration aspect with bge. i toyed with the idea of unity and ideal but scoff the idea of importing asset and animation separately. I feel like bge is easier to learn that way. for some reason, the idea of having a single tool that does everything from modeling to game engine is appealing rather than modeling in one program and do engine physics the other.
The barriers to finishing this project are very large, and only about 1% of them have anything to do with blender.
Generating enough content to fill an open world game takes hundreds of thousands of man-hours.
You can hold the goal in your mind, but if that is your sole objective, you will burnout long before even getting started.
Start small. Gain skills. Build momentum. You don’t need to make your magnum opus in your 20’s. You have time.
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Thanks for the insights! What’s quite unique about UPBGE compared to most other game engines is that all the most bloody business is done by the Blender itself, and the game engine is kinda a side-module that adds some game engine basics on top of it. I personally think it might be worth trying to fork and modify it for your own specific game. This might be much easier than doing the same to any other engines or building your own from scratch, but that’s just a feeling at the moment. I haven’t tried forking/customizing it myself yet.
I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of beginners on forums and facebook who want to make open world mmo rpgs. It kinda became a thing. No idea what’s their progress.
My two cents:
Scale back majorly.
Choose a large scale engine like UE5 and futureproof your career.
For BGE, stick to much smaller games- heck. Id say use BGE for prototyping Ideas, and make the full game in a much more capable engine.
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