Hello,
After the positive feedback from after the conference and the general misinformation, I thought I should probably make blender2crystal clear to the community.
Crystal Space is a widely known game engine which unlike most other “game engines” (such as Ogre, Irrlicht and others) does more than just 3D rendering. Inside it can do physics, sound, gui, filesystem, config files and lots more. This means its complete.
When writing games, nearly everyone tends to create an entity/object which represents a game object like a health pack or a character. There are other such constructs and Crystal Entity Layer (CEL) provides these already made, so a programmer doesn’t have to waste time re-coding these predefined concepts over again and can concentrate on making a game. Someone who decides to redo this all themselves will spend a long time making something not as good because they don’t have as much time to spend on it as people who do concentrate on it single mindedly.
Then these can be all extended using scripting and another program called celstart which is how Visual Basic is for programs but for games.
I’ve heard people say they don’t want all this available logic to use. Why? You don’t have to use it if you wish, and if you want to make game engines and not create games then that is what you will spend your time doing.
These constructs then translate nicely graphically. The idea is that these can be drawn on paper, so why not designed on the computer?
blender2crystal is an exporter tool for Crystal Space and CEL, but because of all the needed logic stuff its possible to do advanced things using it. There is also CrystalBlend which was a blender game engine. Both b2cs and cb need a next step and the next gen set of tools is Obsidian which is superseding both of these projects (they are not dead- just more advanced).
Obsidian will provide integrated editing tools for creating levels and creating games. For large projects, level editors and property modifiers are needed for artists, and smaller games need rapid workflow for creating game logic. This is wrapped into one flexible interface. Some of the technology here is very advanced (dynamic gui, interacting with verse, logic diagramming).
Originally backwards compatibility with the game engine was planning to be maintained but after speaking with Ton, he said he thinks thats a bad idea and we shouldn’t bother.
Hope that cleared up any misconceptions.