BLEngine, AAA Blender Engine in Work

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Sorry for the cross post, I wanted to reach out to the people trying to code the blender game engine.

Check the video link below.

Lets face it Blender is the best 3d application available, but its game engine runs way too slow because of : Python is a scripting language (slow) and Blender has too complex materials and meshes and what not. It also cant easily to AI, pathfinding, vehicle physics…etc.

So, I spent 3 days working on this and its almost done. More will be released about it in the future, and I hope to have it on the blender.org page soon. I’m currently working on a horror 3rd or 1st person shooter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX8Uv0o6b-o

Youtube ruins the quality. I’ll have an official narrated video about the engine next week. Everything you see there can be done without code and is directly exported from blender:
Exported Lights ( can be set to “flicker”)
Exported Meshes
Physics Primitives linked to meshes
Events ( basically you model a sphere, scale it, if the player hits the sphere do stuff)

Shadows and Normal mapping are coming as well as other sweet Sh**.

If your a good artist and iterested in working on this project, you have or want to donate some guns, any art at all
email me at [email protected] . This is very flexible so you can literally export your work by the minute and be able to play it in game.

Thanks!
www.p-o-p-games.com

2

So your coding an entire new engine from scratch? In almost 3 days? Which is meant to be better than the current BGE which has been developed for many years now?

Ive checked out your website and demo reel etc (the link on this thread is not correct btw) and it seems like u have some skills and experience, but still, I dont see how this will be achieved by one person in such a small amount of time.

The framerate of the game in the youtube video seems quite low as well.
I just dont see the point in trying to code an entirely new BGE from scratch when theres one there already that runs ‘ok’ and its constantly being upgraded and optimized as we speak.

BGE already has shadows, normal mapping and heaps of other ‘sweet shit’. :wink:

3

A couple things here that you probably wont understand unless you have coded a real game.

1.) Blender game engine works in Python, a scripting language. Writing a whole game in a scripting language is just not good and slow.

2.) Blender game engine has been worked on yes, but nobody is probably paid to work on it. And it won’t be put out fast enough. I have yet to see a retail quality game come out of blender game engine. I saw Yo Frankie a long time ago but it seemed low poly and not even complex at all last time i saw it. Seriosuly though, if anyone knows of a really good looking game running in the blender game eninge, show me cuz I’ll be happy about it. I still wont use blender game engine though.

3.) 3 days total for the entire engine Im working on. That includes the art you see there, and all coding and my python script from blender. Why is my timeframe small, cuz I’m a mad coder. Just stick around man, my goal is to next week demo some cool shit. If you saw the FPS in my demo reel, that was 3 weeks of work on my old engine which wasn’t flexible at all. And that included art, programming it to be online, getting into vehicles, bullet collision…

4.) Yes, the framerate is really really low. I’m not using Vertex Buffers yet, so the drawing is slow. If you don’t know what Vertex Buffers are, then well…again you don’t really know enough to say BGE is good and my engine is pointless.

5.) Blender itself doesn’t support texture splatting, and you can’t write your own shaders. It’s just not flexible for any coders. Does it allow you to put deferred shading in if you want? Are the physics optimized (definitely not if they are in PYTHON!). I mean PhysX, Havok, these are the physics engines that power next-gen games, and yes they are free and I’m taking advantage of that.

6.) As you can see, my engine supports even simpler things like flickering lights. It will support rotating lights as well.

I’m not posting this as an argument, just pointing out some facts. And I built this to be used by artists, specifically people that know Blender. So not knowing the low-level engine work involved in a game is fine, which is what I aimed this tool for.

Again, link me to a good BGE game that competes with something even last generation.

4

Hey there! That’s really cool.

It’s got nothing to do with me doubting your ability or your intentions. But my only thing that I think is that Blender game engine is very competitive on performance with many commercial engines that are targeted towards indepednents and hobbyiest. It has many features that a lot of them don’t have. Occulsion culling was just added very recently and many of them have been using BSP maps and even those aren’t impleneted completely jsut yet. I should know, I own the licenses to 2 commercial game engines. (don’t ask) ^^

And blender pretty much stands shoulder to shoulder with them on power, it doesn’t have some of the specialty features such as soft shadows and deferrered rendering and advanced skies and parrallax maps, at the moment. But other than those things it stands pretty tall when I put them side to side on my computer with 8800GT vid card.

I mean it really does. So I would only call it slow when you compare it with maybe Unreal or CryEngine2. But if you’re going to do that comparison then you’d have to say that every other engine out there is slow as well.

Now that said, if you can do that in 3 days I’m sure you’d get tons appreciation from the community if you did something simple like increasing shadow performance or improving the shaders or something. But yeah, performance wise I’d hoenstly say that blender is great.

ANd it should fun to see what you decide to do with your skill you have.

So, basically what I wonder is whether it would be better to add to the power of BGE as opposed to making another one.

I think it speaks volumes that I purchased 2 commercial licenses and yet here I am still watching BGE like a hawk and still using it too!

5

“And blender pretty much stands shoulder to shoulder with them on power”

Again though, show me an example real-time that looks like COD4, Crysis, or anything like that. When you say it has the power, well do you mean real-time? or do you simply mean “well blender can do shadows too”. Because real-time shadows and shadows are not the same.

What about enemy pathfinding? Does blender do anything like this? I mean what about AI culling. What about level of detail. How do you tell blender this is detail level 1, 2 of this mesh?

Occlusion culling is hardly anything. I’ll put it in when I need it, its really only needed for outdoor scenes right now. It really only works on scenes where you are in a city like GTA4.

BSP trees: Right now my data is setup as Partitions (not BSP “Binary Space Partitions”). What this means is you have a 20 rooms, your in one, thats the only one to update.

“I purchased 2 commercial licenses”
To what? I mean I’m very impressed with the new Torque Advanced Game Engine so far. I saw it at GDC this year and they basically had Crysis running.

Thanks for lookin out though. I know what I will have done next week and I really want it to be phenominal. And seriously, I’m writing all this blender scripts, I know how to access some data, but BGE just is not setup for sophisticated gameplay and AI, EVEN if I can be proven wrong about its real-time graphics abilities.

6

Yo Frankie was not that bad actually, The models were nice, and the graphics were PS1/PS2 (pretty good considering that I play that more than anything else) comparable in my opinion.

7

Yea I’m actually downloading it right now. I want to see the complexity. Don’t get me wrong, I heard about the blender game engine and I was damn Blender is just getting even more nuts, but it doesn’t give enough power to coders.

8

Well when I look at Torque, C4, Leadwerks, Blade3d, Neo-Axis I don’t really know of any games that are of the sophistication of Crysis or CoD4 with them either. So basically my point is that it’s probably not the game engines that are incapable of making that quality of game, it’s the communities.

If you also go to CryMod you’ll notice that even when people are using CryEngine2 there still hasn’t been a mod released that I know of that can compare to Crysis or CoD4.

So my thoughts are that even if you made something more powerful than CryEngine2 there is no guarentee that some people are going to come along and make something comparable to Crysis or CoD4. That’s the big dilemma with game engines. You have wonderful coders who are willing to do the work to make a game engine but you have a gigantic body of really lazy amateur developers who quit their games after two months of barely doing anything on it to begin with.

I think programmers have a much better work ethic than most game developers out there. So like I’m saying it’s not that I’m skeptical of you. It’s just that I’m not so sure that your approach is the best one. I think the best one would be to add to the buzz of blender game engine by helping the devs to improve on it. THEN when professionals want to use the more powerful blender game engine that you’re now an expert on, you can be hired by them to be a consultant for them and to help them make the most out of blender game engine.

Or you can use it to make a game of your own.

But you can do whatever you want and that would be great. Really I mean it. But I only wanted to share my opinion becasue maybe you can find it helpful in some way.

9

“So my thoughts are that even if you made something more powerful than CryEngine2 there is no guarentee that some people are going to come along and make something comparable to Crysis or CoD4.”

Well I’m doing that too. I want a prototype up and running quick.

“Well when I look at Torque, C4, Leadwerks, Blade3d, Neo-Axis I don’t really know of any games that are of the sophistication of Crysis or CoD4 with them either.”

Well check this out. Blenders showcase game is Yo Frankie. Torques was this:
http://vimeo.com/836267

I supports all kinds of stuff including Mega Texturing.

10

If your curious though I found this really nice demo, but look at the screenshot, 60fps for 2 walls and a bathtub.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=137038

11

Yo Frankie wasn’t super-complex, but it did things that made me step back and go, “holy shit how can I make my games like that?” and seeing as I lack coding knowledge what-so-ever, I stick to logic bricks.

That demo is cool, I rather did like how they did that, Also, aside from the flickering, in your demo I didn’t see much else. mind pointing out what else there is?

12

I’ll point it out later when I show whats actually going on between blender and its interface to my engine.

13

How much have you investigated the BGE?
The logic bricks are coded in C, they are fast, python is used to control them.
The physics engine is NOT coded in python. BGE uses the bullet physics engine. I think most of the engine is written in c++, it’s just the scripts the game developer code that is in python. Unless he/she wants to edit the source. And you can code your own GLSL shaders.

14

Well thats a smack in the face. But where are all the games? I mean I don’t expect them to be published, but no prototypes really? I played yo frankie, didn’t get very far, but I want to see something more.

15

Well at the moment I am attempting to make a game demonstrating our solar system to show off to someone just so I can say “Haha I’m better than you are.” if that counts

16

If your curious though I found this really nice demo, but look at the screenshot, 60fps for 2 walls and a bathtub

Because he had vertical sync on.
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/5406/fpsoi5.jpg

And I believe that Electronic Arts Research is going to/is using the Blender Game Engine:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152782&highlight=electronic+Arts+Research

17

Well like I said before if you look at most game engines out there you won’t find very many hobbyist games. Just look.

That’s why I don’t think finding games is a measure of merit for a game engine .

Lots of great engines out there without much in the way of actual games having been released. See my comments above for my opinion on that ^^

18

Hi adam,
your work is interesting and you surely have a lot of skills to showcase.
I think that you are using the wrong angle to connect with the community here.
There is no opposition between you “the one who says that the bge is limited and there are no good games done yet” and the community “the ones who think the blender game engine is the best engine ever”.

You are here, you have some skills, then every suggestion or request you can make to improve the tool that we are using can be valuable.
I won’t tell you that the bge is the best and that you don’t know anything, because it’s not true. And I won’t enjoy reading your posts if you always put yourself in opposition of whatever is done around the bge.

Instead, I can tell you that, despite the fact that there might not be games that you enjoy, you should investigate the bge capabilities more, watch closely the development of the 2.49,the use of the Blender Game engine by an AAA game company.
The tool is still young but its current development should be a big step in its capabilities.
Also, there might be no games because teams that invests xxxxxx$ in a game engine are (in general) more organized (and financially ‘implicated’?) that those who can use a tool for free.

If you are here, this is because you want to get something from the tool and the community.
If you come to show some pride only (but I assume this is not your case), maybe that’s not the good place for it.

If that is not good enough for you, you can make your own engine and I wish you the best.
But being in opposition with everybody is pointless.

Just my opinion.

19

Adam450,
I’d love to have someone like you ‘on-board’ for the BGE.
Currently it seems you are trying to get content out of Blender into your proto-engine and that’s cool. That’s what the freedom in GPL entails. It is even encouraged. You are certainly not the first person to look at BGE and to find limitations all around (just look for posts by Endi…)
It did however seem that you made some remarks that were a bit off putting with regards to the BGE.
As already indicated, BGE is written in C++, it has the Bullet engine incorporated/supported by the creater himself (Bullet is a really kick-ass engine coming out of Sony, not in any way limited to Blender) and quite some other advances are being put in BGE at an alarming pace.
You seem to base judgement your of the BGE on YoFrankie. Well, this ‘game’ wasn’t even intended to be a BGE game!! YoFrankie was started to get a worklflow going to ‘develop’ in Blender and to export to an external engine (in this case ‘Crystal Space’). This didn’t pan out an in the last 6 weeks or so of the project, it was ported to BGE. The major advancement for YoFrankie was a basic GLSL integration into the BGE, along with other elements of course… Things certainly have improved A LOT since then…
You already found the ‘Bathroom scene’ demo. There are quite some others like ‘Boom’ (Blender Doom), Ruinas and anything recent by Martinsh.
Agreed these are very limited demos (like the Torque demo you linked) but they already show enormuous improvements over YoFrankie game engine wise…
While the engine of course is certainly no Crysis, it is not to be sniffed at either. Currently, it is thru that no ‘real’ game is based on it, but that is more because no team has stepped up to the plate and invested the large amount of work to make such a game (even there, things are changing) There is however an individual contest ongoing that shows some promising games/demos.
So, if you want to create your own engine able to use Blender created content (just what Endi is doing), great, all the more power to you. The community will certainly look at what you come up with. We will of course received you with open arms if you would ever decide to use your coding skills to improve the current BGE. The choice is yours. You can’t lose either way.

20

If you would like to create a AAA engine using the blender, great. And I will not put in doubt their abilities as a programmer ,because I do not know you. And “BGE has problems” we all know. But I do not agree with some things you said:

Blender game engine works in Python, a scripting language. Writing a whole game in a scripting language is just not good and slow.
All AAA Engines have a script language. UnrealEngine 3 have a UnrealScript and Kismet ( as LogicBricks ). Cryengine2 have LUA for AI etc… But The core of BGE is write in C++. This is not as Pygame that is write only in Python ( and cause this is slow )

2.) Blender game engine has been worked on yes, but nobody is probably paid to work on it. And it won’t be put out fast enough. I have yet to see a retail quality game come out of blender game engine. I saw Yo Frankie a long time ago but it seemed low poly and not even complex at all last time i saw it. Seriosuly though, if anyone knows of a really good looking game running in the blender game eninge, show me cuz I’ll be happy about it. I still wont use blender game engine though.
It is a mistake to blame the engine for not having AAA games now. Develop a quality game is not something you create the day to night. BGE and only became really competitive and a viable option for a very short time (version 2.48). And if GarageGames can show the Gears of War in you engine is because they PAID for Epic for yours models, Something that will never happen in the Blender community. With that quality BGE can run the models for Epic.

Blender itself doesn’t support texture splatting, and you can’t write your own shaders.
See http://www.yofrankie.org/tutorial-texture-splatting and blender has support from the GLSL since version 2.31 and you can you write material shader and Space Screens shaders.

All we know the problems in BGE, and come here and criticize her with this desire is very easy but i believe I speak for everyone when I say that this is not the spirit of community. If you want to create an engine AAA as Cryengine 2 I hope that you do, and if you make it free I will be the first to use. but if you is the bester programmer of the world with talk why you don´t help to developer the BGE?

Edit: The UglyMike copy me! and post frist xD