Despite the unfair underestimation BGE has gotten, I plan to make more or less complete games with it. This means I’ll want them to be playable without a Blender installation, and for this I of course use the “Save As Game Engine Runtime” addon. There’s just one problem with this addon though: Cross platform support.
How do you export both Windows and Linux (possibly also Mac) versions of your Blender game, from a machine where you only have one of these platforms available? Is there a generic BGE framework or runtime that includes binaries for all systems?
Also, can a BGE game be exported with all its dependencies? So users never get errors like “system wide Python installation not found” on any platform, and it’s guaranteed to run out of the box for everyone.
Nice… that’s exactly what I was hoping for! Will it be available in Blender 2.72, or a version later than that? If not, will the addon be separately available for 2.72 as an installable plugin?
Also, the wiki states that to publish for all platforms, you need to include the binaries for those platforms manually. But it doesn’t link to them apparently. Where do I download and find the full binary set?
Ah, I understand. So I download the zip / tar.gz of Blender for all platforms, then extract the necessary files from each? Which are those files however? Just the blender_player binaries, or also a few other libraries or directories?
^ The add-on downloads the players automatically. If you use it, you just have to learn the settings and options necessary to work with it, not download anything additionally yourself.
For Windows, it should probably give you the blenderplayer and the DLL files; for Linux and Mac, it’ll probably be the blenderplayer executables. Packaging the games into a zip file’s necessary if you don’t want to deal with setting the execution bit on Linux (very easy to do, from GUI or from console, but you don’t have to do it if you package your game into a zip file).
Good to know, thank you for the info. I hope we’ll see this in 2.72, if not let me know where to download the addon to install it manually. I’ll probably try it a bit later myself, and post here if I have more questions.
I assume that means I shall expect it for 2.72? Will wait till then in that case… since this version is hopefully not far off, and I need some of its new features either way (such as the new mouse look actuator which is finally happening).
Besides, you can download and install my patch, which has a better interface, but it probably will never be implemented because moguri never answers me. https://developer.blender.org/D746
