Am I right that you could create a game in blender with large textures and a large number of faces/vertices and have a medium frame rate if you have a good computer?
Or is the engine poor when compared to half-lifes source and cannot generate such graphics in real time?
Im confused, all the blender games I have seen so far are low poly and low graphics…Is that just a stage where we are today or could we improve the quality if we wanted?
Graphic? Give to Ervin 5000 $, he to make you Doom 3 graphic. Action now;.
Just now it can’t keep up a good framerate with high poly models and shaders and such, there is the B2CS. It’s a blender to crystal exporter, it can give you good framerates and such.
But my project using that went totally disastrous, since it is glitchy and really hard to use. I dont recommend.
You should wait for OGRE integration, it should give better FPS with nicer shaders and FX’s.
TBH its a bit of both, good graphics require A LOT of time and effort especially for indie developers. (Not to mention talent/experience in the first place).
To take doom3 models as an exmaple they will have a concept artist to come up with a kick-ass looking idea in the first place,a modeller who will produce the high and low polygon models. Then a texture artist who will produce the colour, spec and normal maps. So to produce a game with consistintly good graphics takes a lot of man hours. (And thats just to produce the finished model, its then got to go and be animated, optimised etc)
As such indie games usually have a tradition of being a bit weak on the graphics side of things. (Although im sure they will be one or two exceptions).
Then there’s the render engine which as mentioned with ogre or CS integration should make things easier but will still take a fair bit of work to get the most out of them.
Sorry for the rant but thats pretty much why you dont see a lot of high quality graphics in the games here.
I tested engine performance with simple untextured 30k poly plane mesh. Blender runs it 85 fps and CryEngine (Far Cry) about 850 fps. So in theory CryEngine can draw 10x poly count compared to Blender. Well, Blender is free, CryEngine isn’t.
He, he. Yep.
One of the reasons why the indie game developers mantra is “gameplay, gameplay, gameplay”.
While there are plenty of technical limitations, it largely comes down to talent - there is a difference between “good” graphics and “high poly” graphics. There’s absolutely no reason why a Blender game has to look “bad”, if you take the time to develop a consistant visual style. Good art direction will work within the limits to make something visually appealing, regardless of technology (within reason).
Piran
For me at least, it’s a lack of knowledge. I’ve actually been thinking of creating a Blender graphics demo that would utilize the more high-end features that Blender can use, but my knowledge of GLSL and Python is very limited.
If this knowledge was readily available (maybe I just haven’t found it yet), I might try to create a graphics demo…
I’m also hesitant to try anything really intensive because of the integration of Ogre. I’m afraid that if I make something now, it will have to be converted to a different format or something will need to be changed that requires major changes to my work.
There’s absolutely no reason why a Blender game has to look “bad”, if you take the time to develop a consistent visual style.
Well put mate, the “me and my balloon” (or whatever its called) game is good example of that, as well as club silo to a similar extent. Even games on the snes like chrono trigger still look good IMO.