Is anyone getting anywhere with Blender - game wise?

Support Basics & Interface
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I’ve had blender installed on my machine for afew months now, never getting any time to practise it. I’m thinking of using the whole program to model/animate and make games…

Has anyone had these ideas or know they can be done? Say your making a game and you start it off with a short movie (say Worms intro’s) … then you bring up a Game Menu screen which is 2d/3d effects… very immersing stuff… then you can go into your game (be it 3d/2d or text!).

I’ve read that it’s lacking stuff like multiplayer support, joystick controls and many other features… I keep finding myself saying ‘download Crystal Space’ or ‘use the quake3/ut2k3 engine’ … but again I need to LEARN the languages… sure it can look great, but I need ideas and time/effort!

I day dream of starting a web site dedicated to Blender, producing help and decent content… but from the games I’ve seen so far don’t look amazing… plus I’ve heard of limits (like blender doesn’t do proper culling etc)…

It may seem like I’m whinging on… but I think it all comes back round to the stupid question of “Should I go for blender?”… which I know the answer… if I take time to learn it… if I purchase the GameKit and downloadable PDF file I can start to learn blender and add in all these extreas myself…

Skyboxes… you know UT? skies that are realistic!! If Blender is open source (it uses C++ aswell doesn’t it? it’s not ALL python surely?) I can change all the functions/buttons/physics etc…

I can’t swim as of yet… but am I just dipping my toes into the cold waters of Blender?

Does anyone really believe that if you put effort in… a good game (not necessarily great graphics)… with decent textures and models can be delivered? Maybe it’s just because I havn’t got a game in mind at the moment… but if blender is open srouce… EVERYTHING can be changed/added (like the multiplayer internet support)…

this would require teaching myself…

I’m going the long way round to explain this…

Is Blender all I need? The Ultimate gaming package… maybe I’ll branch off to another engine when I have a game cropping up… but I can’t seem to get started…

maybe I should buy the gamekits off e-shop? that’ll help!

and in a life’s point of view… is learning anything on the computer worthy at all? are we just wasting our time on entertainment when REAL matters should be looked into … bah!

</mumble>

hip hip!

:Z

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burnhard:
You can talk to other people about making games for Blender in the realtime engine forum… I think this “Questions & Answers” forum is for things that aren’t related to the game-making side of Blender.
Though on the other hand, your comments/questions are pretty general rather than you having specific problems with the Blender game engine.

Anyway, I’ve made some minigames myself in the past. I used Duke Nukem 3D and Unreal. Apparently the framerate of the Blender game engine is quite bad - at least half the framerate of other game engines I think. In newer Unreal engine games there is a matinee maker for making ingame cut-scenes.

“but again I need to LEARN the languages… sure it can look great, but I need ideas and time/effort!”
Blender takes a huge amount of time to learn… I think learning to code in UnrealScript is relatively easy to learn… and you can make the characters quite intelligent fairly easily… (allow them to intelligently navigate around the 3D environment, etc)

I’d say Unreal engine games are the best way to go to start off… you can initially build some levels and use their textures and enemies, etc, then gradually customize everything until it is like how you want it. (add new models, turn it into a racing game or whatever)… but with Blender you’ve got to start from scratch with all your models, advanced AI, etc.

You can’t sell anything you make with Unreal (unless you pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees but it could lead to paying jobs)…

I think you can sell things you make with http://www.genesis3d.com/ or Quake 2… (Quake 2 is also open source I think…) though like most game engines I think you need to learn C and/or C++ to modify things like AI and the gameplay, and those languages are a lot more difficult to learn than UnrealScript. If you use Quake 2 you’ve got to compile the source code yourself and not include any of their copyrighted sounds, textures, etc.

As far as multiplayer support in Blender goes, yes, it is possible to add it, but you’d have to be a really good programmer to make it as good as the multiplayer support in games like Quake 2 and maybe Genesis3D.

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nice reply there… and I have thought about the Unreal approach… such a beautiful gaming engine, making levels was easy too… I never got into UnrealScript, but I guess it was along the lines of C++ which I started to learn basic stuff in… but you could be right, I’m only one person and to get an idea flowing you need to present actual stuff… changing a game from FPS to something like Racing or Puzzle might seem stupid and impossible, but those wonderful lines of code can do alot!

OOP’s with their ‘inside the box’ technique helps… take it piece by piece…

I’ll check out genesis3d… thanks for your help! :stuck_out_tongue:

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burnhard:

“I never got into UnrealScript, but I guess it was along the lines of C++ which I started to learn basic stuff in”

Learning some C++ is like learning some UnrealScript… but to radically modify a game engine to how you want it to be is another matter… with C++ it would be a lot harder to learn.

“changing a game from FPS to something like Racing or Puzzle might seem stupid and impossible, but those wonderful lines of code can do alot!”

Actually it doesn’t take long at all to modify the game to turn it into a very basic racing game or a flight simulator, etc… you just “map” the input commands (up/down/left/right, etc) to changes in the player’s speed, acceleration, rotation, etc, in different ways. And you can just the position of the “camera” and stop it displaying the persons weapon… you can disable weapons. It would take a fairly long time to learn how to use UnrealScript in the first place though, and to make decent levels and vehicles, etc.
Check these out:
http://www.planetunreal.com/unrealracing/
http://www.planetunreal.com/unrealspeed/index.html?
BTW, in UnrealScript, I think you can see the “source code” of everyone else’s mod and what the original game uses (which may be “Postal 2”, etc) so you can learn a lot that way.
Here’s some resources:
http://www.planetunreal.com/hosted/editing.shtml
http://unreal.epicgames.com/
http://www.unrealscript.com/tutorials.php

BTW, you can do things like Tetris, etc… you could make the player have no mesh, then have a camera in the middle of the air, looking down on the board. The keys would control the different Tetris pieces.

http://www.unrealscript.com/tutorials/tut15.html
This is a tutorial I wrote which shows how to have multiple views in Unreal/UT at once… (perhaps it is also possible in Unreal2/UT2003)

Edited to add:

I read the rest of your post - anyway, Genesis3D isn’t as good as the Unreal engine, particularly for outdoor terrain (hills, etc), and I think you need to learn advanced C++ to modify the code at all…
This should get you started - it has tutorials on Genesis3D and how to make high quality games
http://members.tripod.com/gdata010/tutorials.htm

For a long list of lots of gaming-type engines see:
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
Many are free but many are also very old.

http://crystal.sourceforge.net/drupal/node.php?title=Features
I had a look at crystal space’s features - it seems about as advanced as the latest unreal engine… and it apparently can have curved surfaces too (like Quake3 Arena). It has basic network support but not internet support though… (I think)
I’m not sure how fast it runs though… it can support scripting - so that it is easier to create complex games for non-hardcore programmers.