Newest Apricot build, virtually every game made before 2.46 crashes.

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Anyone have this problem?

Not only do the multitexture materials show black in the 3D viewport, but when you try to play a game I made before 2.46 or Apricot, Blender crashes.

This is a terrible thing, if not fixed it shows we can’t continue games made in earlier official versions of Blender, you have to make every game designed for the newest builds.

In the Apricot builds, the BGE is now about commercial quality for new games made with that version, but for older games is now downgraded to broken.

2

Humpf! any other bad news about apricot? I bet they wont even bother working on the blender player and will only give the blend file and say: go download this apricot build run the blend file press “p” and have fun!

3

Humpf! any other bad news about apricot?

Not that I know of, 2.47 at least is really solid, if you have the face sorting bug with opaque faces, just untick Z-transp.

Brecht still hasn’t gotton around to displaying text in GLSL mode in the 3D view, it could be something with the Apricot branch, wondering if (the crashing of older games and Black multitexture materials) it’ll be fixed when it goes into Trunk.

4

And that annoying bug that broke game playing in the viewport for me. Annoying to have to restart blender every now and then just to test games.

5

Just open old game files in 2.46 save it, and open in apricot =D

6

I have some good news, with the first part of the merge of the Apricot branch into trunk old games can be played again, but Blender materials show as black.

Someone should send the message to Ben the Blender material display in the 3D viewport needs fixing. Even though it should’ve been made obsolete by GLSL, it’s still needed for large complex games with long draw distances.

7

I say screw backwards compatibility if it is what’s needed to move ahead.
Just finish the game in the version you made it with or port it over.
But I guess we’ll see what happens.

8

2.47 apricot crashed on me in my 2.46 game as well. I dumped it and went back to 2.46.

9

i wonder if append scene would solve the problem , append a 2.46 scene into a 2.47 blend .

10

I tried that and it didn’t work.

Anyhoo, the first SVN after merging of part of the Apricot branch has me being able to play my games without crashing again. And making racetracks on hilly terrain is quite easy now because of the shrinkwrap modifier.

11

Quoted for agreement.

12

i hate .blend file format, i hate it

13

I can see one reason to stick with regular Blender materials sometimes, in one of my games when I turn GLSL on, it lags like heck on my powerful GPU, the older method allows me to have complex geometry with long draw distances.

14

I can see one reason to stick with regular Blender materials sometimes, in one of my games when I turn GLSL on, it lags like heck on my powerful GPU, the older method allows me to have complex geometry with long draw distances.
the reason for this is that you are using a GLSL pixel shader to draw something far off in the distance… in other words it’s wasting resources to use GLSL shader to do this.

To make it faster you will have to setup a LOD system and use GLSL materials with Specular turned off… normal mapping turned off…etc. for the objects in the far off distance.

It would be nice to have GLSL vertex shaded button or a button to use only vertex lighting with the GLSL shaders… this would speed things up by a huge amount. Hmmm

15

I found out what was causing the slowdown, an unused layer with a gazillion lamps, I don’t know why a non-visible layer was affecting FPS but I didn’t need it, deleted it, and runs quite smooth now. I have started to port 2 of the game prototypes to GLSL, and adding normal maps and at times neat lighting.

16

Any crashes with old .blend files are bugs, please report them in the tracker with an attached file and information on your graphics card and operating system, since I’m not having this problem.

It is very unlikely that this bug would be related to the .blend file format.

17

I doubt that would actually help, Blender does nearly all computations per pixel, so objects far away also take up less pixels and render faster. In fact per vertex shading would help for nearby objects and make far away objects render slower.

18

yes it is xD the sdna stuff sometimes fails and i have to use appending to solve weird obscure bugs. also i dont like the fact that i cant delete datablocks that still have users, there should be an option to unlink a datablock from all the users and delete it in one step (i should check if its possible with python)

19

Add Transparency has stopped working AGAIN since 15939, So I haven’t been using any newer builds. A temporary fix that works for me is to make a new scene and ctrl-l every object individually into the new scene, testing and saving after each move. This only works sometimes though…

20

You could try 2.46 Apricot if you’d like. It did work for my 246 games.
But 247 Apricot also does, maybe because I already have a fixed version? (September 1 or August 30-31)