Hi I recently found out I cannot use cry engine to present my project on any crowd funding site, not kickstarter, not a video or screenshot, nothing.
So I’m pretty bummed out and was wondering how good blender game engine is?
Is it all realtime and have many features that cry engine 3 has?
I do not wish to use udk or unity because of the long light baking, thats why I prefer’d CE.
But I need to show my enviornment and characters, not really gameplay, and I need to get as similar result as I can to CE
Also what about outdoor enviornments? I have seen some bad videos even worse lighting than unity but wanted to know the true potential.
you can do with BGE more than any engine I’ve seen. You have control over pretty much everything with python and all the editor windows. In terms of graphics capability, yes you can have advanced lighting, multiple GLSL shaders and screen shaders. The thing is, there arent many good built in shaders, there arent built in lighting setups, there arent built in things (UDK has tons of built in things, but sometimes it feels more like you’re modding, and not making a game). You have to set it up yourself, which also gives your more control over it. The only place where you’ll run into issues is speed. BGE is a little bit slower than most engines currently (partly because it doesnt automatically do LoD or such optimization). You have to make sure everything is optimized and program LoD yourself.
Hey Mokoazon,
I defer to your greater experience here, but isn’t calling the BGE “a little bit slower” than Cryenine 3 and UDK quite an understatement? I mean, sure, if people created their own culling / LOD stuff from scratch via python, it would be faster than we usually see, but last time I tried it the renderer seemed way slower, not to mention logic and message sending seeming to eat up a good chunk of CPU power. I imagine that running a lot of stuff through python instead of C++ would slow things down quite a bit, too.
I’ll grant I’m not exactly a BGE power user, but I know enough to optimize the heck out of my meshes, textures, rigs etc. and avoid the real beginner mistakes. Maybe things have changed a lot since I last tried (there certainly seems to be a lot of cool stuff going on). I say this not to tell you you’re wrong (it’s more likely me that’s wrong), but every comparison I’ve ever read, and the experience I have had seems to suggest that the BGE is awesome for getting basic games going quickly, but that it has quite a few bugs and speed bottle-necks, relative to just about any commercial platform (and even some FOSS ones like Dark Places, Ogre etc, even if they’re not exactly apples and apples)…
Is this no longer the case, or did the BGE get (even more) awesome when I wasn’t looking?
When you optimize your game a ton, as much as in commercial engines have by default, you will see major speed increases. Even with this increases, the game may still run slower than the commercial engines, but it wont be a drastic difference. There are some exceptions to this however with BGE where there are major slowness problems, such as: Lots of objects (I believe somebody was working on this…?), many armatures, and multiple lights (deferred rendering should improve this significantly). I’m going to be making a graphics demo and optimizing it to see how much we can push BGE to do, and we’ll see how much slower it goes when compared to a commercial engine version.
I’m very very much looking forward to this! It would be really cool if you recreated the default test scene in UDK. The one with the ruined temple in the jungle. I would scream like a little girl seeing this in bge.
I typically look at this problem as such:
If you can afford to buy a commercial license for a commercial engine, you can afford to complain about the BGE’s capabilities.
No engine is perfect, nor without difficulty. The BGE outweighs some of its performance inferiority through simplicity and workflow. It’s best if you look around the internet for projects already using BGE, and then judge for yourself.
@agoose - Not sure if that was intended for me or the OP. Personally I love the BGE to bits, and posted not to complain about it, but for two reasons:
What Mokazon was saying seemed to suggest the BGE is much better than my understanding of it. If that’s so (as it seems to be), then I’m a very happy camper and wanted to know! If it isn’t so, I wanted to make sure the OP wasn’t getting an exaggerated idea of it’s capabilities. That never works out well for anyone.
Anyway, I’m sure good things are on the horizon (can’t wait to learn HIVE and play around with it!). Looking forward to seeing what the BGE is really capable of.
@ Mokazon - Anyway, thanks for clearing that up. Listing what the three main things to be worked around are, is also very helpful (for example, knowing about the object limit, maybe I’ll try joining all static background objects into one…). I would also love to see some kind of tech demo that shows what’s really possible, along with an explanation of how.
I really feel like the BGE is capable of far more than we’ve seen out of it so far (jut hints like Super Blender Galaxy, Krum, MartinSH’s stuff etc). Just hammering out some of those last optimizations you mentioned and getting some really competent artists collaborating together for a while would really turn out something that would surprise everyone, I’m sure.
Can I ask about the armatures thing: is that a number of armatures, or a number of bones thing mainly? For example, do you think the BGE would handle many simple armatures better, or few more complex ones?
I recently did a test with 56 characters, each with 20 bones and got around 49 FPS (~25-28% Animation in the profiler), which is pretty good in my opinion. In truth, you would probably not run an animation every game frame for every object. You’d probably rather use armatures with lower bone counts and/or play animations less often for objects further away (i.e. play the animation at 30 FPS by stopping it every other frame). You could also play animations that drive less channels. I tried deleting all but a single channel for the playing animation, and Animations dropped to 7-8%. It was able to run at 60 FPS then, I believe. Most of the drain was on the Rasterizer.
And yeah, I think that’s about right that most of the BGE running slowly is not optimizing things. If you just optimize the things that you really should optimize in more ‘advanced’ game engines, I think you’d get pretty nice speeds.
i was making cryblend, but in the end i started feeling like i wasnt making enough progress in my own goals,
working with the bge seems to be more beneficial as far as the support,ability to change/fix things, overall speed in content creation/testing…
i am working on internal glsl shaders that are accessed through normal texture/material setup eg:
vertex deform setup in the material properties
parallax setup in the texture properties…
the resons to go with the bge if you have the will go on and on…
Do note that Kupoman’s project is a bit closer to the more advanced Inferred lighting technique, it’s a little slower, but it’s able to handle full support for transparent objects (which is a major challenge in an deferred lighting system.)
Ah so we do not have deferred rendering / GI or capability to create something like this in realtime with BGE?
What tools can I use to get realtime gpu renders like cry engine 3 is capable of?
Ah so we do not have deferred rendering / GI or capability to create something like this in realtime with BGE?
What tools can I use to get realtime gpu renders like cry engine 3 is capable of?
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That screen you are posting is first of all from Cryengine 2, and second it takes 2-3 seconds to render one frame. Thats one of the cool things with Cryengine that you can push it to become more of a render engine than game engine. But it depends what you need the engine for.
I am personally investigating using BGE instead of Cryengine 3 because cryengine has some serious limitations in rendering interiors with correct lighting. My interest is to make walkthroughs and real time Archviz, and since it seems that I need to bake the ambient occlusion of my models in blender before I export to cryengine I am looking into if not it would be easier to use blender right away.
Advantages with BGE as I see it:
More control with python
Better interior lighting possibilities with arealights in the Candy branch
Baking possibilities inside the same software. AO especially.
Alot of resources in the community.
Easier to fake effects
Not having to deal with layers of built in things I do not need, as footsteps, characters, HUD and such in Cryengine.
Disadvantages
Realtime shadows does not seem to be very advanced
At the moment having to use shaders in python scripts, that cannot use all the lights and such. Will be nice to see them built in in Blender Candy Branch.
Lack of built in features, as Day/Night cycles and other things you find in UDK and CE3.
All the cool features giving BGE a new edge is still in development and can always be improved (Especially the Candy Branch that will build in features that are already available in raw python code), in 1-2 years I think BGE will be a serious game suite with built in features just as UDK and Cryengine if development continous as it does today. The downside with Open-Source development is that you are dependent on a few ingenious people that are donating their time, and if they stop things are left undone, as BlenderCAD for example.
The most important thing and the best thing with BGE is that you should share everything you do so that you might help other people develop further. That is the big strength that the community is really boosting peoples progress. Unlike closed source communities as with UDK and CE3, Blender users are not competitors.
At the moment I am getting very nice results, I am testing outdoor environments that will be backgrounds for my interiors. I am confident that the interiors will be easier to light properly than in Cryengine 3.
