Was following armory’s development just prior to adobe acquiring Allegorithmic, with an added knock on effect of tipping the scales researching a promising alternative too substances…
Looks like they’ve scaled since then so might as well reacquaint myself with their latest offering.
I voted for UPBGE but I think amory3d is better.
But neither engine solves its real problems. I was lost.
Armory’s problem: no refraction, all kinds of errors. The preview waits for the loading to complete. Up to blender2.93 is supported
The problem with UPBGE: large size, few platforms.
Will armory3d partner with UPBGE? (I look forward to this day)
not sure, but it seems that the creator of Armory came back on it since a few
I choose UPBGE without hesitation… well … not 100% true hahaha…
I made an account here a few years ago, and I truly felt an impulse in this small community to get things moving forward. I was told a bit dryly to “go learn Python” (which I did to some extent) when I proposed that the visual programming system (the nodes and bricks) were a major incentive for beginners, and the tight integration with Blender makes it hard to beat.
I tried armory 3d recently, and it’s nice, but it really sends me far from what I want to do. It all looks trivial when showcasing a cube driven with a cool controller, or a basic scene setup with a few scripts, but if I’m on a tight time budget to work on something I will choose the easiest method, and it’s UPBGE all the way.
I have been fiddling a bit with Godot too in the last few months, and also with Unity. I used to work with the Unreal system before, but the licensing stuff pulled me off, as the constant switching back and forth between programs to make, export/ import assets. And Godot is cute, but I don’t want to spend all my time learning its API and GDscript, which will not serve me anywhere else. Same is true for Haxe.
Making a relatively decent player character and animating it takes time, and same for enemies, deco, terrain, etc. I don’t enjoy looking at text for hours, be it Python or C#, I want things to work and have a visual feedback rapidly so I can fix any problem in a timely fashion, and go to sleep satisfied at the end of the day. I know for many “developers” the code is central to them, yes, but… I’m not blind either, and when I play a game the visuals are what I see first. In this aspect, just the fact that to have water in Armory would require me to get on the code side of things once again was enough to decide it was not ready to spend time on it. Heck, so many basic things come out of the box in other engines with large communities with tons of tutorials and examples, why bother learning yet another workflow, on an unfinished product ?
So if I want to prototype a game, or just make a simple “hit the ball in the maze” thingy, I can do it very easily in UPBGE, and not in any other engine, at least not the way UPBGE allows it. If so few games are made with either Armory or BGE/UPBGE despites both being good entry-level development tools, the problem may not be so much about the tools themselves…
i wonder why Armory did not just reviewed the rendering part of BGE and keep the Python API and bricks as they were … Don’t understand their urges with haxe, iron, krom , kha , … etc etc … looks like a huge patchwork from an outside perspective … makes random people want to run away … oh but I’m sure there’s a good reason for all this
There’s always “good reasons” it only depends on their author’s perspective.
Time has proven me that trying to reinvent a better wheel is a waste of time. So much effort wasted instead of collaborating to an existing endeavour and maintaining its momentum to improve it.
Even for a marginal performance improvement, it’s not worth it. Shaving content and properly managing draw calls will eat that difference easily, so what’s the point…
100% agree. In a desert, a collapsing tree makes no sound. The same way, their “improvements” have effect if there’s nobody to acknowledge it. And if some nerds do, its just to move some cubes on a map and post a video of it on youtube explaining how UE and Unity are doomed.
This said, im still curious of Armory and would like to give another try. I appreciate their effort to maintain a nice project even if I would have prefer them to stick to a less ambitious project (basically upgrading BGE)
Theoretically, enough libraries exist now that you can produce the base of an entirely new software just by tying them together. The potential upside is that much of your work is then outsourced to other dev. teams, but then again you are at the mercy of those projects staying alive. Case in point, why Blender does not have carve booleans anymore.
Though there is the interesting trend of game engine teams going back to favoring in-house solutions to external ones (Unity, Unreal, and Godot for instance are all emphasizing a custom-built physics engine and other custom solutions). That only works if you have the resources though (in which I do not think Armory has at the moment).
Armory supports external, custom physics engines. For instance the Oimo Engine:
Haxe is also able to be used for modifying the Bullet Engine as well:
As well as ammo.js support for web-based physics.
Old engines like Iirlicht and Torque 3d (nice one) are still getting some love, and they’re still relevant after all this time, because lots of people don’t have top computers, and yet represent a significant target market for games made with less “feature-laden” engines (compared to UE / Unity).
Regarding boolean carving: in my experience these are quite prone to generating bad geometry and errors, especially for game content. I used these a lot when I started modeling but not anymore.
Some of what I read here seems to indicate that some people believe that using Blender (as UPBGE does for example) implies being forced to use the GPL license and this is incorrect because the ONLY way one can fall into the GPL license is when you link the blenderplayer with the blend file, that is, forming an executable from these two.
just someone to explain us how to achieve this in upbge 0.25
and we are done with the debate ahah
It would not make any of us able to make a complete game anyway, it’s just another nicer demo but with no HUD, no enemies, no player (we are just a cam here)…
UPBGE is good to get the general feel of an evironment, how separate pieces of a larger project look with one another in a small context, etc. But even Blender has its share of bugs and quirks that add to the time wasted searching for solutions instead of using that precious time on actually making the game and its content.
Half of the upbge manual is made of pages either outdated or showing “To Do” and most examples are total beginner-level, except for the “Python” part. This somewhat shows that in some way Blender is more like an excuse to showcase Python snippets than to try to attract and maintain a community with the idea that making complete games with all these loose parts is possible in a reasonable timeframe.
Anyone can download the Unreal 3 engine SDK for free, for example (it’s small and stable), and use it to make a complete game on a robust and capable engine that has been duly tested and used for pro games, and it comes with full fledged documentation, examples and tutorials, with complete visual scripting, etc. There Blender (with all its caveats) can be used as a content creation tool, and at least the lone guy working on his project will not be constantly stopped by the game engine environment, broken features, bugs or performance issues.
Until there’s a lot coming ahead in terms of software polish and documentation, I don’t see how any of the small engines can attract more than a handful of curious people from time to time, who will eventually move on to something more attractive and promising.
but still, there’s some people/team who achieve to make some nice games with upbge. I do think there’s just a big lack of pragmatic sense in upbge community. First question : why upbge is not shipped with a whole game template ? Basically Mixamo mannequin with fps/3th camera and a bunch of fitted/cleaned animations. Sounds… A bunch of nice materials and some default 2d filters ?.. why everyone has to start everything from scratch everytime. Maybe because that’s precisely the fun part ’ starting creating is fun, finishing it is work '
After reading your text , you could honestly ask to upbge devs why they are wasting their time since UE is better no matter what.
Or you could also ask why people around here are still wasting their time making demos with no game purpose behind ? Because, maybe the problem is not upbge in it self , it’s the people it attracts : people who are not interested in making whole games in the first place would rather play experiencing things on upbge than start doing serious things on UE.
Funny, you will notice its the same thing with Godot … it attracts only the curious … seen any serious project in Godot so far ? No . Only 2d nokia games. Just by watching what is published on Youtube, we would say that upbge community is more serious than Godot community
The advantage of upbge over other game engines is its close integration with Blender, which saves a lot of roundtrips and adjustments between programs to import content. I don’t think anyone here would claim that upbge or armory are production-ready, and that is not just a detail : it’s the whole point.
If people want to learn programming they will go to online resources dedicated to programming, they will not start with learning a game engine API. Like you say, a fun starter kit would help a lot, but I think that in the scope of a small project like upbge this depends more on the community to make it happen than on the developers who work on the engine.
And because these things have no direction since it’s on a voluntary basis, it can be difficult to get the efforts focused on a common goal. If the community starts working on something like this and hits a wall that requires a fix to the engine, or some update breaks everything, some volunteers may easily drop out, etc. I have been involved in such things, and it’s not fun to see months of work being thrown to the garbage because of that.
and why so ?
regarding the video above, you can see that UPBGE 0.25 is enough to make a nice indoor game in the style of the Stanley Parable.
And I would add , its already fine enough. If people complain all the time about “muuuuuh licence” and "muuh no longer support " it’s just because they are just too lazy to drag their ass to make a game in the first place … Proof : they wouldn’t be here to talk for ages about that thing , but on Unreal forums … so …
For me UPBGE is fine enough, the real subject is more about how having the job done … Have a look on the Stanley Parable game, it was made by a single dude. He made everything. Look on the UPGE 0.25 splash screen ‘The future’s end’ . And there’s 5-6 other upbge/bge game that have been done too.
Considering the available manpower to push an UPBGE project to its end , there’s just some choice/directions that have to be taken. That’s it. For example, a GTA is out of question because there’s just too much assets involved. Are you willing to organize a whole library of animations ? Creating huge maps or a map generator ? Compiling, Cleaning 100’s of sound ? Probably not… It seems people are just willing to write some python classes and functions and that’s it. Upbge is not the primary problem.
we are getting per vertex displace in eevee next - this should allow to bake animations for mobs and get really high framerates - ik GPU skinning would be nice some day too.
Back when the BGE still shipped with Blender, there was no doubt you could make good visuals with the heavy use of lightmaps and the video texture module (together with custom GLSL tricks). People would post demo videos and brag about how good the BGE was getting.
The problem though was that it took far more work to set up for a scene compared to the same in commercial solutions. Now you have a lot of engines, even free ones, making big parts of the process automatic (which is a game changer since making changes to a scene is no longer a long process).
Now of course this automatic process should eventually come to UPBGE since the team is integrating Eevee, and Eevee itself will be getting a big upgrade, but do they have the knowledge to adapt Eevee in a way that is suitable for realtime gameplay?
Which automatic process are you referring?
BTW, Eevee is already integrated in UPBGE officially since version 0.3 (and a pair of years before unofficially).
very obviously, “the process” is all the setups that have to be made to have a functional vanilla fps game (or 3th view player game) .
comparing to default BGE 2.79, UPBGE 0.25 has 2 default hemi, a sun, but also some background color setup …maybe some more things i didn’t notice.