Hi all. What do you think, the Blender Foundation, should be focused on in 2013. Do you agree it would be time for an other game project since the first one was made with Blender 2.49 (maybe even older then that) Do you think it would be worth developing the game engine when there are already other fine ones out there? (UDK 99$ for indie license, Unity free/1500$) Lets not forget others who are using the BGE like Thorworks MassiveEngine.
What about the simple fact that the game logic/dynamics could use a massive update. Don’t you agree!! What about a crowd generator, a rag doll simulator.
Blender is open source and free, any commercial or payed software will not be included. I believe it is well worth developing the current game engine as considering the nature of the project, it is both logical and convenient to do so.
I’d love to see a project that improves on the content creation tools for game engines - sculpting, texturing, retopology, baking, export. Pretty much everybody else would benefit from this too. But the BGE itself? Not so much.
I’d love to see a new Mango game. In the last few months the BGE has grown in the forums a lot. Project harmony phase 1 is complete and phase 2 is in the making. The BGE just needs more developers. Haidme is making a robot game that will easily compete with Yo Frankie, so that’ll be interesting.
As Sago said, the next project after Mango is project Gooseberry (a feature length animated film), judging from Tons last statement on the BGE, while he has no problem with the idea of further developing the game engine, he doesn’t seem to like the idea of another game project, don’t count on another game project coming from the BF anytime soon.
I(and another 2 people) am working on commercial project that should be completed in September/December 2012 and I hope we sell a few dozens of copies :D. But it would be great if there would be other ways to draw developers attention to BGE… maybe collect some money and give them to developer who makes some specific feature. But im getting too offtopic I guess
I don’t really see an open game project as an entirely new direction because the BGE is already a major part of Blender. The last tim one would’ve seen the BGE as an entirely new direction would be well before Blender became open source.
Maybe if the Blender foundation had the money, they could also work on the official game that follows the same storyline and plot of project Gooseberry. You watched the movie, now you can play the game.
I didn’t mean to imply the BGE was a new direction. I meant, rather than pushing Blender into a new area like Mango is doing with VFX, the next project should stick within the current feature set of Blender and revisit the rough edges in existing areas. Modeling, Sculpting, Texture Paint, Simulation stuff - Blender does okay in these areas, but the workflow could be smoothed out quite a bit across the board as far as production goes.
I wouldn’t mind a game, since I think it could still focus on the targets I care about. Only bad side about games versus movies is you can’t throw a game on YouTube.
By necessity, Blender’s “current” feature set is always improved through practical projects such as Mango, regardless of whether or not a new area is pushed.
I’d like to throw my opinion in here, as well. I would personally really like to see improvements made to the BGE, which would probably be because of a game project (and so, I personally support the idea). In my opinion, I think that it would really bring attention to Blender, as the BGE, even in its current state, sits as one of the most unique engines in existence. No other engine has a similar workflow.
EDIT: I agree with xrg in that rather than adding new features, it’s best to polish the ones that are in need of polishing the most. Many parts of Blender, like modeling and UV animation, work fine to me. The game engine’s pretty much the least-developed part of Blender, and I think that working on it would be a good idea. It could attract more modelers (game modelers) to Blender.