When few years ago I started to study blender and especially the game engine, I was really excited. I read and saw and tested all the nice stuff we would be getting with candy branch. However now it seems that the development has been going on real slow or even completely halted for now. So basically we are lacking developers.
While at its’ current state game engine is very capable for even commercial game production, I must say I am little worried of how the game engine portion of Blender is steadily falling behind.
I know it is not easy to be in the minority group when looking the Blender development as a whole. What should or could we do as a community? What does the Blender Foundation think about the current state of game engine, do they want to allocate any resources for game engine developing (Blender development fund)?
This is my personal humble opinion, but instead of crying out for more “crysis” features, we should get those bugs fixed first and (then) get those features which we saw in Candy branch implemented in.
I do hope this doesn’t sound too much like a “ranting post”, just wished to share my thoughts and maybe get some kind of a discussion going on if anyone wishes so.
Yeah, this is sad… Developement seems to be fairly slow.
But I am looking forward what this year summer of code will bring!
In my opinion blender doesn’t need awesome shader goodies. It needs polishing! Improvements in publishing games. Also mobile device support. You can create great looking visuals. Now we need better performance and better publishing features! If those two points are in, the userbase will grow! I will bet!
I agree with you both. I think that polishing, speed improvements, and other things to help push FPS and compatibility up would be nice. Some things, like faster Python execution, should be possible sometime in the future should an acceptable JIT compiler or another “speed-up library” (for lack of a better term) is made available for Python 3. That’s something that could help both BGE and normal Blender users, so it might be higher on the priority list / easier to ask members of the Blender Foundation to look into than pure BGE fixes. Also, I heard from Moguri that there are a few prospective GSoC projects concerning the BGE, so hopefully some will be selected.
Now, new features are also very welcome. For example, it would be nice of Mokazon and martinsh to work on merging / asking to merge the parts of their branch to add area lights into trunk, since they are as far as I could tell, close to being finished.
Just speed , at the moment you can create a game with good visuals and logic ,but it just needs to be faster .
Performance is ,what I guess …all want !
However ,a better post FX system would be nice too (the downsampling).
As for logic ,python does pretty well,and it is possible to finish a game with its current state .
It is really interesting how nobody (devs) is interested in BGE , seems like all keep working on Cycles and Sculpting.
Some say that the Candy branch is dead, but are you aware that Martinsh has been posting regularly on his blog since the branch started? What you might have missed is how he decided to not only develop features, but also develop a game to focus on how the features should work. This is the game: http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?283415-RGP-Racing-Game-Project-(working-title)
However he said that he will be busy from February until summer so soon he should continue. If you look at this blog you see that he has been very consistent in coming up with new stuff, and since he is doing this on his spare time the rate of development is what it is. But I think people are somewhat impatient. Mokazon is working on his voxel engine, and Martinsh is continuing with Candy but through a game. So they are still working.
One of the main blender developers wrote something about bringing the recently added features into the bge as one of the goals for version 2.7.
It was written in one of the developer meeting reports on blendernation a while ago.
Last I’ve seen, Moguri is continuing to do BGE work when he has time and Kupoman is still (slowly but surely), working on BGE harmony phase 2 (which I would note that they may soon have more time simply because of Summer).
Dfelinto has also committed now and then, but not too often, HG1 and Agoose has patches and bugfixes ready to be reviewed, and one of the prospective GSoC projects is allowing the use of the compositor with the BGE.
