“A word of warning, before you start any big or serious project with the Blender Game Engine, you should note that it is currently not very supported and that there are plans for its retargeting and refactoring that, in the very least, will break compatibility. For further information, you should get in touch with the developers via mailing list or IRC and read the development roadmap.” https://www.blender.org/manual/game_engine/introduction.html
NOTE: I don’t fully understand it; I’m still an amateur.
My concern is: if I start learning BGE today, and then things are suddenly different or discontinued and unsupported months later, then I have learned so much for almost nothing
I’d like to make games for Linux, Windows, Android, maybe Mac and iOS, and if possible, Firefox Phone OS. I have my reasons.
Thanks,
sdhy.
More details if it’s not too long to read:
Does my game have to sell? Hmm… I still have a loan to pay, so donations would be nice. It doesn’t have to be professionally accepted, assuming my main career path goes as planned. I heard Blender games are… looked down upon??
The main things I’d want in a game engine:
easy enough to learn
i.e. I can deal with “if this happens, then do that.”, but maybe not typing code from scratch, making sure there’s a semi-colon in the right place
cartoon graphics (or simply put, it looks like how it does in Blender)
easy to import and use Blender characters
FREE
no copyright tm legal traps.
If I somehow make money off of making games, I’ll pay someone a cut they deserve. I just don’t wanna get unexpectedly screwed somehow. I dunno. I saw the words “copyright trap” on these forums. That’s why I like the sound of open source.
ethical e.g. not made by a company that evades taxes, rips off their employees, etc. Yeah, I think of these things.
Learn it. Learn blender, CE5, UE4, and unity. If you just start out learning BGE, and for some reason want to switch over to another engine, the basic concepts are the same. Learning about physics, culling, scripting, a hundred other things… it for the most part all pours over into other engines. You will gain valuable experience starting with the BGE. And no, the BGE basically never changes. UPBGE is the biggest change the BGE, but it is a fork and not officially from Blender Foundation. It’s still much better, but for some reason UPBGE fucks up on normal python and glsl scripts that work fine in BGE. No idea why.
The only real difference between BGE and other engines are things like volumetrics, layout, GI, world scale SSAO, making blendspaces/putting together animations and running them, and of course- C/C++ as opposed to python. There is only a bit a of a learning curve from engine to engine. The only huge learning curve is learning how to use ANY engine at first.
It’s a good engine. You should learn it whether you expect to stick with it or not. Best case and worst case scenario is you switch to another program and use what you learned with BGE to develop with it.
Something which I tend to do (note that I am definatly not a professinal in this field) is make models and animations in blender and export them to Unity. also note if you do this, blender has ‘z’ as up axis and unity has ‘y’ as up axis so everything you import into Unity will be rotated.
yes you should, is a great engine, maybe not as powerfull as Unity and UE, but i dont think you are trying to make the next CoD, so, yeah, easy to learn, easy scripting language to learn (python), and its the only one All-In Engine. You can animate, model, texture, in the same viewport you are developing your game. in other engines you have to get 3rd parties for this things.
Thanks, Smoliterno. Yeah, having everything in the same program sounds really convenient to me. If blender’s the only one that does this, then I’ll probably stick with Blender.
Yeah, you guessed right, I’m not making the next CoD. Though I’m curious: what makes Unity or UE more “powerful”? If there’s a short and easy-to-understand answer.
Oh and don’t get me wrong- UPBGE is the shit compared to BGE. But you know, volunteer developers can’t fix that many bugs reported by who knows how many people. And yes. For instance, blender has it’s rotational axis however it is, Z up, w/e in front. UE4 is something else but you get it. When exporting an object from blender via FBX, you just make sure that the origin of the object is at xyz 0,0,0, and then in the export options on the left side, you can choose "x+ is front, z - is up, z + is up,) etc… Or, if UE4’s “front” is x+, just rotate you models so that whatever side you want the front to be is facing x+. I made it sound complicated I’m sure, but it’s really nothing. Just rotate model, and apply all transformations (scale, rot, location) and export.
@sdhy
If you want to create a kind of stylish or anime/telltale game, then youll have no problem. The bge material editor supports it. Also there are a lot of tuts and examples too. Yes you can even sell the game, even if its made with a gpl software. I would go with the fork of the engine - Upbge, cos its optimized and bug fixed, and if you find any bug you could report it so that it gets fixed.
BGE is really nice in the way that you don’t need to export assets, its also great for starting out, best of all the community here will help you when you run into problems and most will provide feedback on your project for ways to improve. Once you get into a bit of code you will understand the ‘general’ idea for how a game is put together and this way of thinking can be transferred to different engines afterwards.
@Akira_San, what’s the difference between the two pics? The fps? I didn’t even know you could get 200 fps. I’m a complete noob to the computer technical side of game design.
I’m gonna go with BGE for now (and maybe UPBGE if I need it).
If I need to / want to switch game engines, I’ll figure out how to export models appropriately.
So I have to learn code? Hmm… Could be challenging.
Dont worry about coding, at least in the BGE, Python has a pretty easy syntax, you should give some time to it, but since are logic states you get on the right track pretty fast. Then you just got to start going trough the bge python to see what you need to achcive in game and how to call it, but once you´ve learned the sintax is pretty much practice and paying atention to the console for error checking.
If you are completely new to python I recommend the free python course on codeacademy.com so you can get your head around syntax.
Then after that tutorialsforblender3d.com has lots of great resources especially in the python section with little snippets and descriptions describing what each function does.
@Thatimster, thanks, but I use a laptop trackpad… I have a USB mouse, and it works, but is there a way to get those bar-and-scroll-window-buttons at the side and bottom? See screenshot, please. I’m using the latest version of Blender as of Jan 1, 2017.
And thanks for the links! Free class in python is sure gonna help!
@sdhy
Go to the user preferences -> input and press emulate 3 button mouse. Maybe that will help, but you still need to learn the interface. Press Alt + LMB to pan the screen. Use the middle mouse cycle the zoom too.
@Akira_San, what’s the difference between the two pics? The fps? I didn’t even know you could get 200 fps. I’m a complete noob to the computer technical side of game design.
I’m gonna go with BGE for now (and maybe UPBGE if I need it).
If I need to / want to switch game engines, I’ll figure out how to export models appropriately.
In the game render settings you have some options, that you could see what the do in the bge docs.
I forgot, you can look at the UpBge docs in here -> https://doc.upbge.org/releases.php and see whats new. Upbge dont require exporting models cos its blender.
What game do you want to make?
I find Unreal and Cry super overkill for indie game developers.
If you want to use Blender, or you’re really looking for a game engine with strong integration with modelling, animating and level designing, I suggest using UPBGE or BDX. If integration isn’t a huge deal, go with Godot, Gamemaker or even Unity.
The only advantage of using BGE (UPBGE or otherwise), is the strong integration with Blender - and that’s pretty much it. Every other engine can do what BGE does, and probably even better. That being said, keep in mind that the integration part is extremely powerful - being able to modify code, models, textures and animations on the fly is amazing for rapid prototyping, which is where you’ll spend at least 50% of your development time.
For a developer like youself starting out, it really does not matter what engine you learn first - it’s all pretty trivial. Just pick one you find easy to make a game in, and keep going until you want to explore more options or hit an insurmountable wall that is specific to the engine.
and its free.
