Blender is my first try with a GE and i hav to say i am very satisfied. it is simple to use and learn, and i developed a small game within a few weeks. but i was wondering, what is so different about blender from other GEs? i have heard of crystal space and some others, but what features make blender the best or not the best?
other game engines support real time shadowing, and are more/ less efesint at drawing ploys.
so, basically it processes the polys better? or it can handle more?
Yeah, pretty much. Blender has a pretty good GE, but its not as developed and powerful as many others(it doesnt preogress near as fast as many of blender’s other areas).
And since Imm pretty sure you can use them together(another compatable GE is Ogre), you really just use whichever you’d like.
Blender’s GE is atm, a disregarded piece of garbage, but we have been getting some improvements… there’s much more to this than graphics.
Hahaha, well put My Fuzzy Brother. Its true…
But graphics are a fairly big difference, though of course there are a few physics differences as far as I know…
note that ogre is not a GE its a real time rendering engine and so is CS,
CS just has some additional plug-in’s and I/O stuff that makes it capable of being used as a game engine… 
blender has a GE in it, but its rendering engine is weak, witch though could be cured with a good exporter plug-in such as the one developed for use with ogre… for an example…
CS is a complete game engine but Ogre is just a real time rendering engine.
Crystal Space is basically a full featured game engine with logic systems, powerful rendering, plugin system, … which makes it a beast of an engine. Something professionals use. Whereas the blender game engine is very lightweight and now getting old.
Yea! check out Crystal Core, it is a nice demo.
CS has a great plugin for blender, you can make your entire game from inside blennder just like the Blender game engine… only diffrence is that you have to wait a few extra seconds (minuets of you have lots of lightmaps to bake)
It really is a dream come true! It has everything I want in a game engine. After Apricot we are getting a bunch of new features too like HDR lighting!!
The terrain system is amazing, you can have lots of foliage, and no lag!
You dont have to even have a hardware accelerated graphics card, You can have Ascii art library do all the rendering for you! (more of a gimmick than anything! but is pretty cool )
Also you are not just stuck with python script like the BGE, you actually can take your C++ and compile it with the engine itself! There are bindings for other languages too.
Irrlicht is a worthy engine to look at too, they have done a lot of work for you. Real time shadows are just a mouse click away! Lots of common shaders are buildt for you as well like paralax, normal bumpmap, and alpha masking. My only complaint about Irrlicht is that you have to Export everything, import them into an editor, then build to see your artwork in game, Crystal space is not like this
We have had a few programmers playing with the BGE lately, I am really hoping someone will go back and fix everything that was ruined between 2.42a and 2.44 (mainly the near sensor, and a few other small bugs)
Someone has been even trying to get OGRE integrated into the BGE recently .
As far as just using Ogre over CS or Irrlicht, I really dont recommend it, the developers are rude as hell to new people. it is just a rendering engine anyways, nothing as robust as crystalspace. You will have to fabricate a lot of things that CS already has made, and tested.
Jorrit and crew have been doing CS for the past 10 years(11?) . they really have a nice system going for them.
I wish CELstart, and the Blend2Crystal plugin came with the default scripts in the main blender download.
I conciser CS as the official external engine for blender.
Blender + CS totally blows away commercial packages like Gamespace. Man I wish I would have known about CS before I wasted money on game space.
I use the BGE for the most part because my game’s dont require much in the way of resources. it is very fast to develop concept games, and prototypes.
so…CS sounds like a really good thing. do i just go to crystalspace.com or something?
where can i download CS?and is it for advanced users or will i pick up on it pretty quick?
actually crystalspace really is a rendering engine, together with CEL(crystal entity layer) it makes up a game engine though, all so note that im just being technical, other than that, indeed, a great project it is!
you can get it from here
i appreciate your time in giving me the link. im hoping it works. thanks again.
Hi!
Here you go…
http://b2cs.delcorp.org/index.php/ArtistInstall
that should let you get the plugin all set up with CELstart…
They are pretty cool about it, they even link you to the exporter manual after your get all set up… from the manual it links to other tutorials too.
If you already know python here are some of the bindings:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/PyCrystal
they also ahve a really cool community on:
irc.freenode.net
#crystalspace
Look in the chat room header for links to the other rooms.
My first day I had shadows working, paralax shaders, and basic mouse and keyboard controls
few days later I had terrains, and portals down.
There is a lot to play with (lots of stuff you will never use, but it is fun to play with anyways)
Here is the main page:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Main_Page
lots of little side projects to examine
Have fun, this is really worth while to learn.
EDIT: Felix beat me to it Thanks Felix
ya, well thanks again to everyone i just downloaded it, so hopefully it works:yes: