As the BGE is now gone for a while and no interactive mode is in sight (right?), I’d like to leave some thoughts here. If you have spent long enough here in this forum, you might be are aware that catching up with Unity or Unreal as a Game Engine is a bit unrealistic. In my opinion, the key strengths (at least for me) of the BGE have always been:
Full integration into Blender (one tool to learn)
Fast start-up times
Python (and its extensibility)
Low barrier of entry (Logic Bricks)
Cost (=0)
Bullet Physics (w. Debug Visualization)
Looking back, I spent most of the time playing around with Bullet Physics to various extent, which was mainly possible due to the nicely exposed UI elements and the debug visualization for it.
When I had a look what’s out there I came across pyBullet today, which is also nice, but will never look as shiny as EEVEE does. I just made the pyBullet racecar demo run today - this is something you can build with it:
I think/wish, that the interactive mode ends up being like an educational physics playground with awesome look. Maybe it has its place also somewhere in this engineering/simulation/robotics world like pyBullet or similar frameworks with distributed “multiplayer” execution and some plotting capabilities, but with the lowest barrier of entry possible.
Do you guys think this is realistic? Or does everyone just wants to make the next AAA (!) Shooter or Multiplayer Online Game here
As you are advertising the UPBGE activities a lot, I am aware of this already. It’s great, no doubt about that! And your perseverance is remarkble.
But I am looking at it not from the Hobbyist perspective at the moment. See, back in the days where BGE was still part of Blender, it would have been justified to recommend it as - for example - in-house development tool because of the above mentioned bullet points and as it’s part of this big Open Source project with millions of users, giving some kind of long-term perspective of maintenance.
With UPBGE - at least to my knowledge - the development seems very dynamic and unclear to me.
Will it be merged to 2.8+ at some point?
Will it live side-by-side?
Is it stable enough for productive use?
Maybe you can tell. That’s why I am interested in the future of the official interactive part of Blender, hoping to spark some discussion here.
0.2.5 (legacy) will have 0.2.5->0.2.99 to continue to grow
upbge_eevee branch is becoming upbge 0.3.0 project
Loki and youle are working on it now, one major hurdle was solved yesterday
(export standalone.exe has bpy)
we use everything built into blender now in realtime, we are also looking at acceleration structures for armatures for legacy and for 0.3.0
basically interactive mode and upbge will live side by side some day if it ever shows up.
we stay separated,
this way we absorb our own bug reports / filter noise for bf also.
about stability - It’s as stable as eevee, some materials in eevee were crashy for me but may be fixed in current master add shader(transparent, emit)
it looks like hypersomniac may have patched that though.
Again, I don’t see my experimental branch as something else than experimental. It was originally meant to be a “transition” waiting for interactive mode -> the official project. It is not me who edited the upbge project page with upbge “0.3.0”. I personally don’t plan to make a published fork of my branch with a website, releases… If Lordloki (or/and other volounteers) wants to do that in the next years, it’s cool, but it is not my initiative. About armatures, there’s no work i’m aware about currently, the code used for the engine is directly the blender code based on the depsgraph. Almost everything depends on blender code in this branch, and I personally don’t plan to change that because it simplifies the code. All the credits must go to blender developers who are doing an amazing work with 2.8 development.
I would like to say that, what limits the tool is the user. Not the opposite.
Generally speaking we want to drive a Maserati to buy bread and go to work but we have a bike. Dude the bike can take you there and it’s good workout for you. You hardly use all features of the bike.
I don’t know you and you background, I speak for myself. But I don’t use many features of blender bécasse I learned all I know by myself and watching videos. And I consider myself to be in middle ground between begginer and pro.
Sorry, I’m new to all of this, even though I know about Interactive Mode - what’s the difference between that and UPBGE? And Armory3D and Godot?
Which of these exports to the web? (I know Armory3D does…)
I don’t think AAA is for blender atm, what the Engine needs is a good long Archive list of fun made games to play be4 people can come back and polish the engine to Unreal Engine 4’s Level for UPBGE’s future 2.80+ release builds!!!
(I keep telling people not to use the GE for commercial purposes the engine is not perfect yet, as a community we need to make more Free games and impress future devs to come and join in to improve the engine’s development, that’s the exact reason why the Blender Foundation removed the Game Engine… People focus too much on money instead of getting a Global team of devs to come help fix a piece of software that could be made for commercial purposes like Unreal Engine 4)
The thing is if people wanna make money they should go n use a piece of software that is already well established and where the licensing caters to your overall goal for yr project.
My very unprofessional assessment is the best way to make money involves milking it out of people through the mobile hellscape. 30 gems only $5.99, pay cash to open this treasure chest NOW!
Or wait… approx 24 hours and 39 minutes :B
Free open source games is modders paradise. It’d be nice to exploit that potential some more.
Seems doable! just make sure yr licensing is all sorted and all the copyright stuff so that they don’t pick on yr game but otherwise its all doable and achievable!
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