Switching from VRML to Blender Game Engine

Hi,

There seems to be much more going on in the Blender forums than VRML these days.

I’m thinking of switching from VRML to Blender as I hear it has a proper physics engine.

But I have a few questions.

I’ve been a bit disappointed with the demos I’ve downloaded.
They seem to have low frame rates for quite small scenes (I follow the recommended screen settings)
Is there a demo out there which will blow my socks off ?

I currently have some terrain fly throughs which are about 900mb of geometry.
The Cortona VRML Player handles this quite well with lots of levels of detail and inlined files.
Does the game engine have these features.

Why do some games ship as EXE and others as BLEND files ?

Can you render HTML in a scene or at least 2D text documents ?

Can Python access data sources like MySQL ?

Thanks in advance

Steve

1.) alot of the demos in the gameengine manual ive heard were really good…you should also check out HellStation…Andy83’s horror contest entry was pretty good too…the mini-game contest entries were pretty good…theres also alot more you could check out, none of which I have links to…sorry. :-? Someone should post with some links to good demos really soon though.

2.) The game engine definintly wouldnt handle 900MB( :o ) of interactive landscape very well…maybe with some heavy culling, but i doubt it…900MB seems like a huge amount of geometry, not many professional games have that much in just the model geometry. Im sure you could make an animation or fly-over of that simply by animating it, but i doubt you could make it interactive.

3.) Well there is an option in blender to convert your .blend’s into .exe’s…you should be able to open both with blender…

Well actually it does’nt handle that much. It can only handle small chunks at a time switched in out behond the bounds of fog. I was just wondering of the engine can use proximity sensors to load in components of a scene.