Hi everyone, I have kept a fairly quiet profile for the last year or so. Within that time I have revamped a new website with all my tutorials, resources, addons and games (available for free).
The entire website is built from scratch, so there are no excess costs or 3rd party hosting services in the way.
Pages are all dynamically generated based on requested content, significantly benefiting sustainability of the website for data organization.
A video going over the basics and explaining the entire situation:
For now I am working on many different projects here and there. I have purposely stopped tutorial recording due to the unstable future of BGE. I don’t want the time I put into the recording and editing to go to waste because the engine dies out or the tutorial has become irrelevant after a few weeks/months with the current version.
For now here are my thoughts on all the blender integrated game engine options (ignoring GPL):
BGE is super easy to get into, but is old, unmaintained, many performance bottlenecks and can only export to PC (but this is also very primitive).
UPBGE solves most of the problems of BGE (hence I would deem it the most suitable for now), but also has many issues, mainly version incompatibility, exporting platforms and constant restructuring of API. The UPBGE team is doing a fantastic job at trying to keep BGE modern, but I don’t see it competing with other big players.
Armory3D has an amazing vision and could easily become an open source unreal engine, but is young lacking basic features that even BGE has such as path finding and is constantly changing, so not very suitable for tutorials
For now I am staying away from making UPBGE tutorials, usually within 2 version releases some part of the fundamental structure has changed making it incompatible with previous versions. Not only is this inconvenient but in some cases can make the entire tutorial redundant. I think UPBGE is great, I will keep using it for now, but I want to make “UPBGE” tutorials not “UPBGE v0.2.4” tutorials. This is the same reasoning why I am holding off on Armory3D.
Thanks for that insight. I have another question. Given that you did some work on getting 2d filters into the BGE, do you know of any work being done on importing shadertoy type glsl information into UPBGE (as materials/textures)?
I ask because I use the game engine to do live shows and the existing options of animated textures and video textures is very limiting.
Regards,
Ian
You will most likely need a vertex shader to apply shadertoy glsl effects to a mesh / material. GLSL in itself is very complex, difficult to debug and has limited resources relevant to BGE.
The best idea would be looking into UPBGE / BGE nodes and all the effects you can create with them (for time input you can animate object color and extract one color channel. Then use this factor as shading input).
Thanks. I put up a request on github/upbge so we’ll see what happens. There was a compositing node developed for glsl shaders that worked pretty well so I thought it might be possible.
Cheers,
Ian
Vertex shaders already exist in BGE, there should be some demos up on the forums here. What I meant was you can create many GLSL effects just using nodes. I think youle also created a thread here with lots of GLSL shader toy examples. The main problem is that most shaders are licensed under non-commercial.
I think that thread has been archived but I’d like to see so examples of the process you describe with existing bge and upbge nodes in order to get glsl like effects.
Thanks. That’s looks great! Can you also point me to tutorial (if not included in the link you provided) that outline getting similar effects using standard nodes (as you alluded to earlier). I’ve been delving into opengl and it’s going to be a while, if ever, before I produce anything useful.
Nodes are a primitive subset of openGL, just like logic bricks are a limited version of python scripting. You can do everything with openGL but there are limits on nodes. 2D filters for instance can’t be built with nodes because they function directly with the viewport.
For resources regarding this matter try searching “bge nodes” in google or something similar. Asking for tutorials on “open gl effects” using nodes is like asking for a “game” using bge, it really depends what you want the end result to be, and what effect you are replicating.
Hey Thatimster, thanks for the update. The new site looks great.
I’ve worked in BGE for a few years and your tutorials have always been very useful. I get what you mean about the fluid state of things at the moment regarding engine changes and tutorials. I produced a five part set on BGE a couple of years ago but wouldn’t want to update them given the current situation.
For folks modeling in 2.79 who have an interest in game design I still think there’s value in using BGE as a learning tool for the very basics.
I agree, I would still argue that BGE is one of the best ways to learn how to think like a game developer, without overwhelming users. It keeps things simple, intuitive and really easy to follow / debug without needing to find your way around foreign UI or learn how to coding works. I’m hoping interactive mode will provide at least a bit of this experience when released.
I am currently working with @Thomas_Murphy on The Shadows Lengthen using BGE.
There is many different factors to the engine you use (license, target platforms, distribution, preference) this is something you will have to figure out for yourself and what you like working with most. If you are just starting out with a concept, BGE is not a bad place to ground some of your ideas. Then for more advanced elements you can move to another engine of your choice.
Do you still believe in the Interactive Mode promise the Blender Foundation mentioned before or are you joining and supporting the UPBGE 0.3.0 Movement?
For the moment I have higher hopes for Armory than I do for Interactive Mode.
My biggest problem with UPBGE is that it changes drastically every release, yet still contains bugs (usually that previous versions didn’t have).
i see , and now i understand firmly buddy how much u hate bugs!
That in turn justifies your opinion over picking UPBGE as your choice when making games.
My wish is for us all to get a united team of talented and passionate dev’s who can patch up all the bugs to bring more stability and possibility to UPBGE 0.3.0 +
i can also see why u picked Armory, because of porting and multi platform…
