Taken from the man himself
FYI, I like Unity as an engine. It’s just become unquestionably associated with the worst of Steam’s games, and I couldn’t resist the zing.
I think the more relevant question is, how much skill and effort does it take to not make a large game that looks like it’s in desperate need of polish and is full of bugs?
In some engines, pulling off such a thing is easier while in others it is harder, the fact for the BGE though is that it requires a lot more effort to make a genuinely good game of this scale than it needs to be (noting the lack of numerous helper tools and features that are now standard in most other engines).
Many game developers, especially new ones, will use the engine which they think offers the path of least resistance depending on what their goals are and depending on whether it works well with other software, the BGE doesn’t have anything to offer here other than a unique relationship with a fully-featured 3D tool (because for one thing, the BGE can’t even make the claim of having a full WYSIWYG environment, 2D filters along with custom shaders are not visible in the viewport during editing and some GLSL features do not transfer over when the game starts).
Ace, we understand objectivity, we understand the engine, you don’t need to make excuses for why you yourself are not using the bge,
all of your arguments would mean alot more if you had a very nice , fun gotdot game,
The bugs that I have seen in I will are no fault of the bge.
They are a lack of testing, and a lack of rewriting things that don’t work.
also, If the game is not fun when its boxes, chances are it never will be,
It’s all about fun factor, many people here have forgotten that. What does it matter what “cool” features an engine have if you can not model great models, make great animations and textures and/or code like a pro. There is still no magic button called “Make great game” in any engine. I’m 100% sure that none of us will make his game better on any other engine, because it’s never been about the engine we use, it’s about skills we have. And that kind of discussions are pointless. Instead we should focus here on how to make good gameplay,level design,story,mechanics…etc.
I agree, any examples of this should also be used as something to learn from and why testing a game before releasing is so important.
I think Ace is the Grinch of BGE, whenever there is an opportunity to scoff at its development or stability he is always there to comment.
As haidme said, the usability and how fun the engine is to use is the reason why people still use it, regardless of how ‘out-dated’ the engine may be.
I’ll have to object to that. Art and the visual plays a major factor in how enjoyable a game is, and can turn a very simple game into a great experience. I don’t think Rayman: Origins is a terribly sophisticated game, but that art just blows me out of the water.
art enhances emersion, it does not however make a game with dull mechanics fun to me.
I’m oftentimes rendering something out using Cycles, can’t use Godot when my machine already has its resources devoted to something.
I actually have a nice looking Godot demo with a few levels complete and fully working, just that oftentimes I don’t feel as devoted to game creation in general as I used to.
I think Ace is the Grinch of BGE, whenever there is an opportunity to scoff at its development or stability he is always there to comment.
If you want to know, at one time I was a fan of the BGE, I would defend it when people questioned why it should be in Blender and I held out hope that good things would come for it. I was on the side of BPR when there was discussion.
However, after a few years of seeing game projects breaking in new versions along with nearly every major development effort stalling (and I mean projects that are larger than the little features and the bugfixes that we are seeing now). I had to finally face reality and realize that there might be no place for the BGE anymore (especially with engines like Godot having fully featured exporters from Blenders). I figured about a year ago that if I waited for the right opportunity to continue my BGE projects, then I might never jump back in to making games.
Look around you, Haidme, Monster, and BPR are probably among the very few that have decided to stick with the BGE after more than 5 years of usage (including a lot of very experienced users who were very loyal at one point such as Solarlune, Raiderium, and Vitorbalbio). The rest here have either jumped ship or came to the BGE only recently, and then what compounds this is the massive rate at which projects are either canceled or ported to another engine (a project started in the BGE is far more likely to be finished in another engine than projects started in other engines)
Well bake some stuff and finish a game Ace!
I don’t know cycles so it’s held me back,
but if you can model, texture and bake… Do it!
in the bge, godot…
help a project finish!
or finish a game,
of your own,
also quit picking on the game engine,
many people are finding ways to do new things all the time,
and the developers are patching bugs after they are reported.
your belittling the progress it has made…
start opening bug reports, or close your mouth.
If you are a bge user, use it.
if your a godot user, do that.
A game engine also only is represented by the community that uses it, and the quality of their code, and art.
Help, or don’t,
But if you bring up bugs be specific.
project breaks on upgrade is sad,
but the solution here is if your worried about that,
don’t change versions while developing.
I had a few projects that broke on upgrade,
I reported it, and in two cases identified what caused it,
(Z+ facing of planes changed)
(rigid body joints deleted at frame 0)
I worked around, and in many cases me starting over was very smart, I had to learn what I was doing wrong, not the engine.
at one point I thought 100% logic was the best way to do everything, later I was using
always---------python
all over the place
now I am using it the way it was intended.
Event-------python
Event2----/
Event3–/
double executions and all sorts of other errors come from not using sensors in many cases.
Right now I don’t have anything holding me down but art.
I also have that final fantasy game that needs a ton of art,
but I am building that for a artist anyway.
The BGE can do so much more than that game showed. the main reason why the game looks like an old game from ps2 is because of bad normal and diffuse maps, no specularity maps, and the scene contained very little geometry. Making good textures is a skill that’s hard to do no matter what engine you’re using. I think a lot of people use less geometry in a blender game because most people who use the BGE have lower end computers, which makes sense since free software will attract people who already have limited resources.
I think BPR is right; the reason why the game was failing was because it was not tested enough. It would be interesting to hear from the actual developers, and see what their opinions are about this. How many different computer systems did they test it on? Did they run into the problems the reviewer encountered before they released to steam?
On one hand it looks like a huge disappointment because of the harsh judgments of the reviewer, but on the other hand, 93,000 people saw what you worked on. At least with this game the reviewer didn’t encounter blender crashing time after time like in his Silicone-2 review.
The main problem with the game engine isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that there are other free game engines out there that are far better, unity for example. The only thing the blender game engine has going for itself are the logic bricks. If they want to make the blender game engine more popular they need to improve the performance and make the logic bricks even more powerful than they are. They also need to make it easier to sort, hide and manage the objects in the scene. After you’ve got 100+ objects in a scene and you want to go back and change something it doesn’t happen very quickly because of all the mess that is switching between windows, deleting old texture maps hide objects that are in the way, import different objects and just something as simple as changing the ground on a map might include 6 different obj files each with unique textures, there’s a lot of trial and error and in between the errors there is a lot of stuff you’ve got to do because, blender’s interface wasn’t designed for level design or game making. And naming the different objects and textures, just naming hundreds of objects materials and textures could take hours of time away from you that in other game engines are managed much better. Blender feels clunky, not very fast, there are also some weird bugs I think it’s fair to call them. Alpha textures having white borders unless they’re in a tiff format, textures that won’t import or you can’t change their name. Lots of annoying rubbish everywhere.
Another iteration of this discussion.
Use what you’re comfortable with.
If you’re a hobbyist and have no illusions about what you can achieve in your free time, then BGE is definitely powerful enough.
If you’re trying to learn programming in a fun and forgiving environment doing things you can show to your friends, BGE is great.
If you’re an indie looking to make a game with some weird art style or gameplay, BGE is probably fine.
If you’re an indie looking to make a game that looks like a AAA game, BGE is not the tool for you. Chances are that no engine is.
If you’re a studio trying to make a AAA game, go pay for an engine that is actively supported and top-of-the-line.
Whenever I work in another engine, I really miss the BGE. I miss the ease of workflow between models and game. I miss the simplicity of the logic system for simple behaviour.
One advantage of modern game engines is that they hide what is actually happening. Any idea what happens at GLSL level? I think there are maybe 5 people in this community that can write shaders. (I can write small ones!). The number of people in this community that know that Servo Motion is a PID controller and understand what that means is probably only a handful. If you want to make a good game, make sure you understand what’s happening below your code.
I had an interesting problem today. A system I was developing gave the result:
65080 + 64020 = -736
Let’s see how many people can tell me why. Now try to understand the complexity in the implementation of the malloc function in C. Now try to stack LibLoad on top of that. Can you see the towering pillar of code that your game rests on top of?
When did BGE last crash on me? About half a year ago. How many bugs have I hit in the engine: maybe 3 or 4 over the past 7 years I’ve used the engine. (hmm, the libload crashing bug (still unresolved), mist settings didn’t work in GLSL, some badly documented stuff in applyImpulse (not a bug, but the documentation was wrong). I think that’s about it).
Now the other game engine I’ve used recently in Playcanvas. How many bugs have I hit in the engine: 2 over the past year.
Another system I’ve been using recently is the Arduino. Would you believe I hit a problem with the bootloader?
How many bugs have I encountered in Windows OS? Quite a few.
People’s complaint with BGE is not the quantity of bugs, it’s the activity of development. People assume that a system that isn’t actively maintained will fall apart. In the software world, that’s not true. On Linux, the net-tools package hasn’t been updated since 2001 and yet nearly everyone uses it. Heck, your wifi router probably uses it!
In this modern age, everyone has there smartphone apps update every week, and has their OS system update just as often. People see updates as a sign of ‘goodness.’ But often the best systems are the stable old ones. Yes, they may have quirks but they are consistent.
BGE hasn’t been updated significantly for ages, but does it need to be? I used to update blender every other month and get annoyed when things changed or broke. Now I stick with a specific version for each project. Why? It was started there and why bother changing?
One advantage of modern game engines is that they hide what is actually happening. Any idea what happens at GLSL level? I think there are maybe 5 people in this community that can write shaders
that is so true. when i went to school i have written z80 machinecode and it is so far away from this “easy coding” you have with python or even c++. i have written a spriteprogram and even calculating the clipping was a pain in the but.
and for painting a straight diagonal line you are not only have to know programming but also geometry.
Almost every great looking, well run game is made by teams of people. I was just reminded of something while reading this, programmers who set out to make games won’t make good looking games and maybe not even smoothly running games. Take the video in the first post, an artistically inclined person would immediately notice how awkward the character looks when he is crounching, he would see faults everywhere, from how the camera moves to how warm the enviroment looks. Small things that make a game great or feel great to play. Programming only goes so far if you’re unable to realize how to make something look more appealing or run better.
That is why the blender game engine don’t get much attention, because most programmers set out to all by themselves create a game. I know that there are things that other people are better at than me, so the project me and blueprint is working on, I wouldn’t dare to order him around when it comes to logic bricks or code. Yet he is wise enough to realize that I might be better at designing stuff. That is how a good game project should be run.
So I think that it’s not so much that the blender game engine is not capable of creating good games, it’s that it’s so easy for both artist and programmer to jump right into it and being too proud to acknowledge that their vison might be lacking in some aspects. If you’re a good artist find yourself a good programmer, if you’re a good programmer find yourself a good artist. Find people who are good at music or animations, creating nice stories.
Basically try to specialize on something, that is what all big game projects have. Hundreds of talented people that specialize on a specific role that they’ve mastered, spent 100s of hours perfecting. When you’re talking about the glsl and shaders, they won’t polish a turd. In some ways it would be better for a person who want to make games to join some modding team and try to mod a game instead. Often games that are quite popular, the total war series or Skyrim attract tons of talented people. The other day I saw a team of almost 50 people working on a total conversion mod for the latest total war game.
Why don’t we see any big teams using the blender game engine, that is what you’ve got to ask yourself. Personally I think it’s because it’s so easy to pick up that everyone sets out to make their own game instead of teaming up on something.
The post above by Calceus about specialisation is very good and everyone doing 3D, games or otherwise, should take it on board I think. Very few human beings are good at being a one man band. That’s why bands mostly have specialist musicians. Coding, visual design and animation are really very different skills.
It would be quite nice if Blender and BGE were separate softwares with different licenses. (For example, GPL for Blender and MIT for BGE).
This too
No offense to the devs of course,
not their fault
The dev is an active member, just don’t let him see this video. That was really heartbreaking and I’m not even the developers.
I’m pretty sure the developer would like to know if there is a problem with game crashes so often that pepole doesn’t get to experiences the real game. That’s useful information!
I’m pretty sure he knows about that problem. The steam game forum is flooded with that bug complains.Actually that is the only kind of comments under the game, but I guess the dev is no longer supporting/interested in this game. That’s pity, because if you want your game to succeed you need to be close with the gamers and listen to them(at least partly)