Hi all,
Blender has many modeling, rendering, texturing, and compositing tools, but the game engine is quite lacking in my opinion. I have seen many cool things made with it (ZVirus, yo frankie, color cube), and have tried to make some of my own, but it does not hold up to the standards of, say, Unity even by a long shot. So i thought maybe i could incorporate some of my knowledge into this awesome project.
Recently, Torque3d, a professional 3d game design suite has been released under the MIT license (100% open source), and i was thinking about incorporating this into blender, but i dont know where to start. i am relatively new to blender but an experienced coder, and i would really like to help.
Torque 3D is good, in fact I have on my pc and occasionally i read the documentation. I have basic knowledge about the world editor and I’ve actually imported models to torque 3d blender.
whether to use the blender modeling in another game engine, First you should know all you can about: modeling, texturing, etc.
thanks for the quick reply!
I am afraid you did not understand my question, though. what i meant was i wanted to add another game engine TO blender, not use blender in another game engine, kind of like having multiple renders for blender (blender render, blender game, cycles, Yafaray, etc.).
khan
I would love a total re-write of each section of the BGE looking for ways to increase speed and allow multithreading at the core of the BGE. This would make the BGE itself better then torque3d.
Blender has many modeling, rendering, texturing, and compositing tools, but the game engine is quite lacking in my opinion. I have seen many cool things made with it (ZVirus, yo frankie, color cube), and have tried to make some of my own, but it does not hold up to the standards of, say, Unity even by a long shot. So i thought maybe i could incorporate some of my knowledge into this awesome project.
Just thought I’d point this out:
You say that awesome things can be made with blender game engine
You say that your games do not hold up to the standards of unity
From this I conclude that you need to take some time to learn how to make those ‘awesome things’ as integrating different engine into blender won’t make it any easier to create ‘awesome’
My thoughts: The idea of “plugable” game engines is nice.
Such ideas were established with the physics engine before, but it removed as there were only one physics engine left (Bullet) and this one got a tight integration into the BGE. (the BGE was adjusted to fit with Bullet)
While importing models and animations is pretty game engine independent, the definition of the game behavior is very different throughout the different game engine. This means you need a different UI for each of them.
In your situation, you would need a different UI or a way to “convert” the current “behavior definition” to the one Torque3D expects. I’m not sure if that is even possible.
I recall that there was an effort to hide more of the non-BGE parts of the game engine, and this could theoretically be a good idea. However, it’s worth noting that one of the whole reasons that the BGE is nice is because it’s integrated tightly into Blender. If you kick out the non BGE specific things to only Blender Render / Cycles, then you would have to switch between render engines if you want to model or animate compared to work with the game engine, which would hurt the workflow a bit.
first of all i would like to say…
WOW THESE FORUMZ ARE EPICCCCCCCCCCC
anyways… i did not expect much attention to this topic. so general gist is that Torque3d + blender != good or easy. so next i would like to know how/where i can learn and get blender code so that i could perhaps add some shaders, bullet improvements (collision detection not so good), maybe even c# scripting (faster than python).
Actually, i never said BGE is awesome, i said its renderer is awesome, and that area is awesome. making something cool is not the same as making something awesome. cool in my opinion just means nice, not necessarily successful. there is a difference. a big one.
khan
This shows me that you do not have much knowledge about Blender.
A) Blender is open source, as pretty much any other open source project you get the sources from the official website ;).
B) Shaders? This sounds a bit strange as you said you want to couple torque and Blender. Shaders should come with Torque as it will provide the render part.
C) Bullet improvement? It is an own project. Again, the physics engine is part of the game engine … in your case torque.
D) C#? Again game engine specific. Does torque support C#? I thought they have an own scripting language called TorqueScript . BTW: Scripting is used at high level. Therefore the minimal speed-differences between C# and Python do not really matter.
What are you really going to do? Establishing Torque as additional Game engine? Or modifying Blender? Or modifying the BGE?
These are all different things and will require a lot of work.
Modify BGE is my new goal b/c Torque3d does not seem to be an option, as i said in my second to last post. your right i do not have much knowledge about blender, i pointed that out in my first post
Ah, that is what you meant with this sort of formula in Post#12. No problem.
You can use shaders already. You can find a few examples in the resource forum. I can’t help a lot, as I do not use them. New shaders are always welcome :D.
Bullet#2 is a separate project. I can’t help on this either. I suggest to go the developers route - which is a separate forum + mailing list.
You can try to add a C# API but I’m not sure if that is really worth.
Making everything multithreaded i.e. distributed computing/concurrency/parallelism/etc., is not an easy task because not all problems can be broken down so easily i.e. logic bricks
GameKit is another alternative that is compatible with Blender. It uses Ogre or Irrlicht for graphics and Bullet for physics also. http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/
I think Blender having its own engine* that is tightly aligned with Blender the modeling tool is better because it allows features from the renderer (Internal/Cycles) to transfer over to the game engine. I mean, the game engine is like a limited version of the renderer right? Obviously, certain things are too resource consuming to do in realtime but over time as technology improves they can be transferred over.
*Random thought: could the BGE be renamed like how we have Blender Internal, Cycles, etc. maybe another blender like name associated with circular movement like tornado, cyclone, whirlwind, etc. I think this would give the BGE more of an “identity”. Personaly, I like cyclone
Shaders are great in bge… for Nvidia only. ATI support? no ATI support = no AAA games or even graphics intensive AA games. BTW renaming bge to cyclone would be cool
Alright i am marking this thread as solved because i feel i have reached my goal. thanks for all the support! i will try to improve the bge as much as i can
Khan
