It seems UPBGE developers are really devoted to their project and unlike other unfortunate endeavours this one seems to actually going somewhere.
So I was wondering what about marketing. I mean, just posting about how great it is, is not going to convince much people to use it, also I’m not sure speaking/negotiating with BF will really do much for UPBGE and future of blender game engine as a whole.
So, according to me what UPBGE needs is what all others(including BF itself) are doing in this cases - a presentation of features and capabilities or speaking freely - a game done with the engine showing its features and capabilities.
How CryEngine do it - Crysis, how Blender Foundation do it - Yo! Frankie, how Unreal engine do it - Unreal(game) , how Unity have done it recently - Adam.
It seems this is the right way to make your engine shine and to attract funds and new users towards it.
Unfortunately this will be a huge task requiring professionals and I mean probably we should ask the pros from blender modelling forums to model and texture the props and characters, I’m not sure about animations but there must be capable people to do them and so on.
What I was thinking is something very far from Yo! Frankie…it was a fun little game, and noone actually pay attention to it. It should be something like Adam or something like Crysis - it must shine with great shaders,models and physics capabilities. It is not necessary to suppress other engines :D, just to be something close to a AAA quality game fragment, just it must invoke the WOW factor in people watching/playing it.
I think if we do this many people and companies(including BF) will take a more serious look at UPBGE.
i think for a starting marketing strategy they will need some tech demos showcase, some really elaborate scenes people can download standalone and try them, to actually feel the engine performance. A hole game will be a time to actually get one to showcase the way Crysis and Unreal can.
Not a whole game, just a tech demo in a form of a game. Like one level,one quest or something…just it must be playable and with WOW quality. And of course not .blends file, but a standalone with installer or launchscreen, the blends will also be provided. Also once its done we can upload it on Steam,itch.io like BF did with Blender. As free-to-play techdemo it will surely gain popularity fast.
Look at Robinson The Journey, it is actually a walking vr simulator made by Crytek with hopes to save their company…well it doesn’t, however we need something simple and with high qty like this:
I also think a whole game would be too much, what we need is a demo with diferent scenes and features. To that goal I think we need basically two factors:
One is great artists who can model realistic characters and scenes, animate them well, and so one. Since I’m not one I would let the experts discuss about this.
Second is great programmers. Well actually as long as someone makes great shaders that will be more than enough for marketing purposes. However once someone wants to know deeper about the engine, if he finds that he has to do the shaders himself and almost everything displayed, he will feel deceived, that would be bad.
Right now everyone doing complex games in blender does it diferently, it’s a caos. We need a standarized way to do things, a standarized library for timmers, video/audio playback, GUI, game saving, common shaders, character logic, assets import, etc. When I made BGECore that was the original plan, though one person using it is in no way “standarized” so I pruposse to make a similar library together with the community and the UPBGE team. Since making a full framework may be too much for just a marketing demo, at the very least we should do the shaders module of it, since usually is the one that users have harder time implementing themselfs.
And I agree with haidme that in no way we can just put it all in a .blend file, to that efect I suggest to use the BGECore Launcher (credit not needed) as well as the installer that haidme pruposed. (For linux a tar.gz will suffice).
Actors/vehicles are controlled via a proxy - Keyboard controls are serialized and converted to a string - actor calls local dictionary vs string. (high level controls like walk to this point on navigation mesh or low level like walk forward)
The systems a player uses to control a actor should be easy to use for an ai as well.
2.Weapons and props contain the information about their usage - what animation to play - damage etc
3.World is unpacked/generated on frame 0 and then everything is packed into a file structure tree for streaming
4.World is made of Buildings using an Atlas and a terrain/vegitation atlas
This is what I am doing in wrectified. - this would allow us to share actors and props and vehicles and map tiles we make without re_coding anything.
Things we still need
Better armature skinning
Static mesh batching to be finished
Things I Want-
Batched raycasting - scene.rayBatch()
[INDENT=2]
[/INDENT]
[INDENT=2]example = scene.rayBatch([ [end,start,0,’’,0,0,0,TrueFunction,FalseFunction] ])
[/INDENT]
[INDENT=2](I will be using it for modular robotics but it undoubtedly has uses elsewhere)
[/INDENT]
A lot of art to be finished. - I have a building kit but it still needs a few pieces added and rebaked.
I have 2 actors in a 1/2 way finished state
Wrectified always was meant to be a blender open game project intended to finance bge development.
Over “standardifying” reduces overall engine flexibility, which is the problem with Unity currently. That’s why there’s so many “Unity” looking games.
There is no need for GUI, game saving or character logic libraries on the release versions of Blender, those should all either be third-party content or an optional download along with Blender. This is what LibGDX does currently, and I think it works really well.
Heres my opinion: before marketing, you should wait for blender 2.8 viewport. It will bring new shaders - PBS, that Upbge could use and will use, plus a lot more goodies. I agree about having different game templates and UpBge features tutorials.
Over “standardifying” reduces overall engine flexibility
True, but it seems Unity is not worried at all, just look at their fanbase.
Maybe first we must decide what is this all about.
Will it be a closed(only for geeks engine) or is it for the masses. Do we want to attract new users that just want to make games with an easy-to-use tool(what can be bge) or do we make UPBGE for nerds and hipsters only. That is what worries me for a while.
Going in the direction “engine-only-for-programmers-doing-magical-stuff” is not going to take UPBGE very far.
If UPBGE needs to be noticed it must be “standartified”, it must include many examples and tutorials, it must have a huge assets base, it must have extensive wiki written in a way new users will understand, it must show off a game that people will drooling over. This is how things works for the masses. Otherwise BGE will be remembered as the malformed child of Blender, because masses will not be attracted to it.
I have 4GB of high quality Unreal free assets library and ready-to-use scripts and 15GB of the same for Unity. That is how you attract people if you want them to use your engine. Most indie developers just want to compose scripts and 3d assets, nobody really want to actually program or model, because there is no time for this with the current competition among them.
I was stuck with 2.49b for many years because of the same thing - I have so many ready-to-use scripts and assets for that version.
The one thing that made me transfer to 2.78/UPBGE was not the new features in them it is that Steam is no longer supporting 2.49b.
I never understood that. I entered this comunity after the 2.5. Is it that in the 2.4 era this comunity was better or something? Becouse right now I don’t think manny assets are usable at all.
@elmeunick9: A lot of people stopped using BGE when it shifted from 2.49 to 2.5, because they had to re-learn the API, and if you are doing that, you may as well learn a new engine.
at the very least we should do the shaders module of it, since usually is the one that users have harder time implementing themselfs.
What would you want in a shader module? I made one to help martinsh and I develop some shaders for a commercial project, and while it is adequate for us, it would be quite fun to expand.
@haidme:
Yes, to be marketed successfully, UPBGE does need a good completed game, however, this is no easy task (as you are well aware). The main thing that is lacking is … a leader. We need someone who has a solid game idea, is willing to see it through, and is willing to devote their time to managing a team. When I ran a team project) many years ago I discovered just how much management is involved, and at the time, I did not have the skills to handle it.
You may notice that recently I haven’t worked on anything besides lots of small demo’s. This is intentional: it allows me to up-skill in a variety of areas while waiting for something. What am I waiting for? Someone like you (who commands a good deal of respect), to create a formalised medium-term (1-2 year) project.
I imagine that if one of the experienced BGE users (haidme, monster, elmeunick etc.) created a team project, people would flock to join - and that would be a bad thing. If anyone does want to run such a project, make sure you form a decent team who is in for the whole journey.
His project, Krum was started in 2,49, and took a lot of years to finish, and blender changed in those years making the game incompatible with newer versions of blender, so he had to options, use a newer version of blender and star all over again or stuck with a older release and keep all the work he had done to that point.
Is not that the comunity was better then, just a thing of compatibility… which is a big stone in the road when developing long time dev games in blender.
@sdfgeoff:
I don’t think we need a complete game. Not yet. We can start with simplier things and release more complex projects as we develop the standard. I would suggest to start with a simple scene displaying some shaders and some special features of UPBGE.
So to get started, I think the the first thing we need to do is to see what scene are we going to do and wich elements it will contain (including non physical elements like lights, shaders or logic).
For example we could make a forest like this but better.
After deciding what we are gonna do we should look for talented artists, shouldn’t be that hard on this forum, and decide the basis of the standard we are going to make between experienced coders on this community and the UPBGE team (it wouldn’t be good if the UPBGE team doesn’t agree with the standard).
@sdfgeoff: (After editing)
Basic shaders. Water, DOF, antialiasing, blur, etc. Basically the most commonly used shaders, so that when one does his first game in UPBGE it feels like an AAA game out of the box (of course you should be able to disable them too). Also the shaders module should have a system that if some shader breaks an excetion is thrown but the game continues. And a system to pass paramaters to the shaders from python in real-time (without needing object properties). All of that can be done already, but the idea is to have it included on the standard.
Will it be a closed(only for geeks engine) or is it for the masses. Do we want to attract new users that just want to make games with an easy-to-use tool(what can be bge) or do we make UPBGE for nerds and hipsters only. That is what worries me for a while.
Going in the direction “engine-only-for-programmers-doing-magical-stuff” is not going to take UPBGE very far.
If UPBGE needs to be noticed it must be “standartified”, it must include many examples and tutorials, it must have a huge assets base, it must have extensive wiki written in a way new users will understand, it must show off a game that people will drooling over. This is how things works for the masses. Otherwise BGE will be remembered as the malformed child of Blender, because masses will not be attracted to it.
I find very little reason for UPBGE to be “standardified” because there exists engines like Unity and Unreal that are already free to use, professionally developed and way ahead of UPBGE.
I fully agree that there needs to be a jaw-dropping showcase game, the inclusion of tons of assets and generic game dev libraries for UPBGE to become popular; however, this is at the cost of originality due to lack of flexibility. With this type of setup, UPBGE will be getting a lot of cookie cutter games; i.e. “UPBGE looking games”. Just like Unity has hundreds of “Unity looking games”.
In my opinion, UPBGE cannot compete with Unity or Unreal. When you’re making an indie engine, you should compete with indie engines: BDX, BGE, Godot.
We need someone who has a solid game idea, is willing to see it through, and is willing to devote their time to managing a team.
That is true, even though I’m a team leader in a game company for many years I feel like I’m not up for this task. If we want to make it right the leader must give 100% of his time to the project and also the team must be right. All made by pros and unfortunately it is very hard to find the right people without promising compensation. There will be many people who will want to join and contribute but this is not how it works. The project will need a serious team of professionals, the best option will be full time payed job, that’s how BF done it for Yo!Frankie. However I’m aware that this is highly unlikely, so the other option is a volunteers and the leader task must be to manage a group of non-payed people, doing something just for the cause - it’s a definition for how to fail a project
However its is possible to start small…like Blue proposed - first make a game design document (considering the time and that it will be a tech demo). Then maybe finding a few guys to make the main character and a few props(but really AAA quality) and then someone to make a prototype with those assets and probably some really good voice over. Then we will have something to show to people interested and it will be more easy to find other professionals for the team.
In my opinion, UPBGE cannot compete with Unity or Unreal. When you’re making an indie engine, you should compete with indie engines: BDX, BGE, Godot.
Of course we can not compete with Unity and even less with Unreal, but what masses choose is the important thing. So If we make it for the masses(indies) - it will rise and shine.
Unity and Unreal AAA games are maybe 2% of all games made with them…so we must show to people even more easy to use engine and they will byte it. Python is very easy to learn language + logic bricks…I think this is a winner. Actually that was the original idea behind BGE many years ago and it still works, just its a little outdated as an engine.
His project, Krum was started in 2,49, and took a lot of years to finish
Actually I started Krum in 2.43 ;)…Now as I remember this I’m not sure to laugh or to cry.
@Lucrecius
Over “standardifying”, as you said, is bad. But there is no current standard right now, wich is worse. We don’t need to make a set of rigid and specific rules like “You must use this water shader, or none at all”, but more like “You may use this water shader, or make your own”. Of course most game devs will use the default assets making their games look similar, but that’s fine, you ain’t limiting originality for the ones that don’t want to be limited.
I think UPBGE’s strongest point is it’s integration with Blender, if a marketing campaign were to be pursued this would need to be a big factor along with it’s open source nature.
Additionally to this there MUST be a remedy that is made public and usable against GPL (I think UPBGE team mentioned integrating the BPPlayer).
Some other nice things to consider:
-filter library (notice how unreal has their signature bloom).
-having features that engines like unity make you pay for.
-consider the possibility of exporting beyond PC.
Again I think it would be worth waiting until UPBGE can compete with normal engines before considering marketing it, perhaps waiting until 2.8, when everything gets changed at once.
I think UPBGE’s strongest point is it’s integration with Blender, if a marketing campaign were to be pursued this would need to be a big factor along with it’s open source nature.
Sorry for that, but nobody cares if it is opensource or not. Nowadays every engine is free , Unreal is totally free you just pay 5% of the income if it exceeds 100k $ (insert :lol: gif here) Most people don’t actually care if they can edit the source code or not.
Waiting will give us nothing…making game design document+AAA assets and animations is not connected with the current UPBGE state.
The purpose of the demo will be to attract people when it is ready, not before. I think at the time the demo is ready UPBGE will be much more sophisticated.
