What can be made

is it possible to create games at commersial quality eg games like mario kart or halo with all the menues and ulockables?

Very possible.

The only factor explaining why we don’t see commercial quality games being made with Blender is the sheer amount of work put into development. Commercial games have teams working hard for months/years, whereas most Blender games are made by a single person in relatively short time. The graphics are limited only by the artist(s) making them.

Obviously the engine isn’t up to today’s standards, but that doesn’t stop the game being of high quality. Certain types of games aren’t suitable to be made with Blender though (eg. RTS), due to the way the engine/physics work.

One thing the game engine could really use is orthogonal camera support, which would make it far easier to program complex menu systems. As far as I know this is just a matter of implementing a simple transform too. I’m currently building the interface/menu system for a game, and it’s very possible to construct commercial quality ones with Blender.

Unlockables are simple enough to do as well. They just need a couple of switches in the code.

There are some teams working on high quality Blender games. I’m part of one. With python scripts powering a lot of things there isn’t much you can’t do.

thanks
now for a idea…

http://www.spinheaddev.com/gameexpose0.html
saluk wrote up a game expose on some good quality games, also be sure to check out the work of peter rylander, hellstation is really good.

has the Crescent Dawn game been stoped?, or paused?

no clue, you will have to ask saluk or d0ogs

nope

yes

easy: no
look the same: no (at least not in blender, perhaps by the time you get far enough there will be a nice exporter …)

a bunch of things are pretty easy to do in blender, like keyboard controls for motion, and simple animations and logic

menus aren’t too difficult either

keeping lots of characters and game running quickly and car physics and mouse input (though it is significantly less complicated) and numerous other things are pretty complicated

I think you could relatively quickly in blender make a game prototype, almost worthy of pitching to someone (you would need more than a prototype…). I don’t know if anyone has actually tried that though