I am sure everything related to game development will remain in one category.
Off topic, but the project has since been continued by the UPBGE team, not a lot of people either, but still continued development. Discussions happened to merge the fork back, but it would have somewhat compromised the track on which Blender was going with 2.8, and the will of getting rid of this ancient piece of technology that is the BGE, in order to start fresh. Issue in my opinion is that we trade something for nothing (that could become a thing as long as someone actually works on a replacement). Anyway, that’s a discussion for some other thread.
+1, also, while game making is art, game making on the BGE is a technical feat on its own. So I like having all in one place because it is rather technical, in the same way there is a Coding section. (I guess code can be seen as art too, :p)
On the other hand, why not doing both? Keeping that Game Engine up, and adding new categories for other artsy people working on games?
No move, only new channels with new scopes? I would prefer that.
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Also, I would like to stress out that the BGE community is really deeply rooted on these forums. As far as I remember, the brightests and most active users always have been on BA. There have been contests with rewards going on. Never saw that elsewhere. So this is why I like to keep things as they are. It is not because they remove a feature from the software that the people will disappear.
Just look at UPBGE, there aren’t forums for it. Everyone sticked with BA because that is the place where it all happened. We are still based on Blender, just an offtrack now, after more than 16 years. It would be a disaster to simply throw that away.
The good thing is that it is not going away 
Personally I would prefer to keep the section, maybe mark it as Legacy to understand that this is not a part of Blender anymore, although it is part of its history, now a fork (that again, wouldn’t have any other place to go to).
But the idea of adding new categories to the other sections, with a focus on game development is a great idea and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be done, even without this move talk.
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@Fweeb I know it doesn’t answer your question of “move or not”.
So I would say that I am for the categories focused on game making in the other sections, but as new categories. I vote for leaving the Game Engine channel as is, if not rename it Game Engine - Legacy or Game Engine - Fork, to make it clear, if even needed…
So I guess people could try to focus on answering the same question from @Fweeb: To move? Or not to move?
Me: please no, just add new stuff 
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please no move
+1 for not doing that
just add new stuff
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I prefer keeping separate categories, helps a bunch with cutting down on clutter. I’ve said this before.
The categories make sense to the people that use them; the section is serviceable the way it is.
Not the end of the world if things get moved around or rolled together, yet a clear reason why that is supposed to happen doesn’t occur to me. That’s more or less what I’ve been trying to articulate this entire time, thank you very much brain. But I’ll make do with whatever outcome.
Probably because BGE is getting removed, it would not make sense to keep it as it is now, but rest assure that we wont delete anything that the community wants to keep, only change and adapt it to the changes in blender 2.8.
It makes sense to me that, once there is an interactive mode (or whatever frorm BGE’s replacement will take in 2.8 or later), we’d need to comply with changes necessary to accomodate the userbase for the new engine/mode. If there is a reasonable extent to which some pages for the old engine can be mantained rather than outright replaced or merged with others, as to adjust to change without completely ending support for the BGE, that’d be greatly appreciated.
That’s an interesting point. I expect there will be a lot of old BGE threads that will have no relevance to the new “interactive” mode. If it did end up being significantly different then I think a separate section for the old BGE and the new “Interactive” mode would be best, but that wouldn’t need to be done until the new mode has been added.
Aye, I feel it comes down to just how different it winds up being. In the case of a completely different API (and this is what I expect), having both things share the same pages for support and resources could get confusing. But then team projects, works in progress and finished games could perhaps be used for the two engines, I don’t see such a big problem with that.
Something missing that I think is important is relative activity of the game engine subforums vs the other subforums on this site. If the game engine forums bring in, say, 5-10% of the forum’s visitors - these subforums are clearly of prime importance to the site. If, however, the game engines are only bringing in 0.1% of the visitors to the forums - as passionate as those visitors might be, these subforums are not that important to BA (& so they would be right to question the special treatment that handful of BGE/UPBGE users are getting).
@Fweeb, is this a figure we can get a hold of or at least have you look at to let us know the BGE’s relative importance to BA’s activity?
The game engine accounts for 4% of monthly created topics, however this is still not relevant. Just because a community is small does not mean it will be discarded.
As have been clarified several times already, there are no plans to remove BGE from the forum, neither has anyone suggested so. All we’ve said is we might adapt the Game Development section of the forums to better represent the changes in blender 2.80.
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Not quite what I was asking about, but good information nonetheless. Thank you.
I was asking about activity, which I admit is a bit vague, so I’ll clarify here. How any people visit these subforums vs visit the others. How many people comment on the threads vs comment on the others. To make an absurdly extreme analogy - one person writing 5% of a site’s content is still not really important to the wider community if only one other person is reading their posts.
I am aware of that. Despite the knee-jerk outrage complaining about that outcome, I don’t think anyone ever suggested removing, banning, or otherwise kicking out the BGE community & their posts.
My point was meant to get some information to judge the relative merits of having a “BGE/UPBGE/Legacy” subforum under the “Game Development” classification or whether (despite all the huff & puff in this thread) folding it all into generic game-dev subforums would be a nothing-burger in terms of eventual outcome.
who cares about about numbers and usage? we are a community of people, just like the rest of the sections.
we might all live in the same town, but not under the same roof.
maybe we all need to take a step back from all this assuming until theres actually an interactive engine on the horizon. upbge’s journey really is just starting, the more on par with the modern engines itll become, the more relevant it will be hopefully.
but it is simply too early to be assuming as much as we are.
maybe we can lock this thread for a week and let everyone cool off.
@BTolputt i still dont understand why you care so much about happens here?
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Once again, no-one is saying that you are not a community, no-one is saying that you have to leave BlenderArtists, and no-one is trying to give you a kick in the nuts. I am simply asking how large the active community here is in regards to real numbers that BlenderArtist admins have access to. I don’t think that’s unreasonable in a discussion that basically boils down to “Should BA give BGE/UPBGE users special privileges over Godot/UE4/CryEngine/etc users?”
I don’t disagree with the “stepping back from assumptions” part. However, objectively speaking, that means looking at BGE/UPBGE as a fork of Blender, without official support or maintenance from the Blender Foundation, that is being left behind with the release of Blender 2.8
I’m not sure it really matters. The BlenderArtist admins/moderators are not going to make their decision based on what I think and why I think it.
However, if you must know, I have long felt that the “Game Engine” section should have been a “Game Development” section. Especially after the announcements by Blender Foundation devs that they were going to cut it out of their next (soon to be released) Blender 2.8 version of the software here. I’ve no real hassle with BGE/UPBGE users (outside the occasional bollocks regarding it’s supposed superiority over other objectively more capable & powerful alternatives); but I think that the indie game development community which I’m part of would be better served with the largest Blender-focused forum website being openly inclusive of other engines rather than implicitly exclusive by giving BGE special treatment.
And even then, wouldn’t have been motivated to discuss it all had someone else not made a thread about the subject and had the BlenderArtist software not brought it to my attention as a thread I might be interested in.
@BTolputt, as a moderator, I don’t quite have that granular a view of traffic stats for individual sections or categories on the site. I’m not sure it’s even available to a admin without clever use of the Discourse API or some interesting digging with SQL. Might also be able to find out through web analytics, but I don’t have access to that, either.
I also want to clarify something else here. As rational as the “Should BA give UPBGE users special privileges” question sounds, that’s not really a driving force in our decision-making process (not mine, at least… I can’t speak for anyone else). It’s mostly about what’s best for facilitating the community of Blender users that visits this site.
Even before I was a moderator here, I’ve wondered why the Game Engine section wasn’t better integrated with the other Artwork and Support sections. There’s some unique discussion as it pertains to game development, but for everything else, there’s an incredibly large overlap. Game assets should be posted in the Artwork sections. Game API Python questions should be asked in the Coding sections. Game projects should be posted in Finished Projects when they’re done. This discussion has merely brought some of those thoughts back to the front of my mind.
As I see it, there are two routes we could take at this point:
- Integrate the categories in the Game Engine section with the rest of the site (merging most, while simply moving a couple of them mostly untouched)
- Convert the Game Engine section to a Game Development section and make it more inclusive of all the various game engines that Blender interacts with
I’m leaning to the first option. Furthermore, there are a couple things that I’m not interested in doing:
- I want to avoid creating new categories. The forum has too many categories already and we should make better use of tags to organize things.
- I’d prefer to avoid using terms like “Legacy” or “Pre-2.8” or “Old Blender”. That’s a recipe for generating a ghost town and it diminishes the work that people continue to do with the BGE.
- I’m not interested in keeping things exactly the way they currently are. The community benefits when the forum can adapt to it.
- I will not condone deleting any [non-spam] topic in the Game Engine section. Threads will be moved; that’s a given. But we’re not removing anything.
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I’m beginning to enjoy that idea. My initial concern was that by splitting across different section the BGE categories, it would be harder to see it centralized (like we can currently do). But because I mostly stay on the “programming side”, I could simply look at all the Coding categories I guess. I will miss on people posting on the other sections, unless I do move around the forums, whereas before I had everything in one feed.
So, given what you are ready to do and not do, I am for the merging. Even while merged, tags could handle Armory issues or others (I doubt of the popularity of these Armory threads for instance, because they have dedicated forums, but if one of the users wants to try his luck on BA… why not).
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I don’t see why we can’t have legacy / new blender as 2 categories for a few years
many people can’t afford a new GPU to run eevee I assume.
Not a question of “can’t”, BPR. It’s a matter of “should or shouldn’t”.
As I currently understand it (& I know they’ll correct me if I’m wrong) - the site admins/mods are trying to remove barriers between the types of Blender users. Why split game models in their own forum when there is already an Artwork section used by everyone else? Why keep the development knowledge of the game guys segregated in their own subforum when there is a Coding section that could handle a few more Pythonistas around? And if we’re sticking animations, still shots, and finished other finished works in Finished Projects - why not have the game guys put up a demo/link of their finished project there?
I’m bending more and more towards Fweeb’s perspective on this, both for my reasons and for those he has stated.