kay_Eva, the BGE project was given a little over 3 months including the extra month, and 4 including the month at home where Campbell still worked steadily on the gameplay. Some artwork made before the switch was used of course, though most was made from scratch and to higher standards.
BGE as a viable alternative in the first place was only possible because of the massive amount of bugfixing(50+ kills) Benoit had done on his own for 4 months previous. For a long time he’d been the only formidable force standing between the game engine and the graveyard.
blengine: thanx for design, thanx for coding, thanx for fighting against stupidity and thanx for all the hard work you and the whole blender team faced to let blender shine even more, thanx too for your honesty and for having let us all to know backstage and implication behind YoFrankie.
Found it more entertaining than the regular Gamasutra post mortem…
I know the situation, as game teams, mods, or game companies in general behave quite in that way. Of course, the more experience and less egos, the best things go… At the end the practical perspectives save the day, I 'm afraid. (I still see the point though in the improvement for external engines pipelines, the original idea, or that i did read in its day. ) A game is a painful thing to do allways, but even more when different problems pop everywhere…
But is nothing strange, this kind of things are so frequent… For me, rare is when a team works perfect since day one…
pretty much agree with blengine as an accurate account of events, you might think he’s joking? - not at all. though I don’t go along with some of the more personal comments.
The harshness!!! - I feel sorry for the CS guys but they really had enough time to get things working and kept failing to meet deadlines (Months into the project!) - Why is this “Blenders” fault???
Regarding integration - I think this isn’t an easy problem to solve, getting applications with 2 different feature sets to interpenetrate is always a pain. if this was so easy CryEngine would not have had to invent sandbox their own editor.
Also look at K3D or Ayam- Free 3d apps that focus on renderman standards… who uses K3D?? - Yafray will probably get removed because nobody is maintaining it in blender… does anyone really care? then do something!
Intergration is useful but not sexy. Think of it Collada export Vs GLSL - what do you want more ?
However Id am disappointed we failed on offering better intergraton with external game engines.
Apricot meetings were incredible, mixture of fast spano-english + disjointed polish sentences + ton being partially deaf was really not helpful. (Hows My Dutch? - Not fair I know, but communication suffered)
Comments ranged from “b2cs is the best f*ing game tool”… to … “b2cs sucks, Im going to design the game in a texteditor”…“lets blow up the peach world” … “Lets make a closed source game and big $$$”… CS guys could not even agree on what the problems were. This was very very hard for ton/margreet to manage and for anyone else to know what was going wrong. ( so Im not sure its fair to complain of bad management )
I would have liked to be more open through, real projects have problems like this (as mentioned above) and I think its relevant to blog about the challenges we face as well as the feel good happy snaps.
Benoit? I never heard of him before. Why don’t these guys ever seem to stand up and take a bow every once in a while? Must be against the code. Yes terrible pun intended.
There’s still people that don’t understand their value. It’s the people the important part of a project, not the software nor the machines, just people and how they interact with each other.
This is what is really required for a project to be succeed!
Look at the result of BBB and ED, and the later Apricot when finally the alchemy of the right people was set in! Look at the results of Blender thanks to Ton, Brecht, Campbell, and everyone I am forgetting cause my memory in the morning is still switched off !
It’s because of people. And the big ego is exactly what is NOT needed in this industry.
so Im not sure its fair to complain of bad management
In fairness, you know one was actually unqualified for this industry and the other seemingly stayed hidden with crossed fingers and a fleeting interest. I didn’t fully buy into the guile behind the official blogged explanations, but the failure in team management I really meant was management of ourselves as the team. I can’t rightfully blame any failure on lack of outside influence. That can’t be expected. This was our project to make work, and we were graciously given the freedom for that. It’s a risky style of project management, but Peach was vindication of the potential, and I can’t say I’m totally disappointed in the end either.
I would’ve liked to have been more open during the project too. Try as I might to mimic the duplicity of the average opportunist, I’ll never be able to approach it with the authenticity and fluency comparable to what most people exhibit like it’s just another bodily function.
And I end with another Apricot quote: “I’m going to say THIS, I’m not accepting anything that’s not triple A quality.”
yeah I agree, but sometimes you want to thank the people who are being so awesome and benefiting you because of it, Like, I didn’t really even understand how important Campbell was to the project until about a week and a half ago. Up until then I thought that Pablo and Ton had build most of the game like true commandoes. Not really, but they were the only people I was really all that aware of, everything else was just fuzzy.
I’d like to just say thank you to these guys for all there hard work which is hard if you don’t really know they exist!
It’s like if you see a guy on a baseball field hitting a homerun to help your team win the game. You kind of want to know what his name is. And yes still ego and pride is just nasty stuff in almost every situation and circumstance.
key_Eva as far as I know Ton didnt work on apricot at all (in the way of blender development at least).
But that was the plan, he did help by managing the project and trying to crack the whip on us
Brecht wasnt supposed to work on apricot either except when we switched to the BGE we needed his OpenGL-fu. but this took him away from working on 2.5 so it wasnt ideal.
Benoit, was incredible fixing loads of bugs and adding states, logic bricks we needed. Theeth helped out with snapping features. Erwin’s also done some great work on bullet intergration but this only started just after apricot finished.
My work was mostly with gamelogic, HUD, 2-player-mode /w joysticks, glide, ledgegrab, backflip of walls, loop-the-loops, camera system, splashes, portals, menu, saving gameConfig logicbrick… not so much blender code related though did do bugfixes and small/medium features.
To me, The knot of the generalist / pipeline glue problem appearing in this thread seems to be the Blender file system: if it was human readable, I suppose other applications, even commercial, could import data from Blender seamlessly. But coders know better than me what is good for Blender, I would like to hear their arguments and definition of the current memory dump approach.
but sometimes you want to thank the people who are being so awesome
It’s about time for this! The truth is, if you stumble across someone like Ton you will be blessing every link in the chain of events that showed you such kind fortune. The character of this open, wise, gentle giant could’ve transformed any dank, stale cube of space into a spirited niche for comfort and creativity. The Blender Institute was no second rate place either! This felt like as much of a home as the place from which I’m typing now. He was still humble about his ability to accommodate us, when I was almost embarrassed to be so spoiled! Don’t let the bitter tone of this thread fool you. Two scummy people getting under my skin doesn’t affect me NEARLY as much as the gratitude I have for this opportunity and for meeting this group of people. Pablo flying in was another memorable moment worth sharing. The rain stopped the day he flew in. Rain doesn’t stop in the Netherlands, EVER. He was the easiest guy to talk to and become friends with, and one of my favorite artists working and joking side by side with me made the long nights not long enough.
It was a great time for me. Really, it was fun, challenging, and I gained more experience than one man should be subject to in such a short period of time.
…and Sago raises a good point… That’s why there was so much complaining about the two project durations overlapping.
Hey basse, this is one side of the story, yeah, but let’s not pretend this stuff is anything other than simple. The only complexities would come from trying to make sense of the situation only after it’s passed instead being on the ball throughout. This turned out to be the kind of elementary psychology they’d teach a first year psych student. The stuff you’d basically agree is self-evident after hearing it the first time. The average person just isn’t that intricate. They’re pathetic creatures and wizards of rationalization that tend to over complicate things that affect them significantly, claiming their situation can never be totally understood by anyone but themselves, if at all. The more prolonged or significant the affection, the more adamant they are in saying we certainly aren’t capable of comprehension. I don’t buy into it. I may not always be spot on but it’s only because sometimes I refuse to believe the sheer simplicity of the things I’m staring at. I don’t make excuses for the many things I did wrong. I just worked my ass off to try and make sure what I ended up with would be significant enough to invalidate them.
And a fun quote: “I don’t need this! Jobs come to ME.”
