@Ton Roosendaal - Blender 2.8 - realtime and interactive 3d (Blender 2.9) Blender Game Engine

There was anouncment around Blender 2.8 - realtime and interactive 3d
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-May/049438.html

I can find more information that is actual or how to use if exist. It’s actual?
Where is placed new BGE in road map of versions?
As remeber last BGE was nice and good way to do some interactive presentations.

Maybe take point around Nuitka for python where python can be compiled to exe after convert to cpp lang as intermediate compiler… etc. maybe can help around deployment of game and other.

Blender is good potential competitor for Adobe Animate around game and animation, but lack around interactive objects and control frames inside objects and frames or external files limiting this.

I’m dreaming about ease export of my blender work around interactive 3d to simple html5 file with assets as in AAnimate, and inclulde on web… and control frames like there by python. And need easy manage for hudge timeline.

And it’s time to use B in blender as Blender : )

I hope You spying rightclickselect and have good POs or proxy in this channel ;p

Kiss kiss, and many kisess :* :smiley:


What was the “RTRT” as shorcut on table?

I believe the ecosystem of free open source game engines has changed soo much since these plans that it no longer makes sense to continue with the BGE in any way. Blender never had the resources to support a proper game engine and all the new major studios that switched to blender as a modeling/anim package would have no interest in them diverting resources from infrastructure in attempting to start one.

As for the interactive mode I doubt it will acheive what it sets out to do. Interactive/coupled physics everywhere sounds good on marketing material until you realize that for the most part outside of some previews the kind of physics simulations needed as end results for film/vfx are far outside of what can be reasonably achieved in realtime and different problems often needs its own algorithms that cant magically play well with everything.

I’m dreaming about ease export of my blender work around interactive 3d to simple html5 file with assets as in AAnimate, and inclulde on web… and control frames like there by python

Not sure about AAnimate but seems like a long shot. Having blender export a 3D asset as HTML with an embedded web player seems not only far out of the scope of what the blender team should try with the failure of BGE for the web, but also not the right way to go about making web content nowadays. If you are looking to going into doing interactive 3D web content the best way to do this is probably with frameworks like three.js and using glTF to for model IO from blender.

Coming from someone who likes custom engine tech and works on a hobby engine: I think it’s best to just let the BGE rest. The world has moved on and blender has as well.

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Agreed. I think a solid coupling for other Open Source engines like Godot would be the better way forward. Or even commercial engines. Epic are working on their own toolsets like the Mr.Mannequin tools for easy transfer to Unreal. Maybe it’s also a good sign that William Reynish (apparently) went to Unity in that direction.

Blender as such has still way too much to catch up to the established 3D applications additionally to all the features that set Blender apart from them. Game engine features IMO make much more sense to be kept at use cases for game related asset creation pipelines and integration.
Level creation tools (I’d love to see something like grid-based level editing features, better baking UI elements and feature and better UV tools for example). Physics are already integrated and can be used for asset creations. And anything beyond that would need way too much work or be too half-baked to be actually useful.

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What about upbge (I hope some voice from this side - @ideasman42 , @lordloki are you here or other?)? Are they planing to use Bledner 2.8, 2.9 or next or the project is limited to 2.79 due that BGE was deleted from repo of main blender? Hard to say “let the BGE rest” if they working with this.
edit:{

  • ok, I see version UPBGE-EEVEE-Win64-2021-03-20 : )
    …well… looks it’s working
  • some of my old examples not working like in old but… good to see update
    }

In the way that somebody go far from BGE, let we all go to other from blender… Right? Why not?
The costs of working well financed stuff can be lower than piece of with problems or bugs and risk that never solved or limited… as whole “trap policy around free open source”.

I believe that although it has never been made totally clear a game engine will never be included in Blender again. At best it will go into an interactive mode (like animation nodes or similar) with its own physics timing but not a true game engine.

We, at UPBGE, assume that we will always be in a parallel line to Blender, trying to take advantage of all the new developments (and proposing bugfixes when we see them), but with no intention of integrating into Blender again.

At this moment we are working with Blender 2.93 beta as base and we use eevee as render (you can look at for UPBGE-0.3 Alpha builds if you are interested).

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Thx for voice @lordloki
Interactive mode from BGE was something what speend needs, eg. test concepts (inventions, or for active objects in games), not like pure poses as modified geometry etc. but as more advanced logic as game logic, etc. + fast python scripting.
Just sometime ahead head is the loss of functions of this features where made job around actions, etc. and can’t be used more in futere as mov forward with this type costs (time, financial) and assets. I feel like torn apart when must know so many software nad GUI’s with diffrent UX to reach optimal finall product performance and quality.

In the case that UBGE is not game engine, but require parraler version of blender, what made often problems around merges I belive.

  1. What is problem to made this like in old version where BGE was included?
  2. Or why this can be as pure add-in to be more compatible with current blender versions?
  3. Is this some technical conflict or personal/team?

I take some time to see UPBGE-0.3 Alpha as I edited before You made replay.
Just what I’m afraid here… that can work often with some “laged” version of UPBGE in case of official Blender.

The problem what I’m backing is to stay up to date with add-ons, versions, etc.

I think that writing an XML scene description and then exporting the scene as GLTF can virtually turn any scene into a game. Loading these assets then from a fully capable and dedicated game engine and reconstructing the scenegraph according to XML entries.

Yes, that sounds pretty nice. Having a generic XML/JSON type exporter for game specific assets (tiles for example) could be pretty cool. It would also make it engine agnostic as the import scripts for the description files could be written on the engine side. I have no idea how that should look on the practical side, though. :wink: :smiley:

Blender surely would benefit a lot from a few more game specific features. First and foremost a better baking solution with a much faster and easier setup than we have now. Creating nodes inside the shader editor and having them selected is not only very convoluted - it’s also super slow.
The UV Tools also need a lot more love for games. Better packing and better unwrap algorithms. Maybe also toolsets for marking polygroups as lower density in the unwrap for wen you need to squeeze out more texels in prominent areas.
Not to mention retopology tools which have been in limbo for the last three years. :frowning:

It always makes me sad how much love the film and render specific tools get for each open movie production while game specific workflows seem to be treated more like a side product of this.

Up until Blender 2.79 there were quite a few very awesome plugins from the community. Like Textools which are now fortunately still ported by @SavMartin (Thanks! :heart:) - would be better to have this kind of toolset integrated, though.
There also used to be a really cool FBX Export Plugin (like TexTool also originally by renderhjs) which was able to group FBX files and even auto generate LODs via mesh reduce modifier with custom suffixes and batch export.

The typical problem of plugins: They may not be maintained after some time and it’s difficult to keep track of them over GitHub, BlenderMarket and Gumroad over time.

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But what about the cases where objects are controled fromy python? Eg. integrated with UPBGE and game logic? It’s not advantage, that job is done in Blender? What is relation betwen xml and GLTF in this situation? It’s losing sense - right?

Not sure that Godot can reach this type effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_LIsdSadFI

That is kind of irrelevant because a game engine is not just the rendering aspect. A game engine needs a beautiful renderer (and Godot 4 is shaping up nicely it seems) but it is only a part of the whole. And picking out only the rendering part (which makes up, estimated, maybe ~ 30% of what is important in a game engine) leaves a lot out all the actualy game engine architecture from the whole picture. The whole shabang for logic, developing, optimization, exports, network, flexibility, audio, input handling, etc … everything that makes a game engine a game engine.
If you want Blender to have some rudimentary features to serve as a model presentation engine - that I could actually see. That doesn’t take a lot of game specific logic other than input and constraints and also doesn’t take as many optimizations. Sort of like a free alternative to Marmoset.
Though, what I think is far more important than any game mechanic features in Blender is a synchronized viewport option to give artists the ability to very accurately create content in Blender and have it preview the way it will look inside the game engine they export to.

What Blender direly needs for game artists is optimization, though.

And UPBGE is far from this? Is UPBGE ugly?
Soo what? Looks Unity have much more commercial stuff? As easy ready to use after download?

These guys doing amaizng work here and the results are pretty nice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdjY69aSCg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nky3x9dNsU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjETVmF-RjQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_7-sl_W964
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV3mpb4I9CS4PelJVRTLlA/videos
Looks like EA GL from NFS games…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hrxeb9EZF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xhPE0Ag0Wk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRXRt1msaQ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whuWUtDO2xg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNEXT2Cv-M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpNyE6SWpvo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS1D688GDsk

I see the streaming textures, objects, world solutions, multiplayer, etc. What more need what can’t be done in blender?
Coz I see combinations around binding python for unity, unreal…

I agree about hudge volume for objects, materials, etc. in blender… that need optimization, but is still challenge.
Curently UPBGE is far around WEBGL, but I think can be solved too by ecmascript, etc.

I never said it’s not possible. I said: I don’t see a good reason to have a game engine reintegrated into a program specialized in content creation. But I am not a Blender programmer so you really don’t have to convince me. Or … you know … just use UPBGE if it already is exactly what you want.

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For me is strange that UPBGE integrating Blender, not Blender UPBGE… I see dificuties around this strategy.
Eg. the GP can be enough for simple games in my opinion, and good step to allow WEBGL publish, then next steps.

The BGE was killed off for a reason. It was unmaintainable as a viable game engine or as a component of blender. It was a burden. UPBGE is an unofficial hobby project to try to maintain the old codebase for as long as possible outside any work from the blender core developers. Asking the blender foundation to try to go back on their (quite frankly wise) decision and take on the task of managing a usable/multiplatform game engine alongside blender is rather unreasonable.

As I stated earlier: Exporting to established WebGL frameworks is currently handled by glTF. Exporting out embeddable webplayers/scripts is not an acceptable or maintainable way of doing things.

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