If you can't make anything worthwhile -> Don't blame the BGE

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

There have been a number of threads where people discuss the state and capabilities of the BGE, with some implied relation to their own inability to actually make good games. These discussions have been spurred on by recent comments from Ton, which hinted at a new development direction, and one that might not include the BGE. The reactions to those comments paint a very unflattering picture of the BGE community: Most people here don’t seem to care about making good games.

If people actually cared about games, they wouldn’t be so shaken, because the BGE is simply a tool, which, being open source, will remain eternally available, regardless of what the Blender Foundation ultimately decides to do. So, there’s really nothing to worry about, if you’re just looking to make a good game with the BGE - It’s not a perfect engine, but you can definitely use it, as it is now, to make quality games.

Here’s the proof: http://deadcyborg.com/

That’s a game made with the Blender Game Engine, and one that’s even been greenlit by the Steam community.

Additionally, look at pretty much anything done by SolarLune - He’s doing incredible work.

Could better technology help such developers (for some general definition of “better”)? -> Yes, but it’s clearly not a requirement to make a quality game, especially if you keep your vision constrained to something realistic, because even with the latest and greatest in technology, games are really hard to make, and one person (or even a small team) can only do so much.

As for everyone else -> I don’t think better technology would actually help:

Even if almighty “Unity 3D” (or even CryEngine) was directly integrated into Blender, it wouldn’t make one lick of difference, because your goals are not realistic, and even if they were, you still wouldn’t have the skill/will/determination to push a quality game to completion: If you don’t know how to program, and your artistic skills are substandard, and your notion of creativity doesn’t extend far beyond copying what AAA companies have already done to death … Aside from some magical “make the game I’m thinking of, exactly as I envision” button, there is no technology that would significantly help (most of) you.

There was a recent thread called something like “why do most developers leave the bge half-way into their project?”, and there were a bunch of silly answers there, referring to things like performance, graphics features, and, of course, typical GPL fear mongering.

Yes, those may very well be the reasons why people go to other engines, but I don’t even know a handful of such people who actually finished whatever game they wanted to make, in any engine. They blame the BGE, switch to something else, and then blame the new engine, or they just plain quit, because game development is hard, even with a realistic scope (which they don’t have to begin with).

You claim the BGE is not good enough? Prove it by actually making something worthwhile, in whatever you judge to be “better”.

You think Unity is great? How many awesome games did you make with it?

Zero?

Yea, I thought so.

2

I agree with what you wrote.
Problem in here is that there aren’t that many finished games which can inspire and increase the BGE users especially newcomers to aim and create good games ,so this gives a mentality to the community that blender game engine isn’t capable of making AAA games which is something that it can 100% do even if I must say there are things in which blender seriously needs to be worked such on such as performance which they are already working on for the new blender releases (2.69 and 2.7).

Also by searching in the W.I.P games and finished games in the forum the games which people made before during blender 2.40 releases have very low graphics but amazing gameplay in confront of the current games made in blender.

But for now the way I see it BGE downfall is the fact that its hard to make games for android and iphone using BGE.

So to conclude it I suggest that the community instead of criticizing BGE they should support it,also BGE users can easily make games which can be put on indie db or Steam but what you need is solution and ideas,so make your own game with your own style if you have problems making the game ask help to the community I bet they would be glad to help you to succeed with your game :wink:

3

Who would not want to make a game of the type they like to play.You can get ideas by playing videogames as well.Probably some need a little encouragement.

4

I think the one thing holding most people back is a lack of cooperation , and the tools to do so. I would love to be able to use blender-verse to both make games, and have things explained to me, in real time, with the ability to see the end product.

An issue preventing me at the moment is my lack of skill, and now my lack of a pc…
My gpu gave up its ghost…

Goran, Do you want to take over Wrectified until I get a new motherboard and gpu? My notebook had an integrated radeon 54xx series… and it made some lovely abstract images before failing a gpu stress test, never to turn on again…

I again submit, I WILL NEVER STOP until Wrectified is done…
It is intended to be a community project, so about that community…

Help?

5

Indeed, the main weakness the BGE has is its comunity. Most of us are hobbyists and make the BGE look bad! Very few programmers and artists actually commit to a project and finish it.
The most active members, are mostly enthousiasts, with little skill to back them up!
So if we want the BGE to get better/stronger, we need to power ourselves up!

6

But then, isn’t that a chicken and egg situation? I have been learning the BGE for over two years as I make my game. I am a hobbyist starting from scratch, like most people here. If just one out of hundreds becomes a Goran, Monster, agoose or SolarLune isn’t that better than nothing? Unity has the same problems with amateurs, the only difference is they have more money to spend. Just looking on the Unity and Playmaker forums shows this. Just as Goran states, its the person not the tools that fail.

In fact, I think the BA community is a great boon for the BGE, and a strength that will see the BGE through a time of great transition. I mean, with Unity, can you talk directly to its developers like you can here? The BGE may be made by people donating time, but then everything is done in a very democratic way.

7

Agree 100%. 99% of us here on BlenderArtists are not even close to being held back the limitations of BGE itself. For me, it’s my own lack of time, determination, and creativity that holds me back from making a good game. If you truly find yourself limited by the BGE’s performance or graphical capabilities, then you either:
1.Are aiming way too high
2.Have no clue what you’re doing
3.Are a skilled professional developer who truly ought to move on to another engine

8

@Rubbernuke@ Apart from money the difference between bge and unity or udk is that the already have lots of people who made ready scripts for games which are available so that even an amateur is able to make a good game by simply adding the scripts which have been already made by other users.

9

Well one thing has to be stated here, if you’re trying to create a graphical realism on the level of the Cryengine or UDK, it would be difficult at the least due to the fact that the BGE is behind a lot of other engines when it comes to built-in graphical features. It’s the same with various game types that typically have required a specialized engine such as Minecraft and a large-scale RTS.

However, the BGE has all of the capabilities needed to create arcade games, platformers, and games of many other genre’s, but to make an amazing game with the BGE will typically require a fair amount of Python knowledge and optimization tricks (which there are many), this is especially true for large-scale games which may indeed see the engine bog down a bit as things get complex, but new and upcoming features like built-in animation culling and LOD will make some of these things easier and faster.

10

Bge is really the same as most other engines- when they are stripped down. It’s just those other engines were made tailored for the game dev in mind. In Ue3 with matinee you can fade in the screen with two or three clicks. You can do the same thing in blender but you have to place the plane in front of the camera and create and animate the material, etc. You have to do most optimization features of other engines yourself as well. The bge isn’t really built for all the problems and features that a dev would normally require however you can do those bits yourself. So the bge is really a hacky diy type game engine where you really get what you put in.

11

GORAN
You think Unity is great? How many awesome games did you make with it?

Zero?’’

And everyone in the world can afford Unity Pro right? Or can you get it for free? For everyone?
Look, if unity pro would have been free… i think only 30% would have used blender ge anymore, trust me.(yep, mobile publishing too)

Also, maybe others want to do a mobile game, can you do one with blender?

I know everyone loves blender and within these forums, talking about another engine is like putting the knife at the neck…but lets be realistic though, this sort of disscusion been like forever, with no changes.

I like BGE, I always did and I always will,but for larger projects…it is not the best option.

12

I’m very confused as to what you’re trying to say. Could you reiterate?

13

I have seen a lot of really fun Blender games here that just need a lot of polish.
If you think you’ve outgrown BGE move on to a better engine.

14

Ace, it was not what I really meant, but you are right anyway.
Maybe one day bge will be so good ,that even large indie developers will choose it to create a game.
I see blender growing,but as it is growing slowly, the other engines grow too, and the problem is that they grow faster and they are already much better than the bge.

I dont know,maybe it will happen a miracle and some paid devs will make it shine like it deserves.

15

Ace Dragon, I often see calls for some sort of fundraising for the BGE- do you think thats called for now?

16

Blender is a game engine, just like urho, Isenthel, and a host of others.
Unity, Cryengine and a whole bunch of different ones are what I’ll call Game Toolsets.

A game toolset includes a game engine, but also prebuilt common things like mouselook, networking, pre-made assets and rigs, and everything it takes to make a game (out of things that may or may not be yours) in a short time.

A game engine is a rendering engine coupled with a physics engine. Nothing more, nothing less.

The problem is that because blender has a GUI people expect it to be a game toolset, not realizing that, like every game engine in the world, you’ll need to do everything yourself. I like this, because no game toolset in the world has built in support for what I like doing. I’ve never seen a game toolset for creating space-sims or, well, anything other than a standart FPS or a standard RTS. So please, keep blender a game engine.

Yes, this is a simplification.

Another simplification/exaggeration:

New blender game engine user (NU): Blender is great, you can do anything with logic bricks
Old blender game engine user (OU): Just you wait and see about that
NU: Blender is harder than I thought, the logic bricks are restricted
OU: Yup, they are. Try learning to script
NU: Blender engine itself is restricted. I can’t do LOD, filters are slow etc. et.
OU: I see you didn’t learn to script. Head to the resources forum and see what you can find, or LEARN TO SCRIPT.
NU: Blender engine sucks, you can’t do anything with it.
OU: Huh, really, look at the five games I’ve made.
NU: I’m going to ABCD engine because it’s random.choice([better, faster, easier,])
OU: I doubt you’ll have better luck there, but good luck anyway.

NU vanishes for engine ABCD
A few months later, NU may re-appear breiefly as he realizes that blender wasn’t as bad as he thought, but in the end, 97.3% of new blender users quit making games, discovering that there’s actually something complicated going on behind even the simplest game.

17

I mentioned this before but making a polished game requires a lot of time and energy, and to make anything close to a AAA game, you need a team unless you truly have the dedication (like the creator of DeadCyborg did).

One person with relative ease and motivation can create a 3D model, but creating a game requires not just modeling, but sound, networking, programming, testing (tests your patience), etc. I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of programming needed to create a game, especially those coming from an artistic or modeling background. When new people making a game, encounter programming, they realize the difficulty and then give up. Fortunately, the BGE has a Python API and logic bricks*, but regardless, programming will never come easy for everyone (unless they start teaching it in school…even so).

The BGE has this image or reputation of “you can easily make any game you want!” tool that attracts noobs but turns off serious developers. I mean a game engine is serious business http://blenderartists.org/forum/images/smilies/sago/stick-out-tongue.gif. Then again, it was designed to be used by artists and not game developers. However, the Blender modeling tool has that seriousness and doesn’t come off like Milkshape3D or something. It seems like only now, the BGE has hit puberty where it can really grow and be something more. Some open-source projects take a while to mature and eventually they hit that growth spurt; unfortunately, some never do.

Furthermore, games are highly subjective whereas your general utility program has a very specific goal and does not deviate much from that. For example, Blender is a modeling tool and not anything else like a sound editor or an image editing program so everyone contributing to it has roughly the same goal in mind - making it a better modeling tool. The number of ways that goal can be implemented are limited compared to games which are almost unlimited in creativity since they are fantasy. When a person sees a game, they might not like the story or gameplay and they won’t be interested in contributing or joining the team. Due to its subjective nature, later on people are more likely to leave if the project design or implementation deviates significantly from what they signed up for. This is especially so for internet collaboration.

  • A thought just hit me: maybe logic bricks should be used as a way to organize programming/scripts rather than being the programs themselves (if that makes sense…). Or would that just be like some sort of IDE utility? For example, Python has only so many object types, and you could create a different brick for each one, idk…
18

Everyone’s right. Absolutely.
My be support devs with money?
You know all everything degrades if doesn’t progress.
In our case even to slow progress guides to death.
So may be support Kupoman, Moguri, Agoose?. No?
It wouldn’t be bad to have “our” small reliable dev team… No? Three guys would be totally enough.
(I know. It is a hopeless suggestion.
“I dont want. Just a hobby. It open source. etc. etc.”
As usual.)

19

Mahalin , thats the best post I have seen so far. Yes, blender is supposed to be a modeling+animation dedicated software,but not a game engine.
For a game, you need a dedicated software, not a deviation. Blender is the best 3D suite i have ever used, and it will be like that for ever.
Blender’s main goal was to be an open source modeling +animation software , and for some reasons it will be like that. (excepting the rendering?)

20

Then why bother talking about it here? Clearly the bge is a primitive stripped down version of a game engine. Why bother arguing merits with actual game development software? If someone wants to build a game the clear choice that I’ve seen here is not to use blender if you don’t want to have to do everything yourself.