Autodesk to unveil a game engine by year's end? Should the BF initiate a response?

http://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/bitsquid

Apparently, it’s sounding like Autodesk is planning to directly compete with the guys at Epic and Unity Technologies, by introducing their own game engine product based on Bitsquid technology.

Now in the BF’s case, this is an area where the response can be quite easy, and that is because Blender already has had a game engine built in since 2.24. Not beefing up the BGE in response would be saying to Autodesk that we will not try to compete and that they can have the market, since when would Ton choose to surrender one or more market segments to Autodesk when he’s actually gone out of his way to pick apart the EULA to try to make a case for Blender?

Why though? For one thing you can consider the fact of incredible difficulties getting the .fbx exporter up and running, it’s clear that Autodesk doesn’t want Blender to even register in this area so work on the solution it already has would in effect be an easier thing to persue. The first thing that can be done to pave the way for faster BGE improvement is to resolve the long-standing patch review crisis with patches sitting in the tracker for years and may have actually lost a lot of potentially contributors because they’ve been left hanging with no response or acknowledgement, there is developer interest, the BF just needs to recognize it better or a product named Game Blender might become the first real fork of the software.

I just hope the BF recognizes that when this product comes out, that a potentially good response is already in Blender and just needs a bit more attention. Blender already in a way competes with their compositing software with the VSE and compositor and their sculpting software with sculptmode, are we going to do the same in this case? If not, then it’s very possible that Blender will become the only 3D solution out there that no game developer uses because of the failure of open format standards and its result of the GPL becoming like a supermax prison and nothing at all like a help.

So with .fbx being stuck in neutral for the most part and Autodesk making a game engine, will the BF choose to struggle with .fbx support or will it focus on the solution its already sitting on?

So who’s going to do it? It’s always been my understanding that this dropping of the ball is almost entirely due to a lack of resources. FBX is a struggle, but there is a ton of user demand for it, and a small outpouring of financial support from the game community to get it. Plus, and most importantly, there are coders willing and able to develop it.

I’m all for a kickass blender open source game engine, but if no is available to code it, then that’s that.

I don’t agree that Blender has just these 2 options at hand. First of all bitsquid at its current state needs a lot of improvements to compete with Unity , Ue4 or cryengine.So they will be playing catch up for a while. Secondly fbx is essential to exchange files between Ad products.However game engines are a different matter, there are a lot of other engines which use their own format and writing an exporter which outputs to that format can be done with some effort. If a studio would really want to use blender for their own engine they could so by writing an exporter for it.

Support for custom formats from these popular engines are a different matter but I doubt they will object to it as long as it is feasible. If there is a sdk or access to the engine api , I believe writing and managing exporters can be done.

And lastly the bge plans for changing it to an “interactive mode” is a much better choice in my opinion. There is too many things to manage on a game engine and unfortunately BF doesn’t have the resources.

the Blender Game engine is so was it planned, transitioning into a Model viewer which can show PBR textures.
the pro sides of that are, it doesn´t take too much of the resources of the paid developers and still modernises the BGE and gives a good foundation for others to make more out of it - the open source philosophy could take on.

The effort of modernizing the BGE as a game engine from the paid developers would throw other areas behind like the many patches which need to be looked into and proved for merging and the many bugs which need to be fixed - not fixing that clearly isn´t wished for nor needed, right!?

resource management comes into account and since other Game engines are much better, the BGE is not competing but going to take a cool supporter role.

As you have written the problem is in the fileformat(s) not so much in the available tools in Blender.
to make a new file format get used, it must be first be accepted and used by the industry if you get the big players in the industry to use it, the rest will follow, show clearly what the plus side is of that file format and the willingness is increasing.

Forking… since the ones talking about that are not doing it, it kind of lost its threatening nature even more so when you think how much of an utopia it is of maintaining so many lines of code would need a lot of resources.

the fast majority of Game Artists are willingly taking the discrepancies of the fbx solutions into account to not being forced to use the BGE with its limiting licence which you get when you compile an exe.

There is clearly no need to compete with a multi billion dollar company like Autodesk, it would also be not realistic to archive.

Finally why should the User be forced to always stick to Blender while there are so many beautiful and faster solutions available like Godot, Construct2, game maker, Unity or UE4 and probably many more ?

Its mistake to compare BGE with big game engines, BGE has always been about ease of use and close integration with Blender. So no this does not affect BGE as most likely Autodesk new game engine is likely to fail on both these ground and certainly on the second one.

We are not on a “market” since we don’t sell anything and we don’t “compete” with Autodesk. The Blender game engine is great for prototyping but is never going to be a direct competitor to Unity, UE or any any other engine, nor is that a plan even, afaik.
If we manage to have FBX as an exporter (or any other exporter) so that indie studios can deliver to those engine it’s already great.

Bitsquid is a nearly unknown engine (~38K google responses vs. 4.8M for Unity and 1.5M for UDK). If Autodesk had really wanted to enter the video game engine field, they would have done an unrefusable offer to the owners of CryEngine (which is struggling and therefore a potential acquisition target).

As it is written in the article, Autodesk interest is in grabbing real time visualization technology to embed in their programs.

About Blender game engine: if you google for Unity3D or UDK or CryEngine you get the appropriate links, if you google for BGE, the first link is to Baltimore Gas Electric :evilgrin:.

Bah, just let the BGE die already, or fork Blender for those who still want it :yes:

Autodesk developing their own engine? ROFL. Autodesk couldn’t code Tetris if they tried. Buying things and ruining them is all they’re good at.

Ace you have a unique talent for writing dramatic thread titles.

Why would you even prototype in BGE if you can’t use any of that work directly in a real game? I think GPL is also keeping game developers well away from BGE even if it was good.

And there we go, Queue 60 pages on the GPL issue :smiley:

As far as my experience with the BGE goes, I’m afraid to delve deeper into it.
Something about how you work with it strikes me the wrong way and tbh i’d rather develop something in a more robust and controllable environment ( looking at you python , I still love you tho <3 ).

In other words, just leave BGE be, there are better free alternatives out there that you can put on your portfolio as a developer.

Well what can you say. It’s not like GPL is going away even we wanted.

We are not on a “market” since we don’t sell anything and we don’t “compete” with Autodesk.

It’s not so easy really. Blender has its place between all the other engines and 3D packages. And development of Blender happens by money. Blender has paid developers. So there is in fact some kind of competition.

There’s no way AD can fully compete with Unity or UE at this point, so there must be another market they’re targeting. They would be incredibly stupid to alienate the customers that rely on established game engines. I guess when you’re the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you think you can get away with anything.

Note that this is currently not the case for the BGE.

Good hint. But BGE ships together with Blender. And aren’t there some plans to change what the BGE currently does and how it is integrated? I remember a blog entry from Ton.

Why does there need to be a response? never got that thinking.

I doubt that modo, lightwave or cinema 4d will be changing plans at this news…

I’ve worked on a lot of AAA console games over the years and prototyped stuff in BGE… just makes things nice to sketch out level designs etc and prototype look dev sometimes…

Of course these days more often than not the prototyping would be in unity… it just makes sense sometimes to prove stuff out quickly before the “real” solution is agreed on.

Agile development is the fashion after all.

I quite like the BGE. It has powerful shading abilities, a very efficient physics engine, all the high-level logic is written in a well-established and easy to learn scripting language (Python), and it’s already tightly integrated into a general 3D production package. There’s no import/export pipeline; you literally just press P and you are playing the game inside Blender. That’s amazing.

Yes, it’s extremely quirky, lacks certain key features, and nobody takes it seriously. But Blender was like that 10 years ago.

Bah, just let the BGE die already, or fork Blender for those who still want it :yes:

Imagine if someone said the same thing about Cycles, or the particle system, or fluid simulation. You would be vexed! I used to say the same thing, but then I started playing around in the BGE and I got hooked. It has tremendous potential. Mark my words- one of these days, a sufficiently insane person is going to release a solid indie game in the BGE, granting it the attention it deserves, and in another 5-10 years, people will say the game engine is one of Blender’s most indispensable assets.