With him, LordLoki, Sybren, and Moguri, we may just now have the dev. team that the BGE needs if it is to make a comeback as a quality part of Blender.
In my opinion, a good start would be a major wave of bugfixes that would at least allow all known current projects to continue without fear of breakage in 2.74 (so projects being worked on in old versions can be moved to the latest release). The second step then would be cleaning up and organizing the BGE source. You might wonder why I wouldn’t vouch for a bunch of new features right away, but you create a big risk if you start adding a bunch of things on top of a cracked foundation. All the shiny new toys in the world are useless if the basics that allow the actual creation of games start to break.
I think those are very good news. I noticed that there new commits about bge and more work in the open tasks, also some days ago HG1 update some of his commits about mist, background, etc, so I hope some of his commits get be in blender (an other good ones from other developers), but is it better that they clean up and organize the bge source first?
With this manpower, and a decisive set of actions, we could see the bge overtake some commercial engines,
I think more precoded assets like base movement systems, doors, switches etc, would allow indies to use the engine without
GPL issues (who cares if people copy your code that is already in the engine?)
Art is Protected,
Now we need -
VBO support , OpenGL2.1 , OpenES, hardware instancing,
They recently fixed my personal bane of my existence. - Physics ghosts on parenting.
(I still need to pull down a test build and run a old file or 2 to confirm)
Yay!
Thank you kind Devs!
if we can get the bge running fast on PC and at least a blender player that runs very well on android we will be in business!
(I always pictured Wrectified on steam, and the Play store)
Although, the fact that it took 2 years for HG1 to get commit access is way too conservative IMHO. When you have developers maintaining their own builds because they can’t get patches in - that is a bad sign. With that kind of time frame, development will move at a snails pace, as we have witnessed.
The GPL issue will never go away unless the BGE is rewritten without Blender code, or Blender leaves the GPL which will also never happen unless they write a new Blender from scratch or something. It’s safe to say there’s a lot of cleanup and refactoring ahead for them before they implement new things.
Woah, I think it’s too early to talk about overtaking commercial engines (especially the big ones like Unity).
We haven’t yet gotten to where we can get a clear measurement on just how much of a development boost this will equate to. Sure, the commit numbers have increased, but the thing that matters is how much of an increase we’ll see and whether it is sustained.
It’s too early to know if we’re seeing the start of a genuine turnaround in the state of the BGE, even though I would put as a bit more likely than say, a month ago.
Basically, he creates some common sense restrictions such as that they can freely focus on bugfixes and that new BGE-only features need approval by two other developers in the area. They will also need approval from other module owners if their changes affect other areas of Blender.
Either way, it’s a much better system than what the BGE had in the past.
Mahalin; I agree that waiting two years can be a bit excessive if they are active, but the core team seems to be working on improving the patch review process and getting commit rights to more people (applying to all of Blender, which will even see benefits for version 2.74).
This is a really great news, I’m glad to hear that!
For me, cleaning the code that risk to make old projects break is not a that big issue. If it can save and enhance the BGE, let’s do that.
A question : why now? is it a way to prepare the interactive mode?
I never anticipated the BGE suddenly getting a new dev. team with the potential to fix all of the major issues and bring it back to how it was at its peak.
If that did happen, then I may be open to finishing up some of my existing BGE projects despite the probability of Godot becoming the favored player in the FOSS game creation space.
However, this may be the last chance that the existing BGE has to really get going again, if three new people with commit rights can’t give a major boost to development then nothing will.
Additional members with commit rights, means faster bug-fixes pushed through (they can be created even without commit rights) as there are more developers to review them.
Four leading developers are still not much, but way better than three ;).
A warning to all of the guys thinking that suddenly the development will boost the BGE to a new level. No, it is just a step forward to keep the BGE development alive. If you want eyecandy-feature XYZ …go on submit a patch now there are two eyes more to review your work :evilgrin:.
There’s been three bugfixes today so far as an initial result of this move (Lordloki committing, not HG1). Activity so far is at the highest point since last August.
A nice start for sure, hopefully it can keep up all the way to the release.
The BGE has numerous issues that need to be tackled first, plus you have the fact that trying to optimize code that’s still in a messy state could cause problems.
The process might get sped up a little if we see more activity from what’s now a fifth person assisting the four with commit rights (he’s currently fixing up some things himself).
