Hi,
Not sure if this is the right place. I am look at several game engine for an online game. I have been looking at unreal 4, Unity 5, Blender and some open source ones. Ideally I would like an open source engine, that is easily used for game on several platforms including windows, mac and Linux. I plan to use Blender as main 3d software.
From what I can see Unreal appears to be the best, it is also now free and source code is not that expensive to access. Unity seems not far behind, but is less open with code. Both are high quality complete products. What I want to know is how does blender engine compare, I am not likely to be using unreal and unity to their max and pushing graphics to the edge as I want the game more accessible.
So how is blenders performance in comparable situations?
Is it actually kinder to old machines, as it is smaller?
Also what are its limitations?
Does it do anything better than the big ones?
BGE’s killer feature is how tightly integrated the engine is with Blender itself. You can get a very quick flow between editing your models and just hitting ‘P’ to run the game. You don’t have a complicated export step to get the assets from Blender to your game engine.
Also, BGE’s logic bricks are very good for rapid prototyping.
If you are not already capable of producing AAA-quality game assets, then it is unlikely that you will bump up against BGE’s graphic limitations.
kastoria, there aren’t any limitations of bge graphics. The game developer chooses his graphics. As you know, BGE support GLSL scripts, but GLSL has got unlimited opportunities, just find what computer can handle. And what makes blender very easy to use is built in cycles engine which can be used for baking. This way you can make infinite graphics in the same UI with the same unwrapping, models etc.
There’s no headless mode for blenderplayer. This could be a problem depending on the needs of your online game.
UE4 is intended primarily for modern hardware.
Unity has no Linux SDK and makes a weird chill run down my spine.
Can someone iterate why it’s mostly C++ out there and not python?
Why is it most commercial, famous, AAA games are made and done in UE or Unity?
Is there something i miss?
I recall classes welcomes python because it has a much more human language, understandable, so why it’s C??
Is it the garbage collecting and its tendency to follow the longer algorithm in favour of readability than efficiency?
As for logic bricks, physics, those are doable in other engines in different languages, so i am assuming
it must be the language barrier that pulls away some people from a FREE engine.
I had been playing around with unreal for a few months now and it is very nice to use but it does have a fairly steep learning curve. A problem I see with blender is publishing, and distributing your game. From my experience, it can difficult to publish a blender game to the web or a platform other than the one that you are running on. Just re-iterating what others have said, the blender engine’s biggest advantage is the ability to rapidly prototype ideas. This can be crucial if you are developing a game that revolves heavily around the gameplay. It is good because if you don’t like the way something behaves, you can change it very quickly.
I think if you’re wanting to sell a game commercially, well guess what, the BGE is yet another free engine that has a ‘catch’ and a big one at that.
The catch is that you have little to no control over the licensing of your game and your code, every game made with it has to be GPL and you have to make the source file freely available in a fully readable state. You’ll be able to sell it still, but there’s no one stopping a person from re-distributing your game for free (and it’s not pirating either because it’s allowed under the license).
If you want to have more or less total freedom over your product, you can look at other FOSS solutions that offer just that such as Godot, Urho3D, and BDX.
After using allot of engines, mostly bge, I came to a conclusion that the concept of a game engine should only be for beginners into game development. After you get an idea about how a game engine works, you should start making your own custom one based on your needs. I’m personally going wih the webGL train.
If you’re a starter, then my recommendation would be bge, just for the ease of workflow, I still use it for testing out GLSL filters quickly instead of having to setup a scene in other more advanced engines.
Not quite. Some of the modern game engines have things like volumetric shadows, deferred rendering, better usage of the framebuffers, etc. BGE is stuck on OpenGL v2.0 which was released in 2004 and OpenGL is now up to version 4.x and Kronos has even proposed OpenGL’s replacement. The engine itself will limit the effects you can create to a game made roughly in 2004 but probably with more polygons or more detailed textures.
excuse me but if u know how to handle texture baking you can do wonderfull thing in BGE, do all in cycles (including texturing) bake every textures and WALA, you have good graphics for ur game
excuse me but if u know how to handle texture baking you can do wonderfull thing in BGE, do all in cycles (including texturing) bake every textures then pass it to BGE, them erase the materials and use the baked textures and Wala, u have ood graphics for ur game
This all does not matter. Choose the engine that fits your needs. If you do not know what you need you can choose any engine. You will find obstacles regardless what engine it finally is.
Kastoria,
The current openGL version handles all the shaders you need, it’s a matter of a GLSL capable user base, which is really rare here exceptionally. The only shortage from the engine side might be that it needs more/better ways to pass data arrays/tables to a GLSL shader, which would make the rendering pipeline more flexible.
Unity doesn’t have a libload in the free version. You can load scenes in the free version, and it has a handy Do Not Destroy On Load (DNDOL) script. Meaning you can keep objects from scene to scene. But if you wanted to make a large multilevel game, it would quickly bog down your PC/console, without some type of dynamic loading like BGEs Libload. That’s only available in the pro version of Unity.
