Interaction sounds terribly boring, I can only agree with that. Still, I believe it is better go make something that is solid and boring at first. If there is a more solid and maintainable code base with intersections to Blender features that can be used in realtime contexts, there is a real chance that core developers will more frequently have a look at it and take it into account.
I am not saying this will happen, but there is at least a realistic chance. The BGE in its current state needs a lot of love, far more than it gets. Even if the code review difficulties were sorted out, I don’t believe there would be enough developer power to push it far enough. Sometimes it is unavoidable to make one step back, even if it is boring.
There is a stark difference between mine and yours definitions for “boring” and “realistic”; personally I follow the ones found on Merriam-Webster.
BF attitude about BGE (Blender Game Engine not Boston Gas Electric :evilgrin:) is solidly grounded into Reality™.
right now most people dont even know what resources there are for the bge.
there are possibilities with the bge packaged with blender, that are above and beyond ue4, Ue4 does not have a full3d animation toolkit.
using bpy and the bge one can create assets in game,
we are missing efficient draw call batching, screenspace normals, and some physics callbacks, the rest has almost all been done here or there.
My own project, if I ever finish , will be used to gather funding for paid bge development,
GPL only applies to code, and if 90% of this code is been written before, why do you care?
the bge, if “Bridged” rather than integrated, could make games in games, as well as allow for in game texturing, etc.
Network socket-> BPY (command+model) ->return New model
Actually, the differential section of the developer website shows that there is interest in BGE development. For example, there is one person who created a patch to fix the world API and another who initiated an effort to organize the BGE code.
The issue here goes back to the patch review crisis which I mentioned earlier, a lot of volunteer developers have noticed that getting their patches reviewed and in Blender is a very slow process (slow enough that Blender could potentially be years ahead of where it is now had the BF cared more about making sure there were always resources for that).
There is interest, the BF just needs to recognize that and assist in helping these developers get their stuff into trunk.
One can draw incredible works of art in Microsoft Paint. You’ll still find most artists prefer software that allow them to make their art quicker, easier, and without having to workaround large limitations in the chosen tool. Just because a tool can be used for a given task doesn’t mean it’s the best or even preferred tool for the task.
Sorry, but when I work on things, I don’t think I recall feeling that I had to workaround limitations all of the time. Yes, maybe some of the time, but not to the point that it takes the majority of my time like some who have never used it want to suggest.
Sometimes I wonder how far from game dev reality many “game devs” from this thread are. I mean, it’s clear they are far from it. But how far? o.O
It’s pure denial. Even if it was the fastest, most stable, best integrated, most scalable, most portable engine on the planet it would still be patently useless to pretty much every game development studio due to the license.
To individuals wanting to create games, maybe not so much.
The game industry today is so over-saturated with people trying to sell their new application that a large majority will not even get to the point of breaking even once you factor in all of the expenses. In fact, comments on various game dev. sites indicate that some are going back to game making as a hobby because you simply can’t make much of a living as a game developer unless you have world class development and marketing skills.
Mobile for instance is no longer the gold mine that many indies have originally thought to be, even large publishers like King are struggling because the average mobile customer does not live under the concept of brand loyalty when it comes to games. The ‘race to the bottom’ is also a major problem because it’s now quite risky to price a game at anything other than a bargain price.
Now if commercial engines like Unity and UE4 were minting millionaires on a regular basis, then yes perhaps a GPL game engine would be fairly useless, but as of now maybe not as we’re instead seeing a regular trend of new developers going broke.
And as I said before, one could also try to argue that Blender itself is patently useless even as an asset or level creator for something like a Unity game, because the GPL makes it a lot more difficult to properly support the required formats like .fbx. In this case the GPL is a Blender problem and is something that the BF may need to address less it starts to initiate a major handicap on all future growth potential (for not only the game industry, but the 3D industry in general)
IMHO open-source engines/gaming in general are just not there yet. There is no Linux of game engines so far, at least any with significant commercial backing. Actually, the BGE might be the closest thing to it with the BF.
As far as I know, the only open source game engines that have serious feature sets I would classify as modding engines more than game engines. As in, an old product divested from the portfolio of a commercial company like ID software and instead of building a game how you want, you just start changing the rules of a pre-built game.
The truth is, something that is FOSS can only have a serious future if the organization behind it has a commercial component that involves creating and selling products, paid developers, or subscription services. A lot of the existing open source engines that try to stay as a mostly volunteer only project will either wither away in a few years time or remain at a glacial development pace with no chance of registering compared to the products of corporations like Unity. This is not just with game engines, but with all creative programs. The BGE has the unique position of being an engine that is a part of Blender and the BF may very well be wasting potential here if they decide not to capitalize on it (and the BF’s capability in exploiting potential depends on who you talk to, some people think that wasting potential is the only thing the BF is capable of).
the indie market and mobile in particular is increasingly based on “games as a service”… in a world where most apps are free to play and dominated by IAP the gpl is unlikely to help in monetising… all you have left is advertising revenue… but it would be so easy to remove the annoying ads with a gpl product so not viable.
ironic considering the gpl aims to make coding a service… it just doesn’t work in a free to play world. i could go on but let’s keep it punchy!
This thread is turning into ******* joke. Ace, if you want to make free games, then make them and stop asking for BGE to become golden standard. BGE has nothing to do with anyone making games. People who want to make games need to dust off their old DVDs, and start modding them (Quake, HL2, Crysis2, Doom 3, Gears of War for PC, StarCraft 2, etc.). This way not only you don’t have to deal with BGE’s shortcomings, but you also don’t need to make whole a lot of art assets. Keep making mods until you make something out of ordinary where capacity of existing engine is dwarfed by your mighty skill and creativity. Then you can use your reputation and portfolio to gather a skilled team with world class development skills and make BGE+ or whatever you please, to power your new wonder of the gaming world.
I doubt that the BGE is going to be capitalized any time soon. There simply isn’t enough going for it to meaningfully “compete” with AD or Unity or Epic. Not to knock the BGE, but it simply isn’t that good. It works, but that’s about where it stops. Like has been mentioned numerous times, it is good for basic games and quick prototypes, but not much else.
Seriously, Ace. What is up with all of these “X company does Y, How will blender respond?” threads? It’s software development, not political/sports banter. No need to try to stir the pot with dramatic thread titles. This isn’t Fox News.
So you’re arguing what exactly? That they should make their games but instead of hoping to sell them they should just accept from the outset that they’re not going to sell many copies, and therefore they should use a GPL engine and give the games away for free? What?
Assuming BGE was a great engine (which it isn’t), who exactly would you honestly recommend it to with the GPL license?
You have said that before. It’s still irrelevant. The GPL doesn’t put any license restrictions on program output. It may be inferior output in some respects, but it’s yours to do with as you please.
To Motorsep; Well I’m sorry if the very existence of people using the BGE offends you, I don’t get why the mere mention of keeping and improving the BGE enrages some so much?
It really does seem to be about the long-standing ‘my way or get lost’ belief when it comes to what agenda that others want to see set for Blender, there’s simply no room at all for others. The BGE users are by no means willing to coerce others into using it as their exclusive engine, but just for Blender to have it as a comprehensive solution for game creation.
Like has been mentioned numerous times, it is good for basic games and quick prototypes, but not much else.
And some of my projects have up to a couple thousand lines or more of Python code for the game mechanics and supporting stuff, not exactly AAA complexity, but a notch higher than something classified as ‘basic’ or ‘quick prototype’ (and to note, I have too many WIP games that I can’t work on all at once, and none because of engine limitations).
Wait, you’re considering something with 2k lines of code to be beyond a quick prototype?
…
Motorsep, got some stats on your own prototype? 
That’s exactly the only measure used in software development to gauge the complexity of a project!
:spin:
I am using Doom 3 BFG engine, and I am still in tech demo stage o.O 363,239 lines of code, but that’s entire engine with gameplay code 
Original Wolfenstein 3D for example has 27,311 lines of code.
Well, you do note that it’s Python being used here (which doing things require just a fraction of the lines compared to C++).
There’s also numerous functions such as rayCast() and stuff from the Mathutils module that helps to compress code quite a bit as well.
Sure, I could bypass use of as many convenience functions as possible to make the code look more impressive, but a programmer uses ways to cut back on total line count right?
Wait, you’re considering something with 2k lines of code to be beyond a quick prototype?
May I ask about the type of person who dozens of hours poring over API documentation and setting up logic (along with extensive testing) just to put a ‘quick’ prototype together, just what is your definition of quick?
If I’m to spew arbitrary numbers I’d say 3 man-months or less would be pretty quick, but of course it depends on the complexity of the final product you’re going for. 3 man-months would be pretty damn slow for a tetris clone prototype and amazingly (dare I say impossibly) fast for an RPG or RTS prototype.
This prototyping catch phrase is about as relevant as the GPL to the majority of people actually using the engine. I won’t bring the discussion back to the surface here (we’ve plenty of other discussions on the topic). Prototyping is an “outsider” expression, if you’ll excuse the isolationism.
Concerning SLOC, Python drastically reduces the amount of code you need to write. I just rewrote a Python application in C++ to improve the performance, and increased the SLOC by a factor of something > 2. That’s C++, with the C++ standard library, not solely the C counterpart. Hence smaller counts are more impressive with Python.
The original engines have huge line counts because they consist of the engine and game logic. Using the BGE, for example, we describe the SLOC in the scripting layer alone. (Motorsep notes this already).
Concerning AutoDesk, I don’t really know what area they intend to target with an interactive engine. Even the Blender plans seem rather vague. Perhaps an in-place rule based logic system for a form of interactive storyboard might be useful, but I struggle to identify concretely what an interactive engine brings to the table, so unless AutoDesk intends to produce a fully fledged game engine, it seems rather non-sense.
people can, and are making games in the bge, for commercial reasons,
My code is gpl, my models, story, and concepts are not.
We (a small chunk of bge users) can make a difference in our own engine, by donating profit to the development of the bge.
another thing, code in bge projects is very object oriented, hence it’s hard to follow unless it’s well documented.
The licensing isn’t necessarily the problem with commercialization. Traditional software business models have been based on closed-source. Since open-source hit mainstream with major companies utilizing it, like Google Android or Facebook’s web backends, etc., it’s changing the status quo.
So sometimes I think companies are being lazy and complaining that the market dynamics are changing and they can’t use their conventional business models anymore (DRM…) - instead, they should be adapting to the market; well, in the end, those who adapt will survive (Microsoft a good example…). End rant ;).
Example - Ryzom was an AGPL game that was commercially successful. Hmm, if the original half-life game Natural Selection(my favorite game of all time) was open-source from the start, it’d probably still be around.
Random thought, what if Autodesk acquired Unity…for interactive architectural visualizations? I mean you see Blender wanting the BGE to turn into this.