<Insert Game Engine> Means BGE is dead. Not.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

How hard would it be to start over?

Call it impossible.

Especially when you want to provide something really comparable to Unity or Unreal. Or even “just” open source game engines like Godot.

At Unity there are hundrets of professional employees working at the engine, fulltime. For the professional game developer market, and aiming at AAA. With a super fast workflow and all the bells and whistles of which you just can dream of in BGE. And you get this engine for free now.

But not just Unity, also UE4 is free now. And Corona SDK. And Source Engine 2. Plus lots of other engines are free now too, because the pressure from Unity and Unreal is biting them hard. The whole game developer market is in a radical change at the moment, with lots of professional tools and engines going free now. Most of them by classes more powerful and more flexible than the BGE.

That’s simply not to beat by a handful enthusiastic open source developers anymore. BGE was already a very small niche product before Unity and Unreal became free. And no developer loves to develop for the trash can. It surprises me that there are still volunteers for the BGE available at all. The end is foreseeable.

I can understand that you love the BGE. You know how to use it, it does the job for you. But from time to time it is time to let go. And to let the BGE development die in Blender would be imho a favour for the developers and the users.

42

BGE will continue only if the BF The outdated you want it, and not because some opinionated not give a damn so want.

And I insist that Blender users (all without exception) still lack real information of what will be the one proposed by BF interactive mode, which is causing more confusion still. Only then these discussions (which began healthy and are bordering on ridiculous) ended.

Why not open the game and explain further, since ALL the blender community is interested in the subject one way or another?

I think this is the perfect time of a demonstration by the BF. And please do not come to the chat channels that are available out there, it is not everyone who is nerd to the inmost soul. I believe that we are all normal people in the first instance, and not just by-products of a pseudo-informed society.

43

[QUOTE = Tiles; 2830068] E para deixar o die desenvolvimento BGE em Blender seria imho um favor para os desenvolvedores e os usuários. [/ QUOTE]

Which users? Artist or aspiring game dev enthusiasts of BGE?

As for whether the BGE code is very poor in Blender rest of the relationship is the fault not of users but those responsible for Blender suite.

Anyway, what are the actual concrete plans pair interactive mode, in addition to the viewport of the integration of both modes of surrender?

44

What exactly is not clear about the idea of the interactive mode? The overall goal is to share more code between the core and the interactive mode, such that the interactive mode can benefit from improvements made in the core of Blender.

45

[QUOTE = Dantus; 2830109] O que exatamente não é claro sobre a idéia do modo interativo? O objetivo geral é para compartilhar mais de código entre o núcleo eo modo interativo, de tal forma que o modo interativo pode se beneficiar de melhorias feitas no núcleo do Blender. [/ QUOTE]

And that these benefits would be beyond what is generally in the 2013 roadmap?

46

[QUOTE = Tiles; 2830068] E para deixar o die desenvolvimento BGE em Blender seria imho um favor para os desenvolvedores e os usuários. [/ QUOTE]

Which users? Artist or aspiring game dev enthusiasts of BGE?

All of them. BGE is not longer able to compete. There’s no niche left where you could say that it is useful to use BGE instead of one of the other solutions.

47

The core Blender developer would get in touch with the interactive mode (BGE) at least from time to time, that would definitely be a huge improvement. What kind of benefits exactly do you expect?

48

@firefox.jco, there are no ‘secrets’ regarding interactive mode.

Nobody is currently working on it, so no firm plans have been made.

49

I totally agree with you. Like I said in another topic, the BGE is like other areas of Blender : a good tool for what it does. Not the best, but who cares?

In my professional life, I’m a Nuke and lighting artist and I’m working on animated feature film with the best softwares and technologies on the market. I can tell you, for sure, that Nuke is better than Blender’s compositor and that Arnold is a better render engine than Cycles.
But I’m also a Blender user and I find the compositor extremely useful even if it’s not as good as Nuke. The last Nuke version is now free for no commercial use. Will I stop using Blender’s compositor for my no commercial projects ? Of course not because it doesn’t make it useless.

I’m currently working on a game project. I choose the BGE because if was relevant when I started it. It’s still relevant now. I don’t need to change. GPL license is not a issue, I didn’t need the best engine with the latest technology. I needed a few things : joystick support and advanced animation rigging (IK, stretch). I also wanted an editor that can run on Linux, which make Unity and UE4 more or less out of competition. And for now, I’m ok with the BGE. I had some bugs indeed with libFree but I found workaround and I’m sure it can be fixed.

From a user point of view, the BGE looks pretty good.

50

Originally Posted by sdfgeoff http://blenderartists.org/design/baorg2012light/images/buttons/viewpost-right.png

Let’s approach this differently.

What if Nuke, Maya, Max and all those other modelling tools became free.

You could watch Blender users jumping off the boat like crazy. That’s what would happen. Like users jumped boat from wings 3d when the modeling tools became better in Blender.

And same is with BGE at the moment. It is technically years behind, slower and more cumbersome to develop with, the documentation is lacking, and the GPL is a special hurdle. There is simply no reason anymore to use it really, besides some sentimental feelings and because you are used to.

51

The interesting thing to note here is that by the Blender Foundation removing the engine from Blender, no-one is losing anything. The Blender Foundation is currently not improving (or even really maintaining) the BGE. They’ve already stopped doing that wherever possible. If tomorrow they removed the BGE from Blender entirely, the BGE users would still be able to use Blender with all the same tools they use to put together their BGE projects they do today.

Today & the hypothetical BGE-free Blender Tomorrow are exactly alike in the following ways:

  • The Blender Foundation will continue not to maintain the BGE
  • BGE users will have every tool they’ve been using on the projects to date
  • The BGE volunteers will still have access to the BGE code in order to fix whatever bugs they can
  • BGE users will still be able to create and deploy their creations in exactly the same way they have been to date

On the other hand, the Blender Foundation developers will not be hindered by code they have no interest in maintaining, the Blender codebase actually being maintained will become leaner and easier to handle, and the BGE developers/maintainers would even be free to remove parts of Blender they don’t need for games.

52

I don’t think the whole of Blender would become obsolete if competing commercial tools became free because the are a few areas were it is pretty competitive which I think is the BGE biggest problem it’s not competitive on any front.

But the are some tools in Blender which would be extremely venerable if that were to happen.

53

And I’m sure it has been pointed out already, but removing the bge wouldn’t take it out of the old releases. And as many people are complaining about the lack of development would they be missing out on much sticking with an old release with the BGE?
/somewhat sarcastic.

I think you mean vulnerable? :wink: there’s a bit of difference in the two :stuck_out_tongue:

54

I think it’s safe to say, the BF/community is aiming for professional usage and competing with the commercial market; Blender was conceived by a company, not by hobbyists (and open sourced due to lack of FOSS alternatives at the time?). Anyhow, useful open source software that gets big enough tends to get commercialized and compared to market standards. Not to mention, what developer wouldn’t like to make a living developing software they particularly enjoy?

Make no mistake, the BF is still a company that needs revenue (donations/funding) to stay in business, and naturally the users with the most money and support will be professional users of companies. Hobbyist users tend to like getting more advanced features so it’s still a win for them.

To say the BGE is meant for hobbyists is completely valid, but it clashes with the goals of the BF and the greater community (IMHO). It doesn’t make sense for the BF to invest in the BGE if its future is to remain a limited hobbyist tool (since it simply can’t compete for various reasons). Thus the plans to recycle it into interactive mode since it couldn’t get with the program as Ton mentioned in the infamous blog post.

Ofc, open source software can’t really die as long as the source code is around, but if it’s not being actively developed, it’s considered dead. At this point, the BGE is on life support, but it’s probably not going to get any love from the BF.

Again, it’s perfectly valid to aim to for the BGE as a hobbyist tool, but it’ll have to do so on its own.

55

Or it could lead to a mass-extinction event for game technology vendors due to how the Race to the Bottom is minimizing their bottom lines and their resources.

Indie game developers are already seeing serious struggles due to this, it think it’s plausible to say it can possibly happen to the companies making the engines as well.

56

Ok,

what is magical about other renderers?

what needs redone to change out the render.

interactive mode to me means GSL in the viewport,

why not bridge this last gap?

if we convert one system at a time, and it does not break, functionallity what is the problem?

how much would one need to gather financially to see it through?

you would throw away many peoples work for what?

the bge is good at what it does, with the execption of render draw speed.

why not fix it? then everyone will stop bitching?

What kind of revenue stream would it take to get a core dev to clean up
and fix the engine?

57

The point you’re missing is that the BGE isn’t even good at what it does, and everyone at the BF knows it. Even among free, open source game engines it is completely out of league. The goal of the BGE project from the beginning was to be a competitive, free, FOSS option in a field that was (then) dominated by tools that priced out 99% of game development hopefuls. Since then the field has changed dramatically, while BGE has changed almost not at all. To bring BGE into the modern age, it wouldn’t just take a patch job. It would take a serious, concentrated effort that starts pretty much from scratch. No one is saying that’s impossible, but practically everyone familiar with Blender’s code base is saying it’s impractical. As others have brought up, there are several FOSS projects that have far surpassed BGE in terms of quality and ease of use. No sane programmer is going to look at the Blender situation and say “let’s create another one” when the field is already flooded. The logical thing to do is to make Blender the best that it can be at being part of a general game development workflow, or even to just pick one and target it as “Blender’s” game engine. But to try to resurrect a dinosaur like BGE with zero interested core devs when there are better options already available is a waste of time. BGE, as it exists now, will exist forever. That’s the merit of FOSS software. But the writing is on the wall at this point that BGE isn’t going to be making any serious strides in the future. There simply isn’t enough interest outside of a very niche hobbyist field, and there isn’t enough interest from any developers who wouldn’t be more easily drawn to FOSS game dev projects with an obvious future.

58

I’ll give you that - the BGE is good at fixed-function pipeline on PC, so it’s great at that.

Well if you want the BGE to be comparable to modern engines, you’d need another foundation or company with full time developers focused on the game engine. Yeah, you can build small engines (like most open source ones), but a well functioning and well supported engine is another.

Maintaining 3D engines, both gaming and non-gaming, is a lot of work, kind of like engines in real life. They are very much a large system of components working together. Changing one part tends to have an effect on other parts so it’s not so simple to just do one part, even with the best abstracted code.

To fix the engine, means to abandon it and start elsewhere. The BGE was one way to have a game engine based around Blender, so people should focus on that rather than clutching so blindly to the BGE.

59

Loathe as I am to break the rules, BPR’s post deserves a thorough response. As such, it will be an almost line-by-line reply.

I assume you mean the alternate game engine renderers? They’re faster, more efficient, more capable, and more flexible than that implemented in the BGE. There isn’t anything “magical” about them, they are simply better designed and have more people improving them.

If you took the time to read the links Campbell provided earlier, you’ll see it is a lot of work. The renderer is not a nicely self-contained piece of code, with branches of it spread out through a number of other modules that have nothing (or next to nothing) to do with rendering. As the blog article in question mentioned, this is a red flag indicator for bad design in the first place.

Blender viewport GSL is not the same as BGE renderer. It might “mean that to you”, but you’d be very wrong to think they are one and the same and hence a finished viewport equals a fixed/new renderer for BGE.

Huge amount of work no-one seems interested in undertaking let alone maintaining.

You mean aside from the fact that no-one is actually doing that in the first place? Well, there’d still be the issues code maintenance (the Blender Foundation is not interested in it), the amount of time required to do what you suggest, the fact that alternate engines wil be progressing at least as fast (and most likely much faster) in their development and so still being a far ore attractive option, etc.

However, let’s start with the basics - you’ve got no-one actually converting the system, the Blender Foundation is not going to pay for it, and you have no design to even start working on such a “system-by-system” replacement. The problem is, quite simply, no-one is doing it and no-one is really interested in it either. Do not confuse the volunteers bug-fixing and trying to maintain status quo as being the same thing - they’re not.

For the almost complete rewrite the BGE needs to come close to meeting the level set by other engines? At the absolute very least, six-to-twelve months of developer effort. Assuming a competent developer who has a solid design already in mind and simply needs the time to refactor, retool, and rework the BGE from the ground up without large amounts of trial and error.

Given my experience in the industry, you’d be looking at the very minimum $30K (and I personally wouldn’t expect the right level of developer being hired for that little given the work that needs to be done).

Once again, it’s not being thrown away. You will be able to use it as long as you & volunteers maintain it - just like you do now. It just doesn’t need to be in the main distribution of Blender, freeing up the Blender Foundation developers to streamline any development they would otherwise have to hack & band-aid because of it’s interaction with a game engine they are no longer maintaining themselves.

Actually, no it isn’t. It’s buggy, incomplete, inconsistent, and put’s hurdles where there need be none. It was ‘barely’ adequate some years ago. It’s an embarrassment now. Repeatedly saying it is good doesn’t make it so, BPR, and that’s what the majority of your posts are amounting to.

No-one is stopping you. The Blender Foundation is not going to, however, and given that stance it makes sense for it’s eventual removal.

I would suggest start at $50K and keep it coming. The thing about code development is that those good at their craft tend to get paid quite a bit and those bad at their craft are most definitely not the ones you want “fixing” the BGE. I develop code for a living and don’t even consider jobs that don’t equate to >$110K a year. I’m nowhere near the best coder I’ve met.

60

blender is open source. If people want to use it as a game engine, they will find a way - even if you discontinue work on bge. They already have -with BDX, blend4web and possibly other projects.

What blender developers can do is make blender better at being the shell/IDE of other engines that don’t have one. You could develop a visual programming framework within blender that the other engines can use- make it easy for their developers to make use of blender as an integral part of their engine in this and other ways. Help them get their engine to a wider audience of existing BGE and new users.

The more it gets picked up by new developers- the better. Work with those guys, because they will attract more users with their game engines as addons in blender.