I agree with most of the points being made here, the main problem I think as BPR mentioned multiple times is having a game to portray BGE, currently the only real games anyone outside of the community may have heard about would be yo frankie, and the dead cyborg(?) series, maybe even krum. Way too many potential users judge an engine based off the games produced with it, thats why cry-engine, and unreal get so much attention (also because these games look really nice). To properly fund any development or get anyone interested we need a publicly known game, that can portray the BGE.
For me I reckon the only big priority should be exporting to multiple platforms, aside from that I’m all for other minor changes, but as monster said, these are already (slowly) happening.
When it comes to getting the BGE to match the top engines, I think the development of new stuff as of now needs to take a step back in favor of fixing bugs and cleaning/organizing sections of the code.
A game engine is not going to be fun to use if you have all of the latest toys but half of them don’t work very well, we need to revisit the base and make it as solid as possible first.
Well… Imho, Unity approach for a lot of things is superior to BGE, I don’t want to turn BGE into Unity, but turn BGE into something that can ‘replace’ Unity to some extent, even it the workflow isn’t the same or similar. Imho we need to be wise and take advantage of the good ideas introduced by Unity.
I don’t know… opensource games generally fail miserable mostly because of lack of marketing I think. There’s nothing close to Crysis or Unreal in terms of audience and I think it’s hard to change that. It’s a risky bet to waste efforts making a game that may just fail. Do you have any plan or something? I think Yo Frankie! is a quite decent game (although I didn’t play)… any ideas if the interest in BGE changed after it?
Yeah, that’s a point… I never used BGE extensively but I thought it were stable.
I think blender has done an excellent job of ‘visualising’ all the coding you’d normally do for a game because I normally really struggle but thanks to logic bricks and the like I am getting games set up. I’ve already seen a couple of things that could maybe be improved myself and I’m not much a programmer but some basic things like the way the engine selects objects when you left/right click feel a bit unwieldy compared to Maya which is why I prefer doing my modelling in there and I’ve discovered is pretty difficult to import animations in if you can do it at all.
I do think the most important thing though is to keep Blender open source and to be more friendly towards people who want to professionally sell the games because I noticed there’s quite a bit of confusion about what the license actually states. I’m also not surprised at all about Unity because have you seen THEIR license?
My favourite one is this and a direct quote:
Unity Free, which include the free platform add-on products, may not be licensed or used by a commercial entity with annual gross revenues (based on prior fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000, or by an educational, academic, non-profit or government entity with a total annual budget for the entire entity (based on prior fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000.
So basically what you’re saying is you can’t make money with this product, despite them advertising it exactly like that in the first bloody place.
This license agreement is what made me go to you guys instead of try to get a ‘professional’ game engine and I am glad I made that choice. By the way, another thing you could maybe do to improve things is pick one of the more open source file types ( Isn’t that OpenCOLLADA? ) and make the importing work a lot better for animations. As you guys know I tried importing animations and it wasn’t working at all because the skeleton was all over the place and so on. Importing normal meshes though works fantastic and you can even bring in textures from your model but I’ll have to double check how well that works with UV unwrapping and the like.
No… what that’s saying is you can’t use the product if those conditions are met. If you’re in a company that has made more than $100,000 dollars last (fiscal) year, you simply aren’t allowed to use the free software. If your company is not earning more than $100,000 dollars, then you’re permitted to use the free version.
You are permitted to ‘make money.’ I can’t see how it stops you. It just becomes a case that in the next fiscal year, if you’ve made more than $100,000 dollars, then you just have to buy the ‘non-free’ license.
Yeah, that’s been discussed to death among Unity users and you’re correct. You can use it freely and if eventually you make more than 100,000 in a year, then you have to buy the license, at that point I really doubt one will care though, because Unity is what allowed you to make that money, so imho it’s fair to shell out some bucks a month or <1.5% of what you’ve earned a single year.
AFAIK, the GPL licensing makes it impossible to use the BGE on iOS (which is a big market for developers). So, that’s going to limit possibilities.
You make some valid points, as well as some points that I don’t agree with. Nonetheless, you have thought it out fairly well. I think the real problem is: Why. Who would fund a new engine, and why? Why wouldn’t people be happy with Unity or Godot? “Unity asks money if you break $100K” is a good reason not to go with Unity, except that with that money, you could purchase Unity Pro and be free of the royalty fee.
EDIT: Ninja’d by the peeps above me.
I just am wondering who would fund the development of a GPL engine? And not just use one that isn’t GPL, is already known to be used by at least one company, and is already being actively worked on (Godot)?
EDIT 2:
Stuff like Ogre and Irrlicht are not game engines, that list is flawed because only Godot and Delta are more or less on the same league as Unity, although you can’t compare them. Godot is very nice, has lots of features and stuff, but it’s a pain to deal with external data and it’s kinda slow as well.
Reph, do you have some proof or a link to some evidence that Godot’s slow? I’m curious because I’ve been looking into it, and it doesn’t seem to be slow, though I haven’t gotten far into it.
@Lethn - Unless the issue is purely a BGE one (which it shouldn’t be), better OpenCollada support is something that probably could be implemented by “normal” Blender developers over BGE developers. Even if the BGE developers were to work on it, I think it should be fairly low on the priority list, given that you can model and animate effectively in the BGE already (i.e. it’s not something that doesn’t work well, it’s something that doesn’t work well when used a certain way).
Animating something somewhere else and importing it for use in Blender and the BGE is definitely an edge case - you would probably do better just using another engine built around data importing (like Godot, JME3, or Panda3D).
So, I think I agree with agoose. It’s probably best to look to implement another engine into the BGE; I’d suggest Godot because it’s being built-up well, but it already has an IDE, so it’d be kind of a waste of time to implement it into Blender. Maybe everyone should just jump to Godot.
Oops, I badly misread that, there’s a lot in that license though that I didn’t misread lol so that was enough for me
@Lethn - Unless the issue is purely a BGE one (which it shouldn’t be), better OpenCollada support is something that probably could be implemented by “normal” Blender developers over BGE developers. Even if the BGE developers were to work on it, I think it should be fairly low on the priority list, given that you can model and animate effectively in the BGE already (i.e. it’s not something that doesn’t work well, it’s something that doesn’t work well when used a certain way).
I stumbled across a very detailed animation tutorial hidden away in your documentation so I’ll be learning how to use the bone system in blender and see how things go, I’ll show off how well it goes because by the time I get these animations done my game will be mostly complete.
Well looks like the BGE can handle quite detailed character animations just fine!
I just am wondering who would fund the development of a GPL engine? And not just use one that isn’t GPL, is already known to be used by at least one company, and is already being actively worked on (Godot)?
SolarLune
I think the real driving force behind upgrading the BGE could be
Universities - A. Simulation support for robotics
______________B. Simulation for crowd dynamics - (uber pathfinding + euphoria like tools)
______________C. Virtual reality Teaching environment
______________D. Software Construction Projects for credit
Google = GSOC + google Tango + ???
Oculus rift - a “Native” Vr system
Indie Developers who like BGE’s Flow but not it’s flaws.
There is a downside for mobile in general though, and that is if you ever want to make it rich using that market, then you more or less are dependent on hoping you can make ‘lighting in a bottle’ and create a game that just happens to go viral.
Also, most people will not get very far financial-wise if you’re among those who want to make a premium experience rather than making a game with free to play mechanics (timers, energy meters, IAP’s, ads, ect…), the reason being that premium only accounts for just a very small percentage of the app. market and few will ever sell more than a few thousand copies (the ‘race to the bottom’ ideal that permeates this market doesn’t help either). Again, if you’re one of those gamers who are offended by the idea of adding timers to your game, you’re not going to get very far.
As far as hitting the right notes, I’ve seen plenty of good looking premium games in the Google Play store on my tablet that do not sell a lot of copies, virtually all of the games that get hundreds of thousands of downloads are Free to Play with ads and IAP.
Speaking of Godot, has there been any work on that engine since it became open source? Initially I had a few reservations for it because the studio that worked on the premier 3D project using it jumped ship to Unity several years ago and I didn’t know if it had so much as a physics engine. To note, I just checked to see how it was coming along myself and the website still doesn’t have much.
I don’t have any ‘proofs’ that Godot is slow but you can test it for yourself, to be fair I made some tests and both the scripting performance as well as the 2D physics performance were not suitable for my needs. It is not terribly slow though, and it seems they are using a custom physics engine so the physics speed can be remedied relatively easily by implementing box2d or chipmunk. The scripting can be a problem though. I don’t know how it works internally but it’s a kinda pythonesque language, it’s interesting but I think it’s interpreted and there’s few room for optimization. Of course this doesn’t have a lot of importance because afaik most games nowadays are GPU bound and I didn’t test the graphics performance, so for the majority of games it’s possible that Godot is fast enough. <- Being fair here.
Improving Godot and making a very good Blender exporter/integration could surely be an option. Perhaps it’s a more viable alternative. I think it’s worthy discussing in more depth, perhaps someone with experience could shed some light on this thread.
Oh yeah, I’m not really interested in mobile gaming, but I know it accounts for a lot of the indie development scene. Having an open-source engine that’s mobile-ready encourages developers to use it and mod it to improve it. More activity can equal more improvements. Basically, consider the difference between the amount of patches submitted from Unity becoming open-source and Construct Classic becoming open-source. (Just an example.)
Not sure where you’re looking? On the homepage, the downloads page has the latest public build of Godot, which is from just a few days ago - October 16th, 2014. The Github repository’s commits page shows page after page of commits, ranging from bug-fixes to “quality of life” UI improvements, and even brand new features like a Sprite object for use in 3D games (which I suggested, haha).
(Trimming for conciseness, not because I disagree or anything; thank you all for your post.)
Yeah, I haven’t tested it myself very much, so I don’t know how slow the scripting language can be, and the physics engines are hand-made, to my knowledge, so it’s possible they run slower than the more standard physics engines (e.g. Bullet). However, I do believe that the scripting language was hand-made as opposed to being built from Python or Lua because of their relatively slow speeds. So, it sounds kinda weird that the scripting language was slow. I suppose I can make a test to compare and contrast the speeds of the languages (Python and GDScript) while it’s running a simple test.
Note that I’m not saying that Godot is the end-all be-all engine that everyone should jump to from the BGE, but it’s definitely something to consider. In fact, one of the weaknesses of that engine is the generally small community. Being a large, close-knit community could in itself be a contribution of great magnitude, perhaps even more so than any add-on or patch contribution could be. A lot of the fun of using the BGE now is the ability to pop on to the forums, ask a question, and get several solid answers in just a few hours. That’d really assist a lot of engines out there.
P.S. @agoose77 - I know Panda3D’s a cool engine that’s easy to approach for Python users, but I just can’t seem to get with it. The API feels a bit weird, and it seems to be lacking in some basic common sense things (Advanced graphics, but no joystick input ability; presence of things that the average developer needn’t know about or use). Does anyone have any more advanced personal experience using it?
Remember, most of us here are just wannabe indie game developers.
The question we should be asking ourselves here is: what do you need to make a good game?
Let’s be reasonable here - what is really worth funding?
Given the actual context, the referenced sentence seems to encapsulate your beliefs perfectly.
Most of the people here have no relevant knowledge/experience to discuss development matters intelligently, yet they have strong opinions on those matters, supported by conglomerations of various nonsense they internalized over time (ie: C++ is to Python as a Beetle is to a Formula 1).
Ignorance, on its own, is not a sin, but when someone jumps in with an attitude, labeling statements they disagree with as “Bullshit” (even though they have no substantive counter-argument, and no credibility whatsoever) … It’s a pretty strong indicator that the overall discussion will be fruitless.
The question we should be asking ourselves here is: what do we need to make a good game?
Well, what is a “good game”? It’s pretty subjective, I think, but whatever your personal opinion may be, the following seems universally true: What you can actually do depends primarily on your abilities, and the resources at your disposal.
From that (realistic) perspective, “AAA production quality” games will always be beyond the reach of independent developers, irrespective of the tools at their disposal, because even if you’re John Carmack, you need an industry to create products of industry - You can’t reach that level on your own, even if you’re one of the best programmers in the world, working with the best tools that money can buy.
Yet, so many people here are still convinced that they could actually make AAA products, if only they had AAA tools, and they argue that this is something we should pursue, while simultaneously deluding themselves that our ability/desire to do that depends largely on things like funding.
From that (realistic) perspective, “AAA production quality” games will always be beyond the reach of independent developers, irrespective of the tools at their disposal, because even if you’re John Carmack, you need an industry to create products of industry - You can’t reach that level on your own, even if you’re one of the best programmers in the world, working with the best tools that money can buy.
I’d like to make the point that I believe ‘AAA’ quality is a scam, what you’ll find is actually a lot of the gameplay elements seen in games today have barely changed since the 90’s with the exception of free runner games and the only thing that has changed really is the graphics. So of course smaller budget indie developers aren’t going to be able to make a Farcry or Crysis because that kind of thing takes a lot of hours and manpower because in some cases it is literally a team of 100’s of artists building foliage and rocks and making nice particle effects. The idea that you can’t make a good game anymore because of budget is ridiculous I really hate it when I see people so confidently state that anymore especially when there are engines like Blender out there in the first place.
Let me take Titanfall as an example, all that is exactly the same stuff, same for Dragon Age, the only difference is the quality of the animations and the amount of detail that goes into it which is why it looks so amazing. This may sound harsh but I’ve been annoyed with the programmers of these companies lately and as a lot of gamers say it’s like putting polish on a turd, it’s still going to stink. I always feel sorry for the artists of these games because they clearly put in way more effort than the programmers ever do.
In the end FPS’ are still about hitboxes and RPGs are still about databases with hundreds of items, it’s just people are so easily distracted they fail to notice and particularly newer generations of gamers don’t know any better because they didn’t grow up with the same games.
I haven’t compared GDScript with Python but it definitely is not a ‘high performance’ language, I mean, if we divide the languages in 2 groups based on their rough performance: {C++, Java, C#} and {Lua, Python, Ruby} I don’t know where GDScript would be, but I think in the latter. In any case, I’m convinced that the best language for game scripting is cython; besides the compiling time and stuff… to deal with compiling time one could simply do the whole sheband in ordinary python that runs interpreted and only add ctypes and compile the thing when it’s going to be released/performance tested. We could even add some python objects to simulate ctypes but that runs in cpython and get converted to ctypes at compile time. That’s no big problem at all imho, specially because developer machines generally are overpowered, so there’s no need for extreme performance there.
Yes! That’s what I want! A civilized and reasonable discussion. Some people here looks like little girls fighting for a doll though. :). I’m not saying I’m the owner of the truth, I’m just presenting my points and opinions and wanted to debate on them, and besides some ‘girly fights’ I think the topic was moderately productive so far.
I said C# will never be less productive than C++ once a programmer gets used and proficient in both languages, that’s not up to the programmer, so the programmer doesn’t matter, they won’t magically make C++ more productive than C#. You NEED a context.
I’m sorry but you’re kinda alienated from reality if you think Python can be compared to C++ in terms of speed. I label bullshit what I consider bullshit, no offense intended.
Internet is funny, some people get girly, some get manly, people never behave as they would ‘offline’.
The only sad fact is that you see that, in their minds, most people believe in what they want. I had difficulty to understand how the minds of those people who deny the nazi genocide works, but now after using the internet I understand perfectly. Some people believe in what they want, period. After all, I think that’s part of the reason why religions are still strong today while preaching that God made the world and the men.
I agree, the trump card of AAA games nowadays is graphics. I mean, it’s possible for indies to reach awesome graphical quality (is Ethan Carter indie?), but it’s definately not common because you need a good team of competent artists, especially because of the ‘guidelines’ (poly density, text res, etc.; EC has some poly density and texturing troubles).
In terms of gameplay it’s relatively easy to reach AAA quality, especially if you’re using an engine like Unity which provides AI and a cornucopia of assets on the store. Even without it it’s possible to reach AAA quality relatively quickly because there are lots of excellent articles on game development around the web. e.g.: http://www.redblobgames.com/. So you start to implement something that is proven to work. You don’t have to develop the ‘technology’ behind the game, but just implement the existing stuff that works and develop the game itself.
The biggest problem with indie devs is small teams and bad leadership imho. They start at full steam and after some time some members start to slow down, then people get sick of developing the thing for a lot of time and either release the game in a poor form or just giveup altogether. That happened to me as an one-man-army dozens of times :P.
That’s why you’ve got to have a real motivation for doing it mine is revenge against companies like SOE and EA >_< I want to make them look ridiculous considering how badly optimised their games are now so realistically all I need to do is make sure my games work to beat them lol.
Don’t get me started on what’s happened to Dragon Age lately, another series butchered by EA, yes sorry to the people in this thread, going off on an anti-game publisher tangent again but it’s so easy for me to do.
I’ll just leave this trailer here to express my rage at the games industry right now:
Can you prove that C# is generally “more productive” than C++?
I’m sorry but you’re kinda alienated from reality if you think Python can be compared to C++ in terms of speed.
I don’t think that, and I didn’t say anything that would even imply that.
I label bullshit what I consider bullshit
Ok, but on what basis? I mean, if you can’t explain your reasoning, in relevant technical detail, then why should anyone take you seriously? Did you ever write a game engine, or a significant subsystem? Did you ever complete a game that’s currently on the market?
What exactly is your claim to credibility here?
Internet is funny, some people get girly, some get manly, people never behave as they would ‘offline’.
The only sad fact is that you see that, in their minds, most people believe in what they want. I had difficulty to understand how the minds of those people who deny the nazi genocide works, but now after using the internet I understand perfectly.
Only ways I see the BGE progressing is in these two manners:
The engine is deleted entirely and remade from scratch with all of the features, optimizations, etc. of a modern game engine. This’ll take time and money. The risk of it not making anything from the development is far too high, in my opinion.
The engine is removed to make room for an interface for other engines – similar to what Goran is doing with LibGDX; BGE is besically just an interface for the engine to use. The advantage of this approach is that you can take open-source software (maybe even some professional engines if you can find a way to transmit data between the two without changing the engine itself), mod it to the BGE’s interface and then you can use that as a way to control the engine beneath – the whole Blender package (modeling, texturing, sculpting etc etc) with a professional software. Would make a lot of game developer’s development process a lot quicker if done right. It’ll cost hella lot less to develop than a brand new engine, too.
mine is revenge against companies like SOE and EA >_< I want to make them look ridiculous considering how badly optimised their games are now so realistically all I need to do is make sure my games work to beat them lol.