The bge is sorely missing a automated lighting manager.
you can write your own pretty easily
this makes real time dynamic lights possible without eating performance 
we also could use a cascaded level of detail sunlamp.(not so easy)
I think your expectations are going into a different direction.
A Game Engine is not a game, nor a level editor, nor an authoring tool. A game engine simply runs a game. Not more not less.
You as game developer have to provide the necessary descriptions and assets that the game engine can use. Basically without configuration the game engine renders you an empty screen.
I do not think there is any difference between the BGE and other game engines.
Compared to a car … you get the engine, but no wheels, no seats, no fuel, no anything. Buy them or build them (with other tools).
Indeed most game engines come with tools to help creating the necessary data, but these are separate tools (e.g. like Blender). Typically they are not included in the game but might come with the game engine.
16GB? Performance is going to be mostly determined by the GPU you have in the system. Unreal does assume much more modern hardware than Blender does. I find that performance is quite acceptable on a GTX 460 which is a mid range graphics card from a few years ago.
That is not the material editor 
That is a visual coding tool called blueprints and is used where you would otherwise be using python or C++.
check out the demos and the asset store (more downloading I know, I am a bit of loss as to how Epic is using 2GBs just for the editor)
I have the UE4 installed, and I tried it. My impression? it’s like comparing paint to photoshop. First time I looked at photoshop, I couldn’t use it. Whereas Paint, I could use it straight away.
Obviously, expensive or giant size software doesn’t mean easy to use. You obviously have to invest a lot of time to learn how to use it and another more to adapt your game to its specifications (there’s no do all engine out there).
I think it’s a bad joke to “badmouth” a successful professional game engine, in a relatively amateur game engine forum!
real time editing is super laggy i don’t want any realtime editing in the engine i only want more shader compatibility, better physics calculation and then lastly i agree with your publishing.
I don’t think ue4 is a bad engine, its rendering and performance are amazing,
however I could argue that with a modern render, and pbr material workflow, that the bge would not be as far behind, and SCA nodes could be just as powerful as blueprints, (Radar true)(output hitobject)----------and--------(steer to hitObject)
UE4 is too big for me.
Really BGE is too. Simple pong game 60MB minimum.
-random hobbyist
Sounds like you need to work on your packaging skills.
Default cube exported as an exe is 87MB, the file itself is 31MB, sounds to me like he’s right.
That is why I do not aim for a single application file distribution.
Yes, I noticed that Blender grows with each new release.
Ow…
Is there an undocumented “right way” to package blender games?
We’ve all been going by this:
http://www.blender.org/manual/game_engine/blender_player.html
That is why I do not aim for a single application file distribution.
If you’re suggesting that end-users install the Blender SDK separately, that doesn’t work. The clueless masses will somehow manage to screw it up. Probably by installing the wrong version or giving up when it doesn’t work out-of-the-box.
Look at BGECore. Using a launcher and an engine subdirectory. You can distribuite your game with BlenderPlayer inside the engine directory and it will work out of the box. Or you can let that directory empy and the launcher will automatically find a blenderplayer if blender is installed on your computer, if it’s not, a message will show up telling the user that Blender is required and that it can be downloaded from www.blender.org. This way you can distribuite games with even less than 1mb and all of them will share the same blenderplayer.
BGECore also provides standard ways to do things, that means a good text editor, icon change, unpixelated text, a level editor (WIP), folder structure, coding practices/examples, libload and media utils, etc…
Since BGECore provides a lot of stuff and standards, I’m sure that not everybody will be OK with that way to do things, but I think that the launcher, at least, should be used in any serious game made in Blender.
This isn’t a valid workflow because of backwards compatibility issues.
You pretty much have to include dependencies for the drooling masses.
we need a blender player system that has a core(updater and downloader)
that has a registry of bge games some how, and knows what blender player to use, so we can all sell games at some common marketplace like steam or blender market and the blender player is distributed seperatly from the game.
so 1 blender player could somehow handle all versions of blender,
by downloading the required player if it is not present?
There’s already package managers with built-in dependency resolution. Even for Windows. Anyone that wants this could become a maintainer and support multiple versions of blender.
But still I don’t think this is wise for games. 10 years later you’ve abandoned support and nobody can play because the dependency download service has gone offline.
That would make it yet another issue that stands in the way of any chance the BGE has of coming back.
If BGE executables are growing even if the BGE barely budges in terms of features, that means that the Blenderplayer and packaging code needs to be rethought. That means much of the size is comprised of components completely unrelated to what the game needs.
Right now, it sounds like the code is pretty dumb and simply packages the core application with the game, when in fact it needs a system that only packages code specific to the BGE and to the game.
Having a larger application size is usually a normal thing when you make something in a generalist game engine, but it’s not the major reason for the size of BGE games and that will turn off a lot of people (especially if the BGE was to become a solution for mobile games as well).
When making games in blender people should decide if they are gona use always the newest version or if they will be using always the same one. In the first case make the launcher use the Blender version installed on your system and check if it is the most recent one, on the second distribuite blenderplayer with the game.
Basically all games shluld use the most recent version of blender, if for X reason a game doesn’t (like Krum) then provide the correct blenderplayer with it.
we need a blender player system that has a core(updater and downloader)
that has a registry of bge games some how, and knows what blender player to use, so we can all sell games at some common marketplace like steam or blender market and the blender player is distributed seperatly from the game.
so 1 blender player could somehow handle all versions of blender,
by downloading the required player if it is not present?
Sounds to me like the dotnet and java dependancy hells with versioning. Also back on topic, has anyone actually deployed and played an actual game written by themselves on PSx or xbox. Part of the big sales pitch for unity and unreal was cross platform one click game builds for different platforms - seems to work nicely for mac, windows and linux. Not so easy when you actually get going for console game. You need to purchase developers licenses which aren’t cheap or apply for a free one, where indie devs pretty much get crapped on.
Anyone tried this with unreal or unity?
I looked into it (PS3 or maybe it was PS2) a long time ago, with Unity free, (before Unity Pro it became free)
It cost a lot of money. Plus Sony had this “Stop and Go” rule (?) where they would have to inspect your game to see if it was up to their standards. Before they would let you proceed. But this was a while ago, so maybe it changed.
From a quick google search, it looks like both Unity and UE4 are trying to make it more accessible to Indie GDs
But I asked myself, why do I want to put my crappy games on a PS3? The answer was, So I could play it on a wide screen TV with joysticks. Well, I can do that now with the HDMI outputs from my laptop, to the TV, right? Problem solved.
I know this post is old, UE4 has changes since this post was started.
Just to bring everyone up to date. UE4 4.9.2 is a 6 gig download, but it has a DL manager so you can stop it and start the DL again if needed without losing anything. Once installed, You can use it offline.
It comes with a starter kit, with some textures, sound, particles, etc. But your Blender assets will easily import into UE4, (Not jpg’s)
It comes with a skybox, and a bunch of templates; first person shooter template, a third person char, template. rigged and animated, ready to go. The third person char has a camera set to follow right from the box. It also has a vehicle, rolling, puzzle, 2D side scroller ,flying, and a few more templates. in both C++ or Blueprints.
Epic games says you can make a full game only using Blueprints. 
It runs smoothly on my Medium sized run of the mill gaming laptop.
Asus ROG i7-4720HQ, CPU 2.6 GHZ, Geforce GTX 965M 8-gig ram
I know that as I add more levels, and items, to my game, it will start to bog down, but so does Blender, and Unity.
If a dummy like me can make a (small basic) game with it, anyone here can.
There is a series of 208 youtube videos that will walk you through different aspects of UE4, you can decide for yourself if it’s for you, or not.
The first few videos are the old versions of UE4. The last 200 videos are the newer builds. But all the videos are helpful.
Have fun everyone.
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Can dual core mobile CPU 2.2 Ghz run UE4 with 1 GB card and 4 gb ram?