Are you curious what's in store for Blender 2.7, 2.8 and even 3.0? Ton Roosendaal gives a glimpse into Blender's future in a new article on the code.blender.org blog. And for Game Engine lovers - there's an AWESOME conclusion for you :)
Ton writes:
Two years ago, we scheduled the 2.6x period to have a “branch migration” focus. In the past years, we’ve seen the results of this work, with massive amounts of new tools and new editors in Blender.
All of 2.6x builds were meant to be (mostly) compatible with 2.5x though.Since we’re running out of 2.6x numbers it’s really time to think of focus and projects for coming years. Below is a proposal I’d like to see discussed and reviewed here and on our mailing list(s).
Link
11 Comments
Ton, you're the head focus man. Doing a great job.
well there is a "rebellion" out there about the issue in Blenderartist forum:
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?297023-Future-of-the-BGE
Now I don't know what to think... for one side I really want to put the GameKit in the ecuation (MIT licence, close integration with Blender and Ogre Render Engine).
Ton addresses the BGE issues on the bf-commiters mailing list:
Hi Daniel,
I wrote the blog post as a discussion piece, something we can spend on for months, or a year, or as much time we need. We have a quite long way to go before "a new GE" can be defined to be feasible anyway.
I would also like to see a wide consensus about future plans for Blender. For that reason you shouldn't see it as 'bad timing', or a suggestion to refocus your work.
The GE itself, and its current users, will really benefit your work now. Your gsoc project is also meant to solve a lot of current issues (bugs) anyway. I hope you can continue that work happily.
(Long answer to your questions in a next mail)
-Ton-
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Hi Daniel,
(The long version)
The proposal I wrote for the GE future is not really news for me, it's always been my dream to have a 3d tool that seamlessly merges 3D creation for realtime interaction and traditional film/animation making. That's why I started Blender's GE in 1996. I'm still totally proud of having this integration, and think it's one of the unique things that makes Blender so cool.
Nothing happens in open source without devoted developers though. The fact I have dreams or plans for Blender mean nothing without a team supporting it. But also the fact users like to make commercially marketable games in Blender doesn't mean it happens either.
After 11 years of Blender progress with this open source dynamics, I think it's quite fair to witness that the GE itself is falling behind compared to rest of Blender, in support level and in feature expectations.
In my blog proposal I try to address this by solving the two most crucial aspects for a good online open source project:
1) Focus
What is our "game engine" precisely, who do we make it for, what's the use case references we aim for?
In all aspects for Blender's animation/film pipeline, we have a quite ambitious focus, based on providing production-ready tools and rendering for artists or small teams who can use it for living. Animation and film content created in Blender is very close (if not equal) in quality to what the high-end programs do.
We're even competing with commercial programs here at 'industry level', although we would be realistically ranked more "mid tier" (in the regions of C4D and LW). That's a huge achievement already.
However, where 3d tools are common to to deliver a full finished short film, there's no comparable product that does it for games. Game delivery is still a market (and method) dominated by specialized engines, optimized for platforms and for highly specialized constructed content to play. Even mid-tier engines like Unity3D focus on that delivery aspect (and not offer it as creation tool).
You can find a lot of vocal Blender GE users who _do_ consider that delivery is the focus for our GE in Blender. It's the people who want Blender's GPL dropped for example, so they can "sell" games. I think that's the focus we shouldn't pursue, and that's the remark in the blog to "drop the idea to have an embedded “true” game engine".
Realistically we cannot expect to be able to realize ever anything that is even close to the gaming experience and appearance we know from mid or high-end games studios. Simply because they also don't use a tool like Blender to do it. The entire process is too specialized still, with a lot of middleware and tools, and teams with plenty of full time coders working on achieving the results.
So - we have to be more clear in communicating to everyone and ourselves what we want from a game engine (or interactive 3d) precisely. Positively worded that is:
- Focus on designing and making games, especially on tools
(which can lead to playable prototypes)
- Focus on fast access to create interactive 3D in general
(walkthroughs, character tests, simulations)
- Focus on good support of Blender to fit in game creation pipelines
(for unity3d, or browser javascript engines, but also for PS4)
2) Support and feature expectation
By dropping the articificial separation in code (and usability) between the "GE" and the "rest of Blender" I think we can get a lot of benefits on both support level (stability, new development) as on feature expectation (amazing tools and possibilities to turn things interactive).
That benefit would even work for both sides. I can think of plenty of features the GE has currently, which would be very useful in the viewport as well. LOD for example, advanced shader effects, fog, light caches, name it.
To answer to your three conditions
> 1. We don't lose existing BGE features
I don't know which features you'd be afraid to lose, but we do have to take a step forward to redesign parts from scratch. The archaic logic editor for example, or the separated Python api, the lack of support for animation, lack of particles. I'd like to see real state-based animation possible, behaviour control, massive sims.
Further I believe much more in artists (give them tools) than in features. A tool-based focus for a game engine would be incredible feature-rich!
> 2. We don't lose the ability to publish BGE games
Would work just as usual. We can even check on a smaller 'player' build for it.
> 3. We don't lose a focus on performance for BGE games
Performance for Blender is relevant in any area and in any editor. It just wouldn't be a separated "games" focus anymore, but a target to achieve in generic ways that would benefit every user. Everyone complains about our slow 3d viewport. Now, let's just tackle that :)
All the best,
-Ton-
@jeremaya
Not really. The BGE license was always problematic. The GPL is not allowed on the iOS App Store and any other app store for that matter that has DRM enabled (most Android stores).
The license also presented problems with packaging and including custom code in the game player. So I think this is a good chance for the community to address the problem and look for other game engines that can be interfaced with Blender.
I personally think that Urho3D should become the official engine, if not possible then I guess GameKit would be the second choice.
http://code.google.com/p/urho3d/
http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/
Both are MIT licensed.
If I'm reading this right, the rest of the 2.6x series is for shoring up compatibility. To that end, I have only one wish list item remaining:
Blender 2.49 allowed use of the "self" label in Py-Drivers. I need this back and it's been missing for all of 2.5 and nearly all of 2.6x versions. The workarounds are *not* trivial, and none of them make for a non-destructive workflow. Specifically, the ability to copy "self.attribute" style expressions to meshes that were positioned and oriented by the use of the "duplifaces" function is something I rely on in 2.49 and it's been missing for too long.
(I hope that's not asking too much, but twenty iterations without reinstating this functionality from 2.49 is a bit more than I expected, and I have been unable to find any developer notes that explain the obstacles to doing so and would at least like to get an idea of what the situation is with that.)
Just wanted to comment on BGE :)
I think 'integrating' it more as part of the 'normal' blender is definitely the way to go. It has always felt a bit strange to me how separate it was and how some things that worked in the main editor didn't work in BGE and the other way around.
Having all the cool BGE features available in the viewport would also make rendering with the opengl viewport renderer a lot more interesting, for those of us who are too impatient for long render times :)
I think it would be great if it could also been made in a way where you could (optionally of course) take advantage of newer opengl features, e.g. tesselation and such.
Having worked with both UE3 and Unity3D, BGE's killer feature is being integrated with the 3D tool, the more seamless this integration is the better imo.
I was just viewing the UDK4 demo the other day and was astonished how great this looked in real time. My next thought was this is the future of 3d apps (maya, 3dsmax,etc.), the capability to have near cinematic quality in real time. The integration and functionality of the BGE (realtime feedback @ high quality) is crucial for the future of Blender in my opinion, perhaps not now, next year, or 3 years from now, but soon. I'd project within a decade, interactive cinematic quality will be the norm for professional 3d packages. Time will tell..and cycles is a great starting point(assuming you have a Nvida card!)
A couple of pet peeves / suggestions of mine on Blender:
Lack of presets, presets, presets!. Specifically a material library and a clean way to navigate and categorize and save. Categories / subcategories would be extremely beneficial to newcomers and seasoned professionals. These should be included with every release of blender, not some separate download you'll have to reacquire with each iteration. I do like in the cloth simulator there's some basic presets to start off, would be great to see presets across the board with a hierarchy system in place to save and create. (METAL-bronze-brushed aluminum-gold-silver,etc WOOD-pine-rosewood...)
Cycles Shaders -->Surface. Put them in alphabetical order for the love of God!!! :-) I can't say how many tutorials I've seen of people floundering around to find a shader, as well as myself. "Where is that mix shader?!?..oh the same place as it was before, just not where I expect it to be..again". I understand it's a node based system, but when creating simple shaders it can be a small annoyance. I'm also aware there actually may be some logic to the seemingly chaotic order, but from what I've seen it doesn't seem to play out in real world usage. Enlighten me if there is. :)
I've been a Blender user off and on for 5+ years and more seriously in the last 2 years as I'm working towards producing children's media. Although Blender isn't a perfect app, as if there is one, it's still an amazing piece of software developed by some very talented individuals. I'm very appreciative of all the work that has gone into making this app a viable option for professional 3d work and hope to be able to contribute in the near future. Thanks to the blender community, devs and Ton's leadership!
I'm very happy to see the "Nodification" of constraints and other rigging tools in 2.8.
I've been feeling that Blender really needs to update its constraint and driver system to support nodes. As it stands, it simply isn't possible to create a driver which uses multiple inputs for even the simplest mathematical formulas unless you want to start coding in python. (you can average, take the largest, smallest, or sum of multiple inputs. Nothing else.)
- BGE -
I feel that Blender has the opportunity to step into a niche in the market.The niche, as I see it, is for a tool that provides the best platform for realtime animation, through the use of the BGE.
(Granted - software such as Blender should never be "targeted" towards a specific end. Fortunately this happens simply because the features are available).
Even with it's fairly low level of functionality at the moment, the integrated environment of 3D editor and game engine provides a singularly unique development pipeline.
Realtime shadows and excellent external device input support are my favourites. For small studios who have to do a lot with small or no budgets, Blender even now offers a great solution for doing realtime animation productions.
UDK and Unity offer exceptional quality, but the one is "difficult" to work with, while the other requires a significantly large license fee to get shadows.
The suggested work on BGE sounds good. Thank you to those who take the time and energy for the development.
Looks like this thread is going to be all about the game engine then. Maybe there will be a different update that addresses compatibility directly, so I'll bow out of this one and wait.