Development Games

BGE – Taking it to the Next Level

Alex Delderfield (AD-Edge) ·

blendcharIt was announced very recently (on the 6th of April) that the Blender Game Engine will be used to make a third person action thriller called Fire Wire District 22. The game is being produced by Entertainment Arts Research Inc and its subsidiary Twilight 22 Studio based in Atlanta, Georgia USA.

The fact that the BGE is being used for such a game is very exciting, but even more so when its revealed that the BGE will be ‘developed into a full production game engine’ to enable the project’s usage of the BGE.

The Development team contains many of the BGE’s greatest coders, many of whom worked on developing the game engine during the Apricot project. Their contributions to the game engine have been great so far (especially with GLSL, the huge amount of game engine bug fixes and additional features during the 2.48 Apricot release in 2008) so theres no doubt we’ll see some amazing advancements during this project.

The team for the project is as follows:

  • Joseph Saulter
  • Johathan Eubanks
  • John Walker
  • Nate Nesler
  • Harsh Borah
  • Chris Saunders
  • Dalai Felinto
  • Benoit Bolsee
  • Mike Pan
  • Martinsh Upitis
  • Campbell Barton

Nate Nesler (MatrixNAN) explains:

“Entertainment Arts Research Using Blender Game Engine for Production

April 6, 2009- Atlanta, Georgia–Entertainment Arts Research Inc. and it’s subsidiary Twilight 22 Studio both based in Atlanta, Georgia USA are in pre production on an original third person action thriller IP called Fire Wire District 22 driven by artistic creativity and advanced technology.

Fire Wire District 22® is using the Blender Game Engine. EARI is using the Blender Game Engine by adding additional real time shaders, as well as for scène graph and culling. “Benoit Bolsee, one of our programmers, has been able to speed up the scenegraph and culling in the game engine 5 times in just the very first optimization that was done,” stated Nate Nesler. Nesler is the Artistic Technical Director for Fire Wire District 22®.

Twilight 22 has released screen space ambient occlusion, light scattering, improved depth of field, chromatic aberration, and cross shaped bloom to the community for the Blender Game Engine based on the work done by the artist Martinsh Upitis, Mike Pan, and Dalai Felinto for Twilight 22. Future releases to the community will also include subsurface scattering skin shaders, advanced water shaders and effects, level of detail with background loading, and multi-threading for multi-core systems with better over all acceleration of the Blender Game Engine.

Professor Joseph Saulter, CEO and Chairman of Entertainment Arts Research Inc., commented, “We look forward to forming strong partnerships with the Blender community.” Saulter continued, “We are also open to creating alliances with other gaming companies to create open source game development tools.” ”

And to clear up any initial panic/confusion (as seen on Blenderartists.org), Entertainment Arts Research is not a division of EA (Electronic Arts):

“We are not part of EA, Electronic Arts. Our umbrella company name use to be EAR, Electronic Arts Reseach, but it was changed to Entertainment Arts Research because of the EA made a new division named EAR so it was too close to our company name back when. So to be clear we have no connection with EA, Electronic Arts.”

Theres a thread on Blenderartists.org where all of this is currently being discussed, along with additional information and answered questions.

Its certainly a very exciting development for Blender and the community and will be interesting to see how the BGE evolves during the development of Fire Wire District 22.

Author Alex Delderfield (AD-Edge)
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