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Preorder "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition"!

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You can now pre-order "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition! From the product page on Blender e-shop:

This fully revised and updated second edition has been written with Blender 2.48, and covers all improvements for game creation thanks to the Open Game Yo Frankie! project.

The Blender GameKit starts with an extensive section for people who are new to 3D - explaining all basic concepts - or new to Blender; with a full introduction to the interface. Then it shows in step-by-step tutorials the fun of creating models, adding motion to them, and how to turn them into simple games. Experienced 3D artists will appreciate the more complex game demos, the character animation tutorials, the introduction to Python, a tutorial with the Frankie character, and the advanced reference section.

The CDROM contains several playable and editable Blender game demos, created by renowned artists from the Blender community. It also contains all the files needed for the tutorials and Blender V2.48, for all platforms. Special discount for early orders! Book expected to ship December 15, 2008.

  • Full Color printed, 320 pages
  • Edited and updated by Carsten Wartmann
  • Design and DTP by Samo Korosec
  • Produced by Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation
  • Book revenues will be fully used to support Blender projects.
  • Go ahead and preorder your own copy now!

    About the Author

    Benjamin Bailey

    I am a young creative artist with a dream to conquer the world with my ideas. I love singing, writing, drawing, and modeling in 3D - and I'm ready to put these skills to use.

    81 Comments

    1. I'll see if I can pay by bank transfer... I would like to pay when it arrives, but I can't, by what I see.Let's hope I can >_<

    2. Yeahaaaaa
      Can't wait any more until I get my Copy of this book. Ordert it right away!!!
      I was still using the first edtition all the time... And now it will be up to date what will make things a lot more efectiv.
      Everybody that is rally interestet in making games whit Blender should get this book.
      Not only is ther so muche great Info in it but allso it will help to finance the future Development of BGE.

    3. What OldJim did not told you:

      With effort and persistency he managed to get an article about networking in Blender into the book ;-)

      He wrote it himself!

      Thanks Jim!

      Carsten

    4. Hooray for the new addition to the Blender library!

      Having purchased ALL of the currently available Blender books, I would like to say "enough already!" to the tendency to start every book with an introduction to the Blender interface and basic modeling.

      "Bounce" did a great job of saying, "Hey! You should already know the basics before you read this book." I'm hoping I don't have to skip through the first 25% of the new gamekit book before I get to the meat of the GE.

      Out of curiosity, are there any other Blender books in the works at the moment?

    5. @blendenzo

      If people want a book instead of a website why would you oppose it?

      Also, what's wrong with making money?
      If people buy it, is because they prefer to have the book than to have the money. So why do you oppose this? it seams like a voluntary exchange...

    6. Blendenzo:

      First, you mis-spelled your website's name. Lucky for you it's spelled the same as your nickname here. ;-)

      I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think you're being a little hard on the GE2 authors. I'm sure their book and your web site will be great compliments to each other.

      I've referenced your site a couple of times when trying to get into the GE parts of Blender. You've got a lot of great stuff there, but I am sure there will be territory covered in the books that you don't have on your site. On the other hand, your site has the benefits of being able to download example files, display video tutorials, and stay up-to-date with new Blender GE developments -- all things a book just can't do.

      As for the money made from the book, I assure you that the authors will not be getting rich from the book's sales. Even if the book sells really well (which I hope it does!) the money the authors make in return for the hundreds of hours of work will be small. Most of the money each of us pay for the book will go to the publisher. It's a testament to the authors' love of Blender to have dedicated so much of their time to the project. And I'm sure the will benefits the Blender community will gain from having the book available will far out-weigh any financial profits made by the authors.

      I love the fact that Blender is free and that so many people are willing to donate their time and resources to it. But the fact that Blender is free doesn't mean that making a financial profit based on it is wrong.

    7. On a side note...

      The example book pages on the pre-order web page contain a number of grammatical errors and awkward sentence construction. Hopefully this doesn't carry through the entire book. Learning something as complex as Blender GE is difficult enough without having to decipher poorly edited technical writing.

      I write a lot of technical documentation and have actually been a contributing author for two books on 3D graphics. Maybe I should offer my editing services to future authors of Blender publications. :-)

      I'm still going to buy the book, though.

    8. "Carsten, you and Tony mullen are a couple of pirates. Everyone in the open source world is donating stuff, and you guys are using their resources to make money."

      Wow. How clueless can you get?

    9. Roger L. Waggener on

      I have two comments about the commercial nature of the book.

      One:
      Online free tutorials are great to learn new techniques, but to someone who does not understand how the game engine works to begin with, a tutorial on how to do X or Y will not teach them how to get started with the game engine. They need a step by step, starting from zero introduction (not necessarily to blender itself, I agree with DarrenW there) to the game engine allowing them to get started and develop to the point where those tutorials are useful.

      That is exactly (though I have not read it) what I envision the value of this book to be. That is one reason people will pay money for this book despite the fact that there are so many great tutorials online for free.

      Two:
      Be careful about calling people names. Did you look at the purchase page?
      If so you missed this part:

      "Book revenues will be fully used to support Blender projects."

      Does Ton make money from blender? Does that make him a pirate?
      I hope he does make his entire living off blender in numerous ways. He deserves that AND our thanks.

      Thanks, Ton!

      If Carsten and Tony make some money off this (and other) books- good for them. Their books are advancing blender in the world. I bought Introduction to Character Animation in a Borders bookstore! Imagine- someone looking for their first book about 3d or game creation might have discovered blender the same way!

    10. Sorry Blendenzo, this is kind of a harsh message, but i think you are being
      quite rude, and in opposition to DarrenW, i just do not get your point.

      1. The blender foundation benefits from the sale of this book

      2, You require money for volunteer work? How in the world
      could anyone guess that you wanted money?

      3. Why is it wrong to write a book and sell it, simply because
      it is about open source software?

      Besides, if you wanted to make money from your website, couldn't
      you just do so? payed access or something?
      My point is, why should the book authors be responsible
      for looking up every single blender community website,
      and donating money to them?

    11. Howdy blendenzo
      Hey somehow I don’t get your attitude. You say you enjoy doing your website for free - Right! Well If you enjoy it way do you care about how other people handle things.
      Most of us are here to have fun so why get upset?
      Look I put a loot of time in the Network setup Development for blender (over 2 Years of almost everyday 1 - 1.5h I get up early before I go to work, that’s the only way I can put this time in to the blender Community - having a 1Year old Daughter and a second child on its way).
      I also put a lot of Time in to using the knowledge I gained to write the Tutorials for this “GameKit Book” and I just gave it to Carston – I even did by the book myself. Hey if Carsten wants to give me something for my work I won’t say no – but the point is that I have fun using BGE and sharing what I know whit other people as the share there knowledge with me. I think everything that makes BGE more popular is great for us. That why I also put a lot of time into Gameblender.org as a Admin there.
      Hey I really hope that you can just enjoy the BGE and the community that comes with it.
      Be happy if other bring out a book special if the revenues of the book go back to blender.org and help them to develop BGE even future. (remember how you where thinking when you begun to work on your homepage.)

      At this point I don’t what to miss to say Thanx a lot to all your great work and effort that you put in to BGE. Your Website is awesome (even if sit not totally up to date ant the moment…but I sure that will change soon :) )
      Also Thanx a lot to all the others that help in one way or the other in this great community.
      And let’s become a unity again and not work against each other….

    12. Blendenzo,
      that sounds like a lot of pent-up frustration...
      Is there any possibility for you to do what Kernon did for the BlenderNewbies site? ie put all tutorials in higher quality videos on DVD and try to sell those? I bought Kernon's DVD, both to support him but also because I like having the extra quality and ease of use aspect.

      Buying the Geamekit book is also providing support to Blender itself, just like buying everything else from the E-shop. Sure, Amazon might be more convenient but Blender probably gets a bigger cut when bought from the E-Shop.

      Anyways, thanks for supporting the community like you (and a lot of other) have been doing so unselfishly.

    13. Nice!
      I hope the next Game Project come soon, and form this book selling will be donate the BlenderGameEngine coders and artists :)

      Thanks for all!

    14. Just to make it clear. I gave my tutorials to Carston for FREE, never even talk to him about money - I just wanted that as many people as possible find out about how to make a network multiplayer game with blender.
      Hope a lot of you will enjoy :)
      I did not even ask if I could have a free book for my work that I put in to is. Instead I did buy it as soon as I did see it for pre-order.

      (This double post is here because I did some misspellings in the post above and I don’t want to be misunderstood in this point...)

    15. Sheesh guys.. I mean really the book proceeds are going towards new blender projects.. it quite clearly is mentioned on in the article, on the blog, and on shop page. Nothing is stopping you Blendenzo from making your own book and selling it. Maybe this is the good opportunity to be positive.. I'm sure you could make quite a kick ass book .. so go for it!

    16. @Blendenzo: There are really a lot of people working a lot of time somewhere around Blender (me inclusive). But I would never have started with Blender if I hadn't read Carsten's first book.

      Yes, I'm making money with Blender. Do I have to pay Ton or the Blender Foundation for that?

      I get my knowledge partially from other websites. Should I pay them?
      I don't think so.

      So if you can make money with Blender, it's a good thing. And I will use Carsten's Book to make more money (if possible in any way).

    17. Blendenzo your comments are totally off base! The money made from books published by the Blender Foundation are directly funding Blender development, which can't all be done for free, since if it was the pace of development would be glacial.

      Anyways, no one disputes that other sites like yours and BlenderArtists also make a great contibution to the Blender community, but simply in different matter.

    18. Quote from blendenzo
      “”””””””””
      Do you really think people would help them on the forums if they said: " Hey I have this problems and I need help. Your information will be recycled into a commercial book, and you will receive nothing for it "
      Heck no, no one would help them out.
      “”””””””””

      Well I sure would!!! Because it will help to make blender more popular and spread this precious Information.
      I sort of did exactly that by just giving all my work to Carsten and letting him sell it...I don’t expect any thing for my work. I do my work to help the Community and If I see that it helps someone this gives me more satisfaction then money ever could.

      I have a donation button on my website and if people support me this will give me more possibilities and time to work on my Blender project and giving it away for free.
      But no matter if anybody supports me or not (so far nobody did) I will but give the time that I have to the community for free. Hey because as a family father I don’t really have any time, I extra get up earlier in the morning when the rest of my family is sleeping to work for blender.

    19. @blendenzo:

      1) Your webpage sucks. If you spent "years" on it, you should look for a different kind of job, sorry.

      2) What are you doing, if not "harvesting information"? Information needs to be free, if you don't agree you are free to take all the "(offsite)" links off your webpage. Besides, the book is a BF project – are you suggesting the BF is too incompetent to come up with documentation for the software they make?

      3) Making a book is a lot of work. You can either do it for free in your spare time and never get ready or you pay people to do it. It's how NaN and the BF have always handled it. If you think making a book is easy – feel free to try. If you come up with a finished Game Engine book that is truly original, I am sure the BF will help you bring it to market. But you actually have to write the ~300+ pages first!

      4) The book benefits the community and the BF. Are you seriously envious of that? You sound like a 14 year old spoiled child who thinks he should come first for whatever reason.

      5) Last but not least, Carsten is a member of the Blender community for nearly a decade now (1998 or 1999, I think). He is the editor/co-author of the original GameKit and the author of the german Blender book, which is the de-facto german reference for Blender. To imply he's simply harvesting material off the internet is only proving that you're uninformed and a troll.

    20. @Samo: A decade of Blender.... I feel old now ;-)

      So please people calm down!

      EVERY product, company or human making money with Blender is GOOD. Thats how Ton managed to get Blender to the point where it is now (after NaN went down). Maybe there is no direct revenue, but it will come back. Beside that the GK2 is of course a direct source of revenue for the Blender Foundation.

      Carsten

    21. @blendenzo: sorry, not sure exactly what's going on because I haven't read all of the comments, but I want to reply to your most recent comment:

      I really don't know what you have gone through by being misunderstood and undervalued on BA, but I want to help. I am interested in learning some about game design, but really don't know much. I am open to writing a BlenderNation article totally dedicated to your website on Blender game design. Send me some information, pictures, links to "cedarsoflebanon at gmail dot com" (or through the "submit news" link at the top of BlenderNation) and I'll see what I can do.

      Best wishes!
      -b

    22. Ordered it yesterday! Been waiting for this ever since I first heard an announcement about it, and when Blender Gamekit became free... This is going to be INSANE!!!! :D

    23. Blendenzo... I think everyone gets where you're coming from..... But you're missing a few key facts... The people who wrote these books were not volunteers. While others provided content for free with no expectations attached the reasoning for these books were probably A.) To provide $ for the Blender Foundation. B.) Provide a small income for the Authors, and unless they sell millions of copies they won't be making a ton of money anyways since the publisher take a cut, in Mullens case Sybex probably made more from sales than he did.. And C.) Provide this content at a fair price other than a digital format.... Keep in mind Blender isn't the only DCC community where users are creating free content, your website no matter how great it is, is not unique. I can find site for Max, Maya, XSI where content is free...

      More so being a volunteer you should expect nothing in return... That what volunteering is about, providing your time an energy to help other without gains of you own minus knowing you've done something positive. Once again the people who wrote these book were not volunteers, you were. Now to come back and demand something in return is like someone in a soup kitchen chasing down the person they just gave food to and demand payment. Nobody is forcing anybodies had to purchase these books... they can just as easily find content like this on your site or other ones. To call them pirates when the act of purchasing this material is solely a personal choice who acted on free will is ridiculous.

      As for your site not being linked to often enough, there are a lot of things happening in this community and everyone deserves to be mentioned. Your website is great and I don't doubt you've done a ton for this community but in your past comments I see alot me, me ,and me...

    24. Alright, now I've read all the comments. I appreciate seeing some of the angles on this topic, but please, everyone, take a step back, breath deep, and think "Now, wait a second, why did the other person say that?" and give eachother a few miles of slack. We are a community, and a community is one - thousands of individual, adjacent ideas and angles, all unified in mass community of volunteers and professionals: the melting pot of Blender's contributors.

      Thank you everyone for your thoughts and words! And thank you Carsten, Samo, OldJim, and Blendezo for your hard work! Carsten for the book as a whole, to Samo Korosec for his hard work with the cover design and massive DTP work(!!!,) OldJim for the (likely excellent) article on networking with the BGE, and to Blendezo for all his years of contributing to the open source Blender Game Engine community - all of you do not fully know who you are impacting.

      Give faces to the numbers*, and your work suddenly becomes much more alive.

      I guess that's all for now, I have definitely said enough at this time.

      BUT THANK YOU ALL!!! This is a great community all-in-all.

      Thanks Ton, Bart, LetterRip, Tim Formica, Allan Brito, Alex... everyone. ;)

      I believe in a brighter world,
      -b

      *Numbers such as site hits, links to your site, video views, sales, comments, members, etc.

    25. @ccherrett: Yes, I'm being a jerk. I get like that whenever people come up claiming how awesome they are and how unfair the world is for not noticing it. The Blender community is full of people who spend a lot of their free time helping others, providing learning material and being nice while doing so. It's unfair to them to go out and claim one deserves special treatment.

    26. I just ordered one. I still find it easier to study from a book, that's the only reason. Maybe we should end this discussion about pirates and blendenzo before it comes a war (I still remember the post about microsoft and blender). But hey, it's great to know there are such sites. In a great community like this one, there is a lot of input from the users. I think it's normal that not everybody will get the recognition they sometimes deserve (but we can only hope they do). Everything develops just so fast with blender that a lot of people just can't follow everything.

    27. Wow, this has become somehow controversial!

      Well, Blendenzo, I'm very sorry you feel this way. You're right about one thing. Part of what I do in writing my books is to scour every resource I can find to get good information and bring it together. That's called research. There is a ton of good, free information out there on your website and many others. I draw upon that, I draw upon my conversations with artists and developers, I draw upon hours upon hours of studying and experimenting with Blender myself, and I put it all together in one place where people can get at it.

      Obviously, if people find what I do useful, they can buy the books, and if they would prefer not to, I'm the first to agree that with enough time and effort, it's all stuff that they can learn, just like I did, on their own effort without the books.

      As for whether people help me knowing what my plans are, I can assure you that they do. Everybody in Blenderartists and #blendercoders knows who I am when I ask questions. Most of them know that I am conscientious about mentioning people who help me in any way I can; I link to websites, I include profiles of users and developers, and I generally do all I can to raise awareness of other Blender users. People who have worked with me on my books have gone on to other lucrative opportunities doing their own work. So as for whether I take more than I give to the community, I don't think you'll find many people who agree with you on that.

      Many people who have contributed free material in the past, by the way, eventually are finding ways to make their work profitable, thanks to the growing market for Blender learning materials. I would encourage you to do the same thing, if you want to be rewarded financially for your work. However, being paid for your work requires that you take the appropriate steps to arrange that. You must contact and negotiate with a publisher, you must be prepared to meet deadlines, you must be prepared to work, as I have for the past few months, VERY hard and very long hours to get things done in a quality and timely manner. And after doing all that, don't expect a great deal of money. It's not enough to live on.

      As for whether I'm a pirate, I think it's pretty obvious that I am not. Learning things from one place and teaching others somewhere else is not piracy, even if you get paid. I never plagiarize or quote without attribution, but I certainly do learn things from your and other websites and apply them to what I do. If you want to stop people from doing that, there is a simple solution: take down your website.

    28. being new to blender is Game kit 2.0 a good place to start or am I better off starting with say Tony Mullen's Introducing Character Animation with Blender and then move on to Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! I know nothing about using blender yet.

    29. @KlonoaDreamer: Welcome to the Blender community! :) Sorry it's not very friendly in these comments. ;(

      Anyhow, no, I would say that The Blender GameKit 2nd Edition is not the best place to start if you are wanting to learn Blender basics. I have not read the GameKit, but from what I understand it covers game design (smile) not Blender basics.

      Since you are beginning on Blender, I suggest you check out this links:

      How to learn Blender ;)
      http://www.mathiaspedersen.com/resources/10-tips-while-learning-blender-3d/

      Blender 3D: Noob to Pro
      http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

      For various features in Blender (in video-tutorial style) check out Bits of Blender:
      http://www.youtube.com/user/bitsofblender

      And never forget the very useful Blender wiki:
      http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Main_Page

      And check out this book:
      http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=96
      (though I have not read it I think it's a good resource.)

      Of course, you can learn pretty much everything you need for free online, but if you prefer books, then check out these two links:

      Blender e-Shop
      http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/

      BlenderNation.com community store:
      http://www.blendernation.com/category/store/

      Thanks! I hope your journey is a very exciting one! Don't forget to Google for answers to questions you have regarding Blender - that's how I've learned: by all the free resources out there and countless hours of playing with it. Having a teacher would (and still would be) great, but that's not always possible.

      Best wishes and God bless!
      -b

    30. As for fairly dividing up the pie, unfortunately that's not possible. What is possible is to work together to expand the market for Blender resources, and for each person to work hard to carve out their own niche. If you are not happy as a volunteer, you need to find a way that you can contribute in a way that you are happy. But this is up to you. Tearing down other people's efforts and contributions is not likely to be a good way for you to advance your own interests.

      @KlonoaDreamer, the best place to start is probably
      http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

      Also, http://www.blenderunderground.com has some of my favorite beginning-level video tutorials and http://www.blendernewbies.com has a ton of various interesting beginner tutorials as well. If you're interested in learning the Game Engine, start here:

      http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_the_Game_Engine

      Blenderartists.org/forum is a great resource for finding other tutorials and websites, such as Blendenzo's.

      Once you have decided you want to learn more, then I'd suggest looking at the various books and DVDs available that cover various topics in more depth.

    31. @DarrenW: oooh, I see what you mean. After reading a little of the excerpt I quickly noticed your point. :( Maybe the next edition will have a grammatical editor sweep the entire book, with a few "beta-readers," who give feedback about parts that they didn't understand/have suggestions for, etc.

    32. Who cares what monetary cut people decide they want to take out of it? Blender as a program profits! All that'll happen in the long run is that more people will learn how to use the game engine, more people will make cool games with it, more programmers will hear about it, more development will go into it. Why is that a bad thing? If any one of us wanted to make some money out of it, we could probably find some way to do it, but a lot of us just want to give away information for free because we like Blender and we want people to find out about it and use or improve it.

      The positive side to a website is, it's there, it's free, and it gets updated a lot. The positive side to a book is, it's physically there, it's concise, it's indexed well, and it's consistently written. If you want to spend ages trying to find a piece of information that you need without being concerned about how many times you hear the same pieces of other information that are useless to you over and over again, how long it takes you to eventually find the right piece of information, you don't mind deciphering badly written or misspelt text, and you don't want to pay or haven't got time to wait for a book to arrive, you go to a website. If you want to be able to find a piece of information quickly and easily, that may not be quite up to date, where everything else only appears once in your search, and you want to have a physical object so that you don't have to have a computer on or a web browser open, you look in a book.

      As for 'harvesting information' - yes, book authors harvest information from websites, spend hours of time arranging it and rewording it to suit the book they are writing and make it easy to understand, then make money out of the work involved in this task. But I'm sure that the information that was not harvested, although it is from the same book, will quite quickly find it's way back onto the websites again. So while book authors make money publishing free information, websites also make information free that the books authors already published.

      Seems like a fair deal to me anyway...

    33. So while book authors make money publishing free information, websites also make information free that the books authors already published.

      @epat: Hey, that's a pretty cool take on it, epat! Thanks for the insight... :)

    34. And yes - I agree with the previous points about grammar and readability of this book. In my opinion, somebody should edit it before it gets printed. I'm sure nobody would mind the shipping date being set slightly later if the text was improved? Am I wrong?

      I would offer, but I'm currently a bit busy in my life at the moment. :/

    35. @blendenzo

      I don't know if this is of much worth to you considering your understandable and valid emotional state, but I wanted to say that I really respect and appreciate the work you put on your website. I have planned to learn the BGE in the future, and if it's still online I'll be using your site. I just finished browsing through it and I think you've done a very good job. I'll be glad it's there when I start learning the game engine.

      I don't think there is a good reason to keep being a moderator or any think else if you don't find it rewording.

    36. @KlonoaDreamer: You bet! Glad I could help. Remember that you don't -have- to buy any books, DVDs, or other materials. There are plenty of online resources to answer most of your fundamental questions. That's the beauty of open source, volunteer tutorials, and learning it yourself. However, some people do buy the books because it helps them and/or they want to support the Blender Foundation. Both are good reasons.

      Hope that helps,
      Happy blending!
      God bless,
      -b

    37. As being someone who is "less economically viable" I HOPE there will be a friendlier priced (Eur. 15-20) downloadable e-book version of this. I'm simply NOT able to afford this "discounted price" right now!!

      Please, please Blender book authors consider that there are ppl that are not rich too! You do that too little, while you are monopolizing your knowledge for profits!

    38. There's really confusement in this thread... apparently people don't understand how the Blender Foundation pays bills... we do that almost exclusively as a publisher, making and selling books and dvds. That allows me to work full time on Blender, and Brecht van Lommel (full time coding) too. It allows us to have a studio here in Amsterdam, make open movies/games, sponsor the Blender Conference, Siggraph activities, and so on.

      We even take the very bold move to make all of our products available as open content. So for those who have not much money; all the GameKit text+images is going to be in wiki too. Also training videos are free downloadable.

      As on the 'getting paid' side: both Carsten and Samo are professionals, and accepted this as paid work. They've accepted fee that's less than half what such work normally would cost.

      Grammar issues: those pages are not the final pdf yet, a correction round was scheduled. I'll only check on spelling and readablity though. We're not native English speakers.

      Have a good day!

      -Ton-

    39. To address 'blendenzo' issues:

      - The Apricot project had an open subscription for a month, that's how we picked the artists. You didn't mail us to tell you were available.
      - In the over 10 months we had the apricot blog, a lot of enthusiast GE artists/developers got involved via that site. I can't find a single post from you, nor anyone mentioning your site.
      - If you want get listed on blender.org, there's a form where you can submit the site. Every website there did so.

      For Blender having all those 1000s of volunteers working happily is crucial. For everything we do, I'm always looking at ways to get them positively involved or inspired. With Blender getting mature and recognized by the industry, it also means we should support people to get involved professionally. How to balance volunteer's work with paid work is always tricky, I know we shouldn't scare away volunteers. But we also shouldn't close our eyes for the opportunities that lie ahead.

      Lastly: documentation is still Blender's weakest point. I try to keep closely track of what happens in our wiki, and active volunteers (such as 'PapaSmurf') get involved with paid opportunities as well. If there's any money well spent, it's for paying authors, or get them in contact with publishers. :)

      -Ton-

    40. @ Blendenzo

      Good things come to those who wait.

      Your a good guy, who does a lot of really good, hard work, just try to have more patience with these things.
      Perhaps consider writing your own book, as I would like to do in the near future.

      Its unfortunate that this discussion escalated to the point where Ton had to come in and explain things, but at least its cleared up now.

      -Alex

    41. @horace: There's a 3 page "bullet physics engine" part in the Reference with short tips, but nothing too extensive (the vehicle one is half a page). If you're hesitant to buy the book, you can wait a bit until the content is prepared for the wiki — the book will be published under a Creative Commons Attribute licence from the beginning, so all the material will be readily available for fixing, translations and extending.

    42. Celebration or no... But yes, forum moderation tends to be like that (I did it on some non-3d related sites.) "Janitorial" work most of the time politicking for the rest, little of the

    43. Will the second edition be made available in pdf format like the original gamekit? The cost of the book is fine, but it will cost me half the book price to actually get it here.

    44. @Samo: what DTP (DeskTop Publishing) software did you use? Scribus? Open office? What software did you use in conjunction with it? Inkscape (for vector illustrations and diagrams) and the GIMP (for general image manipulation)? I am very interested to know!

      Thanks,
      -b

    45. @Ton: thanks for clearing things up. ;)
      @: blendenzo: Thank you, Blendenzo... your apology was very appropriate and means a lot. If I try more game designing (which I probably will) I will try to remember to check out your site to find some answers. :)

      Oh boy, free content on the wiki! ;) Maybe I will start buying Blender materials someday... then I can make a digital smoothie... OK, that's off-the-wall. :)

      God bless!

    46. hmm.

      wauw.

      I alway understood blender to be open and free, not "gratis". Everybody who can should try to make a living out of blender.

      Now... blendenzo... I see your point. Years of hard work without turning that into revenues.
      That must feel cruel.
      But in this case it's pointed at the wrong people. If you want I can rant a word or two about blenders (in)famous NaN period, a period Ton for some reason never talks about. I can tell you he lost a friend or two, and some stayed to support blender. In my opinion this support is a little bit more valuable because it hold a tint of friendship.

      Giving and Altruisme are nice topics, a little bit too hard for me to discuss in a foreign language on some blog.
      I've been around blender for a while now, it's to big a part of me to let go, but it's not only gems. The world is not all "Happy happy, Joy joy".
      My only real advice would be to try to do as much as you enjoy, if you no longer enjoy maintaining a help site for blender then just stop doing it. Somebody else will take over, or not. The people not only get the king they deserve, the king also gets the people he deserves. :)

      Cheers, joeri

    47. I have spoken to Blendenzo at length on a number of separate occasions, and to be honest, these posts do not sound like him, and in fact directly contradict some of the points he has told me in confidence (he told me specifically that was in fact planning to purchase the book). Perhaps the comments here need to be taken with a grain of salt given that there is no reliable authentication system for commenting here. I for one am skeptical that these are his comments. I would not put too much weight in these comments until BN has a sort of authentication process. It would be a shame if words not posted by the real Blendenzo damned him.

    48. BlenderBroadCast BBC on

      ..::----------------------------------------------------------::..
      That would be a cool story if blendenzo here was a fake!
      Anyone willing to contact him on BA?

    49. When is it going to ship?!! I just noticed that the shipping date of 15th of December has been removed. Are they shipping or has publication been postponed? Keep us up to date!

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