Physics Demo for Game Engine Browser Plugin
Toby Lieven writes:
I made a Blender Game Engine demo called “Box Apocalypse” which you can play in your browser with the new Burster browser plugin.
The Burster web browser plugin for the Blender Game Engine is a fantastic alternative to the closed source and very expensive Flash (£800 for the Flash editor last time I checked).
It would be great if we all got behind Burster and helped to raise the profile of this fantastic piece of software as much as possible. I’m sure it’ll really capture people’s imaginations once more and more people start to hear about it. With some work and the support of the community, I really think it could be as big as Flash in a few years and that would obviously be fantastic for Blender itself.
Here you can play the Box Apocalypse demo and watch a video of it
Links:
Hooray for BGE love!
…But…
Where’s the Burster Mac plugin?
Cool plugin :D now i waiting for some cool games :)
A browser plugin? even if it’s ID software doing the plugin it doesn’t have the browser penetration it need. noone wants to install plugins anymore. it’s outdated.
This is the next flash player, now in alpha state called molehill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwi0lWgX8w
4 million polys rendering 100% on the GPU , logic in AS3.
If blender want’s to be a part of the next gen web stuf it should use technology such as
* webgl
* html5
* google native client (C++ code downloaded and compiled on client computer, think JavaScript but C++)
only then will it surpass flashplayer.
I would love a BGE exporter that takes the Py Game Logic and translate it into JavaScript, and exports the whole scene with animation textures etc and a preloader.
OR
exports the entire BGE as source code for compiling on the client side with Google Native Client.
wow, this is great! web plugin again! yeah!
if it will works on some android tablet -> blender will rule the world
I don’t want to sound negative! But I work in this business and I kinda have a sense of what’s next and what’s not going to “blend” ;P
will a browser plugin blend? nooope. WebGL most likely will.
here’s a comment on a unity3d (closed browser plugin for 3d content) blog post (read first comment by me)
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/18/interview-with-muse-games/
I asked if they had plans to do a Google NaCL translation and they actually had it in the pipeline already done for Google IO. Now that kind of engine downloadable and compiled on client system for maximum performance is hard to beat.
BGE should take a somewhat similar path.
Yes, unfortunatly the molehill rules, this new API will bring the flash player up on a hill again in a couple of months. But I love blender, wish all luck to my favorite application and its cool plug-in afterwords.
Blender will rule :)
-thing is, anyone can make really intricate sims on it with very little coding -sad part is, to share it, you have to give the source -that’s the only down part. Once that’s out of the way, it’s all smooth sailing.
-sides, if anyone wants to make a converter for the new flash or the google thingamajig, that’s fine too.
and webgl means you give the source out too like you would the javascript. *gags* no thanks.
no plug in available for this content i get in chrome.
any ideas ?
“Linux version is temporarily unavailable!” :\ Maybe I’ll boot into windows to try it…
It’s cool, but plugins these days are an annoyance and something people won’t go through much trouble to deal with. Need a plugin to view this content? *click, close*
The upside, it uses Blender and it’s sort of open source. The downside is that your .blend files are not protected. You can buy a certificate to encrypt the .blend, but I don’t see that lasting very long since someone out there will come up with a workaround. And I’m too much of a free-as-in-beer kind of guy. I don’t want to have to buy any additions to protect my content. While nice in concept and it’s got some cool demos, if you’re going to make someone go to the trouble of using a plugin, you might as well just release your content with an actual game engine such as Unity. There are, unfortunately, better alternatives to this idea, cool as it may be.
i totally agree with martin lindelöff. nobody will install an unknown plugin. it’s a huge security risk.
the future is webgl or native client.
the effort should be put into porting the blender player to google native client.
“””and webgl means you give the source out too like you would the javascript. *gags* no thanks.”””
there are very good javascript obfuscators.
Well, if everybody install the unknown Flash player plugin…
maybe everybody will install the at-less-I-can-see-the-source-code unknown Blender plugin…
And have 3D acceleration, that is a good thing.
Yeah, everybody installs the Flash plugin, which by the way hampers the spread of html5 (as does IE). Since other players such as Adobe and Microsoft don’t conform to standards, why should we? I know, they are the big players and they can “dictate the rules”. But not quite. Linux still exists, open source still exists and is increasingly better off, although it’s in the minority. But it’s an option, an alternative to the monopoly, and perhaps so will be the Burster player.
I forgot I installed the Burster player a couple of weeks ago when it was first announced so the game just came up and away it went!
(Disabling now!)
Once the security issues are sorted, it’s just another plug in – and come on, who hasn’t got an extra toolbar or media downloader or flash already?
I think this is worth getting behind, so we don’t get behind if you know what I mean. Blender has a web plug in 5 years ago and it atrophied. Let’s not see it happen again!
Oh and BTW – Gotta get me one of those guns for Minecraft!!!
haha i just want to know how he made that game
To those who are saying that plugin’s are dead… I have to ask (without meaning to be rude) what planet are you on from? I might be a bit jaundiced from my day job but from what I’ve seen people will install any random plug-in at the slightest provocation.
More over, plug-ins are still a perfectly valid way of extending the capabilities of a web browser, particularly when you need a consistent environment for your content, whatever it may be, across multiple browsers and operating systems.
Given that the big players can’t even agree on a codec for video playback, expecting them to create (and implement!) (and STICK TO!) a standardised interface for far more demanding tasks such 3D accelerated content (e.g. WebGL) is frankly absurd.
Plug-ins are going to be with us for a very long time, in all their insecure glory :)
On topic: Thats quite a nifty demo, hats off!
@ Site Admin: Can you *please* fix the edit system?
I’m just impressed by the speed of that many boxes all using the physics sim at a time. Last time I checked, people were advising against using more than 8 or so physics sim objects in the BGE for a game on an average computer. From the look of this demo there are significanty more than 8 objects being simulated there! \o/
I have to agree with CorsairX too. I do believe plugins are still valid in today’s modern browsers, particularly if they’re executed in isolation to the browser so when they crash or have problems they won’t kill your whole browser.
As for the whole HTML5, WebGL with Javascript approach, these first two technologies are merely experimental at the moment as both standards have yet to be finalised and agreed on, then after this, the browser developers have to implement all of these features in accordance to the standards. This could take many, many years to complete. I’m guessing five to ten years or so.
I would also like to point both these technologies are open to security exploits just as much as flash is. Pretty much any software can be vulnerable to exploits. At the moment flash is by far more mature and when the next version is released sometime next year with the all the 3D GPU acceleration, it will take off.
Remember you do not need to buy adobe software to make flash programs. The SDK is freely available with all tools in which to compile and create the flash files. The documentation and API references are also free to download or view online. The only thing that costs money is the IDE software.
My biggest concern with the WebGL, HTML5 and Javascript approach is having all the source code available for people to read and do with whatever. It’s hardly worth spending many years painstakingly developing a game, only to have it plagiarized by others.
@ Blender Fellow
Yes, the implementation of HTML5 could take years – thanks to the big “old-school” players (MS, Adobe…), excluding Google, who are the only harbour of sanity in the corporate world I believe. That’s why we have to make all the workarounds. That’s why everybody is (ridiculously) paying somebody for enjoying mp3 instead of using the free (and more efficient) ogg. In a different world implementing anything in a browser would be a piece of cake. All the technology is here, we’re just unable to use it properly, because “easy and free” is against the interests of those who rule the technological world. So in the meantime we have to rely on solutions such as Burster.
As for Flash, I hate it. Because working on Linux I can’t develop anything sensible for it. And even if I were on Windows, I wouldn’t want to be in a situation, where I have to pay ONE company to develop in an (unfortunately) ubiquitous web standard. Just think of it, even with Microsoft, you you can choose another company (e.g. Apple) to pay to. Or you can get a free solution like Linux. Same with 3D. You can always go to another company (although with Autodesk buying everything that’s less and less plausible), and you can always use the free Blender. You can use Gimp instead of Photoshop, or some other paid solution, albeit probably not as good one. But to make anything impressive in Flash you actually HAVE to buy Adobe’s product. There’s no alternative. And since Flash is so ubiquitous, it’s nearly like some company buying and closing javascript or css and any developer wishing to use it would have to pay directly to the company that makes the editor. And they could always say that Javascript (or jQuery) is just for “extra stuff”, you can always code in pure and free HTML. Wouldn’t people want a workaround then? Down with Flash!!
here is an excellent open source Flash IDE for Windows that I use every day at work:
http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page
(You don’t actually need Flash CS* to develop with Flash but you should get it if you are serious about Flash development.)
It is also a coding environment for the open source Haxe platform (http://www.haxe.org) that allows you to potentially target Flash output, C++ output and HTML5 js/canvas output (to name but a few) – all from the same code base.
choice is always good :-)
@Pawel I agree with you on open standards over being locked into proprietary solutions that are solely provided by a single company who’s monopolizing the technology. However, as a software or even web developer you cannot release everything you make for free otherwise how do you receive an income in order to support yourself and pay for the food, transport, house, bills, latest computer hardware etc. that you depend on to live a comfortable life. I suppose you can sell support as part of the software but how can you maintain, test and release updates and respond to customer queries and issues all at the same time if you’re a single developer.
I think some free alternatives can be great and they can be terrible. I use Ubuntu as the OS for my render machine as didn’t want to waste my limited hardware budget on a windows license which will also consume valuable resources that could be used for my rendering. On the other side I use Office over OpenOffice.org as that has caused me more problems than I can remember not to mention all the times lost trying to get it to work when I could doing important work and meeting the deadlines.
As for flash, it has revolutionized the web in some respects. For instance, animations in flash are now much more sophisticated than the previous 256-color GIF animations that are an alternative to flash. Not to mention the video streaming codec within flash that now powers the majority of the websites out there like youtube.com and vimeo.com. This codec issue still has yet to be finalised with the HTML5 standard, meaning that until it is resolved and defined you’ll have to make multiple videos of the same content in different codecs for it to run on all browsers which is an unnecessary waste of hard disk space.
“The Burster plugin for Widows (TM) supports browsers listed below” … “widows” poor ladies?
webgl won’t take many years to finish. it’s almost done. firefox 4 / chrome 9 and opera (don’t know the version) at the beginning of next year will have it enabled by default.
javascript doesn’t mean that you must present your code in useable/readable form. there are very good javascript obfuscators which make the code nearly as useless as c compiled to an exe. if you want to prevent easy reverse engineering you have to use obfuscators with all languages that don’t compile to machine code (java and c# too)!
…and flash is the most insecure thing that exists! there is no comparison to anything else. flash is responsible for the majority of browser crashes and serious exploits get known every few weeks.
@Blender Fellow
Thanks for your comment. I’m not against commercial software. I’m against one company monopolizing a standard, which prevents you from producing (or using) a certain type of content if you don’t purchase the company’s products. It’s as if there was only one 3D suite and anyone who wanted to produce such content would have to buy their software. Can you imagine that? You can pay for MS Office if you think it’s better, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you’ve got an alternative. I often receive doc files from my work (I think it’s shameless an educational institution is using this closed format, but that’s the fact). What if there was no option to open those files except via MS Office? I’d have to purchase and install Windows (and I’m using only Linux and want it to stay that way) and I’d have to purchase MS Office. To only occasionally read some simple documents! Fortunately Open Office opens those documents, albeit sometimes with some formatting errors. Even though I’m so “open” and “free”, I still pay Microsoft in my taxes. Schools and institutions, which we all pay for, sadly usually purchase Miscrosoft’s software, so e.g. kids in school can use Windows and MS Office. Those kids also need a copy of the software at home to do homework. So their parents pay again, from their own pockets this time (unless they use pirated copies). Remember, it’s not the case of a conscious person deciding to buy a piece of software because they feel it’s better in one way or another. It’s millions of people being forced to pay for a product of a certain company (often not even the best product), if they want to survive in their job/school/community, while there are free alternatives for the taking. Some governments realize this and introduce free software in institutions, but they are still in the minority. It’s as if the school canteen decided that the lunches would be provided by McDonald’s. Which government would agree to that? Still, in software terms, that’s exactly what’s happening.
With Flash it’s even worse, because there really ARE NO alternatives. Fortunately, offices and schools don’t have to buy a Flash production suite. But if you want or need to produce this kind of content, such a monopoly is deadly. All I want to say is that projects such as Burster should get all possible support from us, as they break the monopoly. They don’t even have to be free – I probably wouldn’t mind paying for encryption if I was satisfied with the workings of the plugin. Then I could make the money. But in a way that I choose, in a way that makes sense to me, not because there are no other options.
Nobody’s gonna rip-off your crappy games. And if the game’s good and worth it, the not-so-original guys will find a way no matter the protection.
Just look how many Minecraft and Crayon Physics clones there are already!
Renato Alves – They’re not really widows – they just never see us because we’re too busy with Blender :-)
I agree with all the points made about problems of plugins.
But if Burster does anything which other web3d offerings can’t do we should support it.
Ive looked at them all since Cosmo Player 10 years ago and nothing does physics like Blender game engine for a start.
Flash 3d is useless – (ok to examine a toothbrush) .
The best other web3d right now is X3DOM and it has a long way to go for serious game physics.