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MassiveBlendWorks Contest

24

MassiveEngine

MassiveEngine is a commercial game engine that's closely integrated with Blender. They now host a Blender game contest.

Joey Ferwerda writes:

Thorworks game development studio is very happy to announce that the registration for the MassiveBlendWorks Contest is open as of today.

This contest is created to give something back to the incredible Blender community, and give interested game developers the opportunity to work with a early version of our engine.

The winner of the contest will be awarded one license of the early alpha of the MassiveEngine for one freeware game, to give the experience of developing multi-platform games with Blender as a total game design suite.

This contest is open for existing or new teams, as long as the 3D creation is done primarily in Blender, and the result is a Freeware game.

All you have to do is create a presentation about your game (a demo in the Blender Game Engine is a plus, but is not a requirement), and send it in to: [email protected]
All the functionality to create a good singleplayer game will be done in this early alpha, including Physics, GLSL Shaders, Presets for general game modes, Skill system, Conversation system and of course the meActor system!
Specific details, like how to register, and the contest requirements are avalible on http://contest.thorworks.org

The MassiveEngine is a Multi-Platform engine (Linux, Mac OSX, Windows), with full Blender integration which allows direct loading from .Blend files, and uses multiple features from Blender.

This multi-platform game engine is based on Ogre3D, Bullet Physics, OpenAL and written entirely in C++. Designers can benefit from the use of Blender for everything a designer could need!

Blender is our total solution used for creating models, designing worlds, assigning logic to objects, storing content, designing gameplay and much more!

MassiveEngine uses the exiting meActors system, which allows configuring parameters for almost every feature implemented in the MassiveEngine. Designers can use meActors to set everything for a player, give a player weapons, make objects move, create dialogue etc.

Programmers will benefit from the C++ codebase, direct access to all the libraries used by the MassiveEngine, and access to the specific components the Designers use within Blender.

Links

24 Comments

  1. I don't want to be unthankful, but...  ONE license of the EARLY ALPHA of the MassiveEngine for
    ONE FREEWARE game? Unity free, for example, allows to create infinite ammount of free games, as far, as I know. And their demo looks much more pleasant. Anyway, any blender - related activity is good:))

    • same thought..
      And as far as I know Massive Engine builds on the opensource engine Gamekit.
      But also.. I am looking forward to that engine!
      A site with better feature presentation would be great(shader demos and more)! And maybe some more detailed demos. In short please give us more infos on the engine! :)

    • gamefromscratch on

      Yeah, I have to +1 this.  In this day and age, with the competition that exists, every single engine out there should provide this "prize" completely free anyways. When I can grab a copy of CryEngine, UDK or Unity completely free until I start making money, they pretty much set the benchmark.

      I am interested in the development of a Blender friendly engine but this contest, not so much.

  2. ONE license of the EARLY ALPHA of the MassiveEngine for ONE FREEWARE game?
    So I can make one game that i cant make any money from? 

    Im confused.. what exactly about this makes it a prize?

  3. thomas trocha on

    Hehe, as a gamekit-user I'm very interested in how much gamekit is still inside :D and what cool stuff they built in and if they have cool tutorials and documentation *lol* (Especially how/if they fixed the mac openal issue? :p ). But as said before the conditions of the contest are more than poor.

  4. I normally don't like to make a suggestion box out of BlenderNation, but since this one particularly addressed to many who visit BlenderNation, I'll use it and hope others support my suggestions:

    Hmm...I'm looking at this engine, and though I really like the Blender integration, I can't help but feel there's little reason to really use this engine currently.  I don't want to appear negative critical or anything, but it seems to me that even the Blender Game Engine has this engine beat, in terms of features available.  I look at Yo, Frankie! done years ago with that old Blender Game Engine (and also a version created with the free CrystalSpace), and I look at the new additions coming to the Blender Game Engine, and both the honest person and the indie game developer in me just ask, "Why this MassiveBlendworks engine?"

    Perhaps if you could just release those early-alpha features to begin with, instead of offering them as the prize, only because it seems that your engine (while a nice effort) is lacking enough as it is.  Otherwise, I don't think you'll be very successful when Unity, UDK, CryEngine SDK, HeroEngine, and even the Blender Game Engine all are freely available and have all those pre-alpha features on MassiveEngine and then some (well, actually a whole lot more, I'm afraid).  They all even allow you to create a commercial game.

    But I do have encouraging words, though.  I think the engine's angle is a good idea--supporting Blender and providing a game engine that can create a Linux binary are both rather unique in the world of game engines (though, Unity can pretty much get the job done, too).  It seems like your engine has a lot of potential towards your aim of having the engine being coder-friendly and developer-friendly respectively, and having a game engine that reads the entire Blender file would be awesome.

    Perhaps if you worked out a better license for your engine, provide those pre-alpha features as standard (at least), provide some information about the engine's features and more examples of the technology (your website's currently quite barren) and continue to develop this otherwise interesting concept of a game engine.  And maybe if you included support for at least Android (though preferably both iOS and Android), which could make games that I think might make your early game engine look better, you'll have an edge over the Unity engine (which sells their basic Unity iOS and Android licenses at $400 a piece and Pro iOS and Android licenses at $1500 each).

    I hope this helps, and I hope the criticism doesn't discourage you guys.  I really would like to see this engine do well, and I think it can.

  5. for a programmer, just get Ogre3d and build your own game engine, its not so hard and you will get that results without too much difficulties, mine imports scenes from blender just like that and has physics. 

  6. Joey Ferwerda on

    Hello All

    There are a couple of things i want to comment on.
    I am one of the Lead Developers at Thorworks (and also the one who did the presentation about the MassiveEngine on the conference in 2011).

    Regarding the graphical features, the engine is still in early development and current focus is on getting all the basic functionality rock solid, but also providing all the functionality that you should need to deliver a good quality game.
    All the content in the Video and on the website is "Programmer Art", not created by our Graphics team, and are not really representing the graphical features of what the MassiveEngine will deliver.
    The version that we will deliver to the winner of the contest will include several rendering and shading techniques that can match up to par with other game engines, including the possibility to add your own GLSL shaders.
    Ogre3D is a very powerful rendering library and we are trying to get some of the best features ready for the Contest alpha.

    Regarding Licensing, the specific license of the engine will be made available when the actual engine release is announced.
    Thorworks WILL support Freeware and Open Source projects on custom agreements, and also deliver Commercial and Indie licenses.

    Regarding Features, something that really separates us from engines like Unity, UDK etc, is the Designer vs Programmer approach together with our meActor system, which makes it very easy for a a Designer to create content for a game, without depending on a programmer, or vice versa, but also makes collaboration between the two a lot more easy and pleasant, something that is really lacking in other available game engines in our vision.
    Also the default Multi-Platform (Linux, Mac OSX and Windows) is something that is very important to us, we take Linux very seriously as a game platform, and Unity or UDK can not deliver on that.
    We are also looking at other platforms like Mobile or Consoles, but that is still in consideration.

    Regarding the GameKit question, yes we have used GameKit as a base for our engine, but a lot of things have been rewritten and replaced.
    GameKit was great to start with, since it had a couple of interesting designs that we wanted to base our engine on, but lacked a lot of things and had a entirely different vision on engine design and feature implementation.

    I understand the criticism against feature completion, but a lot will be implemented in the next couple of months!
    Our reason to do the contest is due to popular demand in the last half year, and we really hope to provide enough information about the Engine as we can right now.

  7. I don't think any self-respecting blender artist or user will enter this contest purely because of the terrible attitude of the makers of the engine. Come on, giving such a prize as this is treating blender artists as dogs. Clearly the goal of the contest is not to give back to the community but to get free beta testers of the engine. When I read it I could not even believe that a company which has no reputation could offer such contest terms. And the engine is not even open source.
    I will pass. Thank you.

  8. Blender3D Fan on

    As a programmer myself the presentation with the poor quality graphics wasn't much of a concern to me. The big concern of mine is the fact that you're competing with engines like Unity3D.

    The development team is much larger and they are backed by funding. I can already use Unity3D for free. I even got the basic license for Android and iOS for free (April promotion).

    The only really good thing that this engine has as I see it is it supports Linux. But Unity3D already supports a lot of other platforms (even flash just recently). It's only going to keep on growing because they have a dedicated team.

  9. Quote "
    All the content in the Video and on the website is "Programmer Art", not created by our Graphics team.." 

    Umm.. so you have a graphics team .. who do not do any of your graphics? What a joke!

    • Our team is currently split into Engine and Game Development, and while our engine developers are working hard on the Engine itself, the rest of the team is working on our first commercial game.
      There are some new Screenshots and Video's planned soon to show off some of the graphical power of our game engine.

  10. Besides the many valid arguments against this competition, I fail to see the viability of this game engine.

       Anyone with more than a passing interest in the game industry would see that any new game engine that focuses only on Linux/Mac/PC is doomed to fail. An indie developer is the same as any other company. If its continued existence is to be guaranteed, it needs to sell its product. Preferably as many as possible. Therefore, it needs to reach a market as big as possible. With all due respect to Linux and its users, it is not a big market. If a game is released also on consoles, via Xbox Live and on mobile devices via iTunes for example, millions more potential buyers will be reached.

      Ergo, anyone willing to pay money for a licence (as Massive Engine intends to be commercial), they will choose a product with the best support for multiple platforms. Massive Engine is not that product.

      Way back in 2006 I participated in a contest from Retina Software LLC to design a game level in Blender. This company was a start-up of two students who also were working on their own game engine. You know what? They actually offered real prize money. I know, because I won the contest and they actually paid me $1000.

      The moral of this story is that not long after I delivered my finished work and got the money, Retina Software LLC disappeared, never to be seen again, nor was their game engine.

    • Although i can understand the statement you are making, this is not something that reflects on Thorworks.
      We do not focus on selling our engine to as much as possible users, and MassiveEngine is not our primary form of income, so we do not need to focus on the biggest selling market.
      Multi-Platform availability, and more specific, Linux support is very important for us, since we love the platform itself, but also think consumers should have a choice in operating system, without the limits of available (lack of) software.
      The reason for this contest (and making our engine available this way in quite early development) is to contribute back to the community after the amount of questions we got about interested developers about using our engine.

      Regarding Linux as a gaming platform, in 2006 there was still a big lack of support in the industry for games on Linux, but also the amount of gamers who used Linux were quite limited.
      The last year, there is a huge increase of Linux users, but also in available Linux games and software, there are even game development company's that exist purely because of their Linux Sales (Frictional Games, the studio behind Amnesia has a great article around it, just google it).

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