New addon for cross-platform game publication
Mitchell Stokes is working on an add-on to facilitate cross-platform publication of games, and more.
One of the common complaints with the Blender Game Engine is with publishing games. While there are many issues related to publishing with the BGE, one issue is the lack of a simple, user-friendly way to publish to multiple platforms. Steps are being taken to resolve this with a new Game Engine Publishing addon that has been recently committed to master (should be available in buildbot builds by now). This addon is intended to replace the old Save As Runtime addon, and currently provides the following improvements:
- New panel in the Render Properties to control publishing (this also means publishing options are saved in the blend file)
- Easier cross-platform publishing (this requires downloading the binaries for the desired platforms, see the addon’s wiki page for more information)
- Ability to create archives (e.g., tarballs and zips) for published games
- Ability to automatically copy extra game files (e.g., scripts, unpacked textures, logic, other blend files, etc.) when publishing
Finally! a feature the BGE desperately needed. hope a similar feature will be added to the Blender Interactive project.
What is the Blender Interactive project? Sounds interesting!
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and-beyond/
scroll down for the bottom of the roadmap and they define the targets for re-doing the BGE with Blender Interactive. while there isn’t much enthusiasm shown for the importance of the project by Ton in this posting, it is not planned until the blender 2.8 stages so we will probably find developer’s truly interested in the modernization of the BGE. who knows it could be the project that brings blender into the future of real time animation, visualization, and indie game development.
for interactive mode, I think that opens up a lot of possibilities for animation, but I’d still like to be able to use logic(or at least python) to control some of the activities rather than just hope things bounce the right way.
Any content that you create with blender is your property, and as such it can be licenced in any way that you like.
May that be a video game or an animated short, or a few game characters to be used in an external game engine.
Hope this helps
yes your content and blend files are able to be sold and distributed without problem. however blenderplayer (bare-bones version of blender is used to run your game when you chose to build as runtime) is licensed as GPL (you can get around this by creating a starting level purely for loading or startup sequences that falls under the licensing category but the other .blend files that it loads are free for you to license. the problem I am referring to with content packaging is the ability to protect your content from being viewed, copied, modded, and re-distributed improperly to protect intellectual property (for instance your game contains assets, texture packs and scripts from third party creators with licencing that requires content to be protected from redistribution.) most game engine do this for that very purpose, but since blenderplayer and does not package content securely (even if you pack to .blend you can easily open the file and unpack it) that creates many other issues when it comes to content licensing. it is much different from movies because if you create a film you can always choose to distribute the movie without sharing the source files, but if you create a runtime application you have to distribute the files from the original to a local storage drive (one way or another) in order for it to function in your program.
Really interesting. And agree with astrand, it would be nice if this add-on finds its way to the future versions of Blender. Mitchell, good luck with the development!
Nice! Good luck with the development.
Is webGL export planned for the BGE? Then everything is so awesome, and Blender could be really big competitior with the propierty Unity3d.
Are there any plans for support for mobile devices like Android?
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Game_Engine/Android/Building_Blender_for_Android
Its a pain to build for android, and I am not sure if this works anymore. but if your committed and you know how to compile programs properly I am sure you can get it done. but it only has been tested to work on Linux so grab a OS Installer for a Linux OS, put it on a flash drive, and install it alongside Windows or MacOSX, and try to follow the instructions. maybe in the future there will be a better way, but for now just try this.
Great news!