Blender 2.33 Re-enables Game Engine

fforw writes "One and a half year after becoming free software, the Blender Foundation has released a new version of Blender which finally enables the game engine again. When Blender became free software. the game engine had to be disabled because SOLID, the collision library was not free software. After SOLID's author Gino van den Bergen changed his mind, Blender has now restored all functionality from the closed-source period."

Comments

Some Blender Games

[c_oflynn]

A quick Google revealed a few examples of some games that use this engine, see http://www.spinheaddev.com/gameexpose0.html (NOT HTML clicking to help reduce load on server a tad...)

Re:Some Blender Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Done the right way:

http://www.spinheaddev.com/?id=crescentd
http://www.shadeless.dk/3d/?site=darksquad.htm
http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/
http://www.brainstorm-studios.net
http://zerooneentertainment.org/blengine/sachi
http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/
http://www.tudbzd.com/

Great F/OSS

[mastergoon]

Blender has got to be right up there among the best of the F/OSS software. It may not have all the features of 3d studio max, but for beginner and intermediate modellers, or people with no artistic talent, it kicks ass!

The controls are a bit hard to learn, though the interface has been getting better recently. In the end, once you read through the tutorials and learn all the keyboard commands you will find them to be great.

Re:Great F/OSS

[dcuny]

I agree. However, there's been a lot of work to redo the Blender interface, and that work is continuing. For example, the Blender Funboard newsgroup was put together for this purpose.

Unfortunately, this newsgroup hasn't proved entirely successful. One problem is that long-time users are loathe to have their beloved interface changed, since they feel that it's just "dumbing it down", and any changes will also slow them down.

Another issue is that coders would rather add new features (ambiant occlusion, new texture models, etc.) than work on the UI. Ton (the primary architect) has been working on the Blender Book, and the other major coder has been off on vacation.

I recently tried to learn RVKs. What's an RVK you might ask? They are Relative Vertex Keys, but the rest of the world calls them Morph Targets. And where the rest of the world allows you to actually select a named morph target and drag a slider, Blender insists that you create IPO curves (interpolation, not initial price offering) - somehow remembering that RVK curve #7 was a left blink, and RVK curve #8 was the phoneme "o" - and then ctrl+click on the IPO curve and drag to create a spline for the RVK ...

It's a freaking UI nightmare!

The refusal to use common nomenclature and standard UI tools here pretty wells sums up the problems with the Blender UI.

Still, William Reynish (aka Monkeyboi) has put together a great set of proposals to fix the UI, and many of his prior suggestions have been incorporated. So I'm hoping that Ton and others concentrate on getting the remainder of Blender UI out of the "dark ages" so the rest of us can use it.

Re:and another thing for newbies to learn

[zaphod_bee4]

Their is complete documentation for the 2.3x release available in several formats: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Using_Blender.80.0.ht ml

Re:what about Undo?

[DavidLeblond]

This is great news but when is UNDO gonna be implemented, if ever? This is a major feature for a software like that to be missing.

Its been there for awhile now. Press U in edit mode.

Re:and another thing for newbies to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not true, the 2.3 manual has been uploaded in html and pdf forms. I do find a paper manual (+- 800 pages and 1 kg) easier to use in most cases, but for quick searching the pdf is nice.