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

and another thing for newbies to learn

[Goeland86]

that's nice to have the functionality again... but it's something more to learn for newbies in blender. As if blender wasn't complex enough... I appreciate the gesture though, but there's really going to be a need for a complete rewrite of the online doc... most of it dates from the 2.2 era. So get those renders and movies and now games coming along! It's time for it now...

Re:and another thing for newbies to learn

[bob_calder]

The newbies seemed split on it - I checked them last semester.
(That was a joke for those who wish to report me to the purity patrol.)

I needed to have interactive design students look at something they had never seen - so I gave them Blender. Half had used 3D Studio Max. The rest, just Adobe and typical high school student fare. There were 17 students. They had to write a tutorial on creating an object that wasn't just a primitive.

Half of the 3D Studio Max users loved it, the rest were irritated, but found it usable. There was only one student who copped out of the assignment and the rest *really newbies* were able to do a credible job.

The general consensus was that the interface was different but good if you are a macro stroke user and a pain if you use menuing. I think they were saying 'different' compared to things like Photoshop. Of course 3D is a different interface, so their expectations could not be met. As with anything else, everybody has an opinion! Mine is, as we all know, irrelevant and uninformed, so please, I have a headache. Curtman, I obviously have no idea about Soft Image and others. I can't even remember the name of the first one I used in the mid eighties. I am still amazed by meshes.

What I can't believe is that Photoshop users think that there have been these great leaps forward in bitmap editing programs because they no longer have to open Illustrator to make type flow on a path. Maybe Zanax would help.

A welcome addition - not just for games

[JaF893]

This is good news - its not exactly a giant leap forwards but it is important all the same. Improved collison detection is not just good for games its good for modelling. For example a physics teacher could teach his students about the ideal gas law using a series of blender animations.

This is really good news

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

As a Highschool Student I did an entire project in Blender's 3D Engine. It essentially had the ability to navigate look around and view objects in all dimensions. While this may seem a little base, as it was, it was not too difficult for a 17 year old to pick up and run with.

It actually gets even deeper when you combine the python scripting with the game engine, as opposed to using the built in object functions. The games can get really complex, and with the inverse kinematic options for human body(mapping theh way the human joints move), it makes for some really interesting possibilities. Personally as I am learning python now, I may go back to the blender engine, and see what havoc I may be able to create.

Collision detection

[Animats]

It's nice of Gino to make SOLID free software.

Good collision libraries are fun. I've written one, as part of Falling Bodies. I think I was the first, back in 1996-1997, to use axis-oriented bounding boxes with GJK, which is what SOLID, and everybody else, uses now.

Lin and Canny are the ones who really cracked this problem. Before Lin and Canny, algorithms for collisions in a space with N objects with M faces each were O(N^2) * O(M^2). They got that down to slightly worse than O(Nm), where Nm is the number of moving objects. Very clever.

I-Collide was the first generally available package for this. The original version was in LISP, which was translated to C, retaining much of the LISP style. They used axis-oriented bounding boxes with a linear programming package. This had some problems with numerical error, and the linear programming package was rather bulky. But it demonstrated, back in 1996, what was possible. Then everybody (well, the half dozen or so people into this stuff) went to work and built better systems.

Actually, collision detection is a pain to code, but well understood today. Collision response, the actual physics, is much harder.

The end result of all this is that games can now have really big worlds with working collision detection.

Re:Collision detection

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to see ODE integrated into Blender instead of SOLID. ODE is a complete dynamics simulator, not just a collision detector.

SOLID is a nice library, but its license terms are still unfriendly to commercial products. The author wants a couple thousand dollars to license it for even a shareware game, which is just silly when ODE is free under a BSD-style license. ODE's collision subsystem isn't quite as, well, solid as SOLID, but it's good enough for many applications.

Re:Game engine = worst...idea...ever

[zaphod_bee4]

Being a contributor and hanging out with the Primary Dev's I can reassure you that the Rendering engine is still a high priority. Not to mention the new emphasis on Yafray integration. I doubt you will have to worry about this being neglected.

Lightwave vs Blender vs Max

[Wizard Drongo]

OK, it's nice that blender has a game engine again, which is something I feel is lacking in Lightwave 7.5 (i know game sdk exists, but it would be nice if it was a little more intergrated). However, the point is, what is Blender trying to be? An open source alternative to the big hollywood rendering soloutions, capable of doing boradcast level animation and compositing? Or is it trying to be an open source alternative to 3d Studio Max, a sorta half-game, half-studio, totally lame program that does neither modelling nor rendering very well? If you look into a lot of production games, modelling these days is done increasingly in Maya or Lightwave. Not 3ds max. Surely basing it's development model a little on max is a road to distaster? At the end of the day, Mx is neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring. It doesn't really do anything very well. For games development, it's fairly good, but rendering in it is horrible, and modelling in it's a joke. I sincerely hope that Blender, which as someone rightfully said is one of the gems of the OSS world, does not follow Max down that road now it's got it's game engine back.