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Blender Foundation to Create Open Movie, Open Game
Eloquence writes "The Blender Foundation, which maintains the open source 3D tool Blender, has announced two new projects, codenamed Peach and Apricot. Project Peach will be a new open source movie, following in the footsteps of last year's Elephants Dream project (which was initially codenamed Orange). Apricot, on the other hand, will use Blender in conjunction with open source 3D framework Crystal Space to create an open game, thereby showcasing both technologies."
Actually, it is an Open Source movie. The contents, creation files, final products, etc. are all Creative Commons (or maybe Blender Open Content, not exactly sure) licensed, meaning you can use the actual production files for whatever you like, including a whole new movie.
What's not open about that?
I liked Elephants Dream very much. BTW: You can download it here as Avi or Quicktime.
If Peach and Apricot follow the progress made in Orange, you will be sure to see a lot of very useful, general purpose improvements in Blender for everyone. The need for specific features in Orange really focused the developers (some of which were Orange team, some of which were in the general development community) on solving specific creative problems. It's the difference between "scratch an idle itch" and "remove a troublesome splinter."
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Hi all,
:-)
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space. I'm of course very glad that Blender and us will do this project. It is an amazing opportunity to enhance both Blender and Crystal Space to actually make this possible. The plan is to make a really good looking game that can compete (graphics wise) with commercial games. Crystal Space can do a lot already but in some areas we still need some more work (more specifically things related to render2texture like HDR and others). Also for a game like this we need to work on a very good animation system. Having a project like this is of course the best motivation possible.
Another important goal of this project is documentation. As this game is fully open all sources (both code and art) will be made available. And we also plan to release a DVD with a full documentary on the entire creation process. Basically everything will be available (we would release the left-overs of the meals of the participants if we could
And of course the idea is to make a nice and playable game. Six months is not that long but it also doesn't have to stop there. The nice thing about an open game is that it can be extended for a long time to come. Also the game logic will serve as a nice starting point for a new game based on a different setting. So lots of possibilities here.
Needless to say I'm very excited about this project. I think it will be a great thing. Both for us (Crystal Space) as for the Open Source community. If we succeed we will have a commercial quality game but 100% free and open!
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
"It shouldn't be called an open source movie ... more like a movie developed with open source tools...."
It is open in that it will all be released under a open license (Creative Commons attribution i think?) including all blend files etc. Of course it is also being made with open tools.
LetterRip
LetterRip
You seem to be asking this backwards. Blender is a 3d animation package with a simply game engine thrown in. It is far more suited to doing an animated film then a machinima toolkit on top of a game engine.
The huge difference though is it doesn't include all the models and textures you would find in a game. You can find a lot on the net, but you are not going to get the cohesive art design of a commercial game without a lot more work.
This is one of the goals of their 'Open source' films and games, building up a library of resources you can reuse in your own work.
Ogre would have been a perfectly valid choice as well. It is just that we have closer ties with Blender at the moment. We have an excellent blender2crystal project and our connections with Blender developers are very good.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
No, that's more like a GNU movie. With the blender Orange project (aka Elephant's Dream), it came with a script and blueprints for a set, and you're free to make modifications to them and make your own movie and distribute it, but you don't have to make your script and blueprints available. Anyone can build on Elephant's Dream all they want, but it's up to you whether you want people building their own movies on top of your Oyenstikker's Dream movie. The community might appreciate your continued generosity, but the Orange group (aka Blender development and artists) don't deign to tell you what you can do with your creative works, just their own.
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Don't forget that one of the goals of this project is to expand Crystal Space to do what we want to achieve.
As to Open Source not working. We are going to do this with a solid team that will remain for six months in Amsterdam (Blender studios). So while the end result will be Open Source the way to develop it is like any other commercial game (only with less money and a bit more time constraints).
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
"There's a little matter of physics."
We actually have support for physics using the ODE physics engine.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
Blender's game engine has been on the way out since it hit Opensource land. If you recall, the first few released after being released Open source excluded the game engine. Blender is now dominated by those of us who use it for CGI/animation and modelling work for videos and fun. Making Blender easy to use with Crystal Space (called crystal blend iirc) has been the project to watch. The idea is to make it simple to create 3D worlds in Blender and then export to Crystal Space as the game engine.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The Blender Foundation sells printed high quality versions of its documentation (and commissions new and up to date documentation - ie see the link to Essential Blender earlier); it presells DVD versions of the movie projects; and enough users use it commercially that they can afford and are willing to 'give back' to the foundation. Also the Blender Foundation has support from both commercial and government entities. All of those are possible through both the efforts of Ton (the project lead and chairman of the Blender Foundation); and through the work of volunteers.
LetterRip