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Blender Foundation to Create Open Movie, Open Game

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the opening-new-doors dept.

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."

1 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Not the Blender game engine? by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's too bad they're not using Blender's own game engine. Blender has an integrated 3D animation system and game engine.

    The trouble with the Blender game engine is that it doesn't scale well. The Blender game engine can be used "without programming", but what that really means is that you have to draw connection diagrams with hundreds or thousands of connections. Then you get to debug the wiring. For a non-trivial game, it's painfully difficult to debug.

    It's an occasional fantasy of programmers that wiring visually functional blocks together is easier than programming. Engineers who wire up real hardware know better. That's why we have VHDL.

    Fortunately, you can extend the Blender game engine in Python. Unfortunately, it's CPython, which is 60x slower than C. This isn't a hit you can afford in most games.