Jump to content

Blender Game Engine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Joeedh (talk | contribs) at 20:12, 28 July 2009 (tried to clean up the grammar. I think this page in general needs quite a bit of revision, yeek :-/). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
The Wikibook Blender 3D:_Noob to Pro has a page on the topic of: Game Engine Basics

The Blender Game Engine is a component of Blender, a free and open-source comphrensive 3D production suite, used for making real-time interactive content. The game engine was written from scratch in C++ as a mostly independant component, and includes support for features such as Python scripting and OpenAL 3D sound.

History

Erwin Coumans and Gino van den Bergen developed the Blender Game Engine in 2000. The goal was to create a marketable commercial product to easiy create games and other interactive content, in an artist-friendly way. These games could run either as stand-alone applications, or embedded in a web page using a special plugin. This plugin has since been discontinued for security reasons, though there has been some effort to revive it (an updated alpha version for Internet Explorer has been released, and Firefox and COLLADA support is under consideration).

Key code in the physics library did not become open-source when the rest of Blender did, which prevented the game engine from functioning until version 2.37a. Version 2.42 showed several significant new features, including integration of the Bullet Rigid Body Dynamics library.

GameBlender

The Blender game engine uses a system of graphical "logic bricks" (a combination of "sensors", "controllers" and "actuators") to control the movement and display of objects in the engine. The game engine can also be extended via a set of Python bindings.

Version 2.41 of Blender showcased a version that was almost entirely devoted to the game engine. Audio was fully supported, whereas previous versions did not support it. A new system for integration of GLSL shaders and soft body physics was added in the 2.48 release to help bring the game engine back in line with modern game engines.

The game engine is intended to reach a broad community and work on as many platforms as Blender itself currently supports. Like Blender, it uses OpenGL, a cross-platform graphics layer, to communicate with graphics hardware.

The game engine layout is simple and easy to use, and it is easy for non-programmers to learn to create simple games. Larger and more complex games tend to require the use of Python, which can be used to extend the engine and create more complex behaviour. The game engine's system of graphically connecting "logic bricks" allows non-programmers to quickly create logic setups simply and easily. These "logic bricks" are highly adaptable and can be extended using Python scripting.

Game Blender future

Current development in Game Blender is focused on the new Bullet physics engine in an attempt to make it faster and more life like with better collision detection and object interaction. A car physics engine is also added in version 2.42 that makes it easy to create cars and subsequently, racing games. The process of modifying cars has been simplified, leading to a more realistic feel and better customization of individual cars. Real-time Ragdolls are another expectation in the future of Game Blender.

Discussion Forum and Books


See also


Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blender_Game_Engine&oldid=304740961"