Kester Maddock - who did the actual coding - and Nathan Letwory - who did the merge from tuhopuu2 CVS to bf-blender CVS - added the Game Engine back to Blender, with physics restored to 2.25 level.

Aim was to strictly go for compatibility with the last (closed source) version for Blender's engine first. This release in fact completes a milestone for Blender, where we can now fully replace older versions of Blender.

Most work has been in getting the new Solid 3.5 library (collision detection) working with Blender. It was not very compatible with the Solid library as used in 2.25, so still some little errors might happen with collisions and in performance (especially speed).

We hope that this release will bring back enthusiasm of game artists with Blender, but especially we invite coders to help out with further development!

HTML version of full GameKit reference (browsable)

HTML version of full GameKit reference (.zip download 1.2 MB)

Many small game demos from NaN artists, including skategirl and rvo-fighter. (10 MB)

Games: Frogger and HardMashed New! Never published before! (10 MB)

The original game engine in Blender, released with V2.10 early 2001, was written by Erwin Coumans (main architecture) and Gino van den Bergen (collision detection and physics). It was a major upgrade of the old (NeoGeo) engine that was released with 2.0 in june 2000.

The main purpose was to give 3d artists access to interactive 3D content creation. The commercial version of Blender (Publisher) supported stand-alone players. a cross-platform web plug-in, and options to sign and lock content.

These 'Publisher' features have not been restored in this release yet. For stand-alone executables this will be no problem to add later. But for the other features the Blender Foundation doesn't see a simple solution yet.

Most likely this is not suitable to organize within the Foundation, but leave this as a nice (potentially commercial) opportunity for a third party to look at.

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