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Module API_intro

The Blender Game Engine Python API Reference

See release notes for updates, changes and new functionality in the Game Engine Python API.

See update notes for bugfixes and changes released since 2.49.

See Blender/Python API if your not looking for GameEngine docs.

Blender Game Engine Modules:

Modules that include methods for accessing GameEngine data and functions.

Undocumented modules:

Additional Modules:

These modules have no GameEngine specific functionality but are useful in many cases.

Introduction:

This reference documents the Blender Python API, a growing collection of Python modules (libraries) that give access to part of the program's internal data and functions.

Through scripting Blender can be extended in real-time via Python, an impressive high level, multi-paradigm, open source language. Newcomers are recommended to start with the tutorial that comes with it.

This opens many interesting possibilities not available with logic bricks.

Game Engine API Stability:

When writing python scripts there are a number of situations you should avoid to prevent crashes or unstable behavior. While the API tries to prevent problems there are some situations where error checking would be too time consuming.

Known cases:

External Modules:

Since 2.49 support for importing modules has been added.

This allows you to import any blender textblock with a .py extension.

External python scripts may be imported as modules when the script is in the same directory as the blend file.

The current blend files path is included in the sys.path for loading modules. All linked libraries will also be included so you can be sure when linking in assets from another blend file the scripts will load too.

A note to newbie script writers:

Interpreted languages are known to be much slower than compiled code, but for many applications the difference is negligible or acceptable. Also, with profiling (or even simple direct timing with Blender.sys.time) to identify slow areas and well thought optimizations, the speed can be considerably improved in many cases. Try some of the best BPython scripts to get an idea of what can be done, you may be surprised.


Author: The Blender Python Team

Requires: Blender 2.49 or newer.

Version: 2.49

See Also:
www.blender.org: documentation and forum, blenderartists.org: user forum, projects.blender.org, www.python.org, www.python.org/doc, Blending into Python: User contributed documentation, featuring a blender/python cookbook with many examples.

Note: the official version of this reference guide is only updated for each new Blender release. But you can build the current SVN version yourself: install epydoc, grab all files in the source/gameengine/PyDoc/ folder of Blender's SVN and use the epy_docgen.sh script also found there to generate the html docs. Naturally you will also need a recent Blender binary to try the new features. If you prefer not to compile it yourself, there is a testing builds forum at blender.org.

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