Game Engine Issues

[greyWiz]

Hi, another issue...

I was trying to add a Keyboard Sensor who should emit one pulse per second, so I changed its frequency value to 50. But, to my surprise, nothing happened!

What could it be?

Thanks
wiz

[arangel]

Will the 2.25 option "Compress File" come back to Blender anytime soon? It´s very useful to trim down file sizes for web publishing. I´m doing it on 2.25 right now (model and program in 2.33a and compress in 2.25 - that´s ok to do, right?).

[teachtech]

Now that the game engine is back and fuctioning well, is anyone working on getting the "Save Runtime" feature and setting for runtime back into the package? I need to clean-up the computers in my school drafting lab for next year and I'd like to get back to just one version of Blender and say goodbye to Publisher.

[johnn]

In order for us game developers to be able to leave 2.25 fully, we need the save runtime feature back.

I can't understand why you choose not to re-insert it with 2.33.

As long as you can't save the runtime (ie a standalone .exe), games, or the like, developed with blender are - restricted to blender users only!

"Hey! Try out my new cool game! But wait - you have to download the development platform first and load the game in there and then press 'P' for play!"

That's not how to get either new gamers or game-developers.

My feeling is that the blender developers priorities lack vision of the grander picture.

With stand alone games, people can make small shareware games (blender is perfect for this) and hopefully collect a small price for their effort and maybe some money will tricle down to the blender developing community as a thanks from them. This will get the blender developers more money to make more improvements to the game engine, which game developers can use to improve their shareware games, and get more money from their gamers and the ball is in motion.

But without the standalone save game feature this is not an option.
Why cripple yourself?

You might say that the ones who make renderd images and movies also can contribute to the blender development community moneywise, and I believe they do. But it is harder to tell which software was used to create the image or movie, compared to using the game engine, right?

And while I'm at it: A time plan for improvements for the game engine and the progress of those improvments should be a sticky in this forum.

As things are now I don't know when or if the following things, for example, will be implemented:

* Other pysical objects than spheres

* Built in LOD

* Built in real time shadowing

* Ragdoll-physics (or an object with physics connected to other object with physics stay connected after hitting other objects)


With all the above, you might think I don't like blender or it's community, but on the contrary - would I have written this much if I didn't care?

I hope of a better future for all - with Blender!

[z3r0_d]

In order for us game developers to be able to leave 2.25 fully, we need the save runtime feature back.

I can't understand why you choose not to re-insert it with 2.33.

that seemed to be more of a mistake than a decision

My feeling is that the blender developers priorities lack vision of the grander picture.

are there more than 2 people working on the game engine part of blender?

that was a rather large, and from my point of view, pointless rant. there has been a standalone runtime posted on elysiun.com for 2.33

and it isn't obscenely difficult (for a programmer with experience with whatever tool is at hand) to build it yourself.

And while I'm at it: A time plan for improvements for the game engine and the progress of those improvments should be a sticky in this forum.

As things are now I don't know when or if the following things, for example, will be implemented:

* Other pysical objects than spheres

already there

* Built in LOD

so, uhh, you want blender to spend cpu cycles to calculate your lower detail mesh at runtime, making everything slower. Or do you want a way for the artist to specify lower detail meshes?

the latter is very much possible already

* Built in real time shadowing

which kind? how? you want blobs projected on the geometry instead of parallel to it? you want dynamic rendered textures projected on the geometry? you want blurred dynamic rendered textures projected on the geometry? you want stencil shadows [as seen in doom III] with that too? how about dynamic rendered indexed shadows?
(the last two methods mentioned allow self shadowing. Stencil shadows need an interface to prohibit them from passing through walls, indexed shadows require convex regions of meshes be seperated. All methods require that some setting be set somewhere to determine which objects cast shadows, and which objects recive them)

this stuff could slow blender down significantly, and aren't really a priority. The priority of the moment appears to be getting a few culling methods to work.

someone posted on blender3d.org (I can't seem to find it right now) some plans for future changes in gameblender. Perhaps the second most notable graphics related one was a "fix for the alpha bug," or actually drawing faces with the alpha flag from farthest to nearest, so they do not appear to overlap incorrectly

* Ragdoll-physics (or an object with physics connected to other object with physics stay connected after hitting other objects)

I have a few things to say about this

first, the current physics engine as far as I know has no capability for multiple bodies to be connected and simulated as linked in some way. ODE (which was put in blender until SOLID became avalible again) had this capability, but until recently there was no interface to it.

furthermore, there is no beginings of an interface to define the kinds of constraints required to make a reasonable looking ragdoll in blender.

finally, I believe it is possible to do this already, using python. It would be a bit of a nuisance as you can't interact with the physics and collision detection as would be possible if you were editing the code directly.

[pildanovak]

Sorry if already posted>but
Blender crashes always when running a script with a bug. I've tried 3 2.33 builds, all do it, the last 2.32 build from the forum didn't. if the script has no bug everything runs ok.(except of the falling through time to time)

I use win 2000 prof., 1 com. pentium, 3dlabs wildcat, 2. computer ati radeon 9100, athlon

[z3r0_d]

Sorry if already posted>but
Blender crashes always when running a script with a bug. I've tried 3 2.33 builds, all do it, the last 2.32 build from the forum didn't. if the script has no bug everything runs ok.(except of the falling through time to time)

I use win 2000 prof., 1 com. pentium, 3dlabs wildcat, 2. computer ati radeon 9100, athlon

I'll be more specific than that

the current version of blender does, but it appears my 6/7/04 cygwin build does not.

it seems to happen with syntax errors and the like, where the file cannot be converted completely.

for example

Code: Select all

if 1:
unindented block

or

Code: Select all

a{} = 2

[Sutabi]

I remeber when I had my todo list of all the features:
http://www20.brinkster.com/sutabi/todolist.html

Culling is more import then anything else.... The features that are needed are features that will speed up then engine. Like of LOD, have the user define the meshes vs same distance to change to the reduced mesh, instead of the engine calculating it, and instead of having the user define it by making their own python script.

[jd-multi]

Lol, yeah a big list, but why are we still bothering how to code a pixel shader? Nvidia released an opensource code of a pixel shader. Is there a way to use it? If there is any interest I can dig up the page I found a several months ago. It's free to download and to use. That's why the quacke 3 engine has now pixel shaded shadows, they used that opensource one from Nividia

[Saluk]

We really don't need pixel shaded shadows with the engine as slow as it is now. Not that it wouldn't be nice

The python error crash is fixed in one of the latest testing builds.

[jd-multi]

When can we see some serious fixes on the engine? Indeed it's really slow, even 2.25 runs around 6 times faster then the one from 2.33 I hope we can see soon some cool new features

[pildanovak]

When can we see some serious fixes on the engine? Indeed it's really slow, even 2.25 runs around 6 times faster then the one from 2.33 I hope we can see soon some cool new features

i don't want to flame anybody, but have you been thinking about that there's only 1 person(Kester, alias alien-xmp) working on the code of GE?
There can be long todo lists written, but until there are not more coders, we can't wait for any miracles

[dmao]

One problem I've been having is dynamic objects in 2.33 tend to jump when moving on a sloped surface. It's about the only thing keeping me from moving to 2.33 entirely. Has anyone else had this trouble and is it a known issue or should I report it as a bug?

Please check out this demo file (129kb) in 2.33 and 2.25. Thanks

[dmao]

Another problem for me is rotating objects with bounding boxes (as opposed to bounding spheres). When rotated left or right, the object moves around instead of rotating in place like it should. This makes Bounding Boxes pretty useless as dynamic objects. Please see the blend file

[LRTC]

I just read a few posts, but I have a question: Where did the "Actor" option go? Without it, physics are undoable for people without Python experience (and I'm stubborn with that--I'm not going to start using Python until I really need to, i.e. savegames and complex crap), Force & Torque are utterly useless, and you're wasting people's valuable time & computer space (by computer space, I mean for multiple Blenders & the aforementioned Force & Torque).

By the way,

are there more than 2 people working on the game engine part of blender?

I wouldn't know the answer if that means "development," but a considerable chunk of the community is pretty devoted to GameBlender. Sure, proportionally 2 people working on GameBlender for a rather small group of people makes sense, but allow some people to bring GameBlender up to even low-system-requirement standards (i.e. anti-aliasing, physics, blah-blah-blah), plenty of amateur game makers would join up, learn, and improve popularity of Blender.