DevCorner: Blender Game Engine

While Blender3D is one of the premier FOSS projects out there, its integral part the Blender Game Engine (BGE) is often belittled as not a serious game engine.

While the criticism is certainly not completely unfounded  and the integration of limited "non-programming" game code creation (via logic bricks) gives it a bit of a "RPG maker" image, it really is a quite interesting platform to work on it seems.
Ok, probably as of now the BGE is really more of a rapid game prototyping engine, but previous experience during the Yo, Frankie! project has actually shown that at least compared to some other well known FOSS engines, it is a serious contender (that Blender Foundation project originally started on Crystal Space, and after many problems was implemented in the BGE in a few weeks only).



So what makes it so interesting? Well for one there is the full integration with a creation tool (obviously Blender3D) so that getting your content into the game is only a matter of making it. No exporters or anything needed... it just works. Then of course there is the fully scriptability via Python, also integrated tightly. Basically you never have to exit Blender, and testing your game can be done right in the editor with one click (no compiling etc. necessary). Oh and did I mention the great physics capabilities via Bullet, also build right in?

In addition your created game will be immediately available on any platform the Blender Game player has been ported (all major desktop operating systems, with an Android port under development and a browser plugin, too). In addition you can choose to publish your game as a single .blend file, giving the users a direct access to all the source files of the game; a wet dream of any true FOSS game developer!
The tight integration with the GPLed Blender Player, has been a major source of discontent with the predominately propitiatory game developing users of the BGE however. Thus there now exists also a few options to encrypt your game and/or run it on an external engine that can be kept close source (but I will not go further into that here). 

You can find a lot of (sometimes really awesome looking: 1, 2, 3) game projects on the Blenderartists.org forum. Now as I said, most of it is sadly closed source with propitiatory artworks, but I also have the feeling that some simply don't know or care about the legal implications of their "freeware" game (which sadly shows that even many people who use a great FOSS tool, mostly care about the "free as in beer" aspect of it). 

One of the more interesting projects right now (which might or might not become a full FOSS game) can be seen in this video:



It shows the most recent work by Martinesh, who is basically BGE's resident game art guru. Two years ago we already featured previous awesome work by him, but sadly that Air Race project is by now canceled.
What he is now working on is however rather a show-case for the really nice new graphical features in the BGE which he and others are developing in the so called "candy" development branch (on his blog there are also more details and nice videos from some time ago).

Another cool recent project it the rewrite of the the logic bricks visual programming idea via nodal logic blocks called Hive.

While not completely integrated into Blender yet, you can already try it via an external editor (the created python code works fine inside Blender). There are also some tutorials and a documentation for it.
Since my programming skills also lack somewhat, I find that an interesting tool... however most likely it is rather a nice way to do some level scripting, than actually programming the real guts of a game with it.

So where can you get started with developing your own game using the BGE? Well, the blenderartists.org sub-forums are always helpful, with some nice beginners video tutorials linked here, here, here and here ;)
There are even some books available (this one in particular is quite recent, which is a plus given the fast development of Blender3D) and there is of course the official Blender documentation.
Oh and a good source of content is (besides our friends opengameart.org of course) Blender Swap (nice interview with one of the creators here).

If you have further questions please comment below or ask over at blenderartists.org!

Dev-corner: Primer to modelling with Wings3D

Today I would like to start a new regular (?) feature here on FreeGamer: The Dev-corner!

As you should know by now FreeGamer is all about FOSS games, and of course the most important part of the FOSS development model is participation! So, yes that also means you! Yes you... don't think I am not seeing you... and don't switch to that other browser tab to hide from me ;)



So with the new dev-corner we will try give you some easy introductions how to participate in FOSS game development, maybe do some more development focused developer interviews and so on. I also hope to get some guest bloggers to write an introduction into contributing to their projects or something like that... so if you are a developer interested in this contact us :)

So what can I do?

You though about contributing to a project already, but are not much of a programmer guy/gal? Well... there is an artist in all of us (it's in our genes the anthropologists say)!

But getting started with that can be a bit scary... 2D art is of course an option, but the learning slope is steep there, as for a long time everything you draw will look like crap (trust me, I am still in that phase also). But if you are interested in that there are a few pretty good FOSS tools for that (we will do a dev-corner on that some other time).


3D art on the other hand is more accessible, especially if you are not a born artist! You can make some pretty awesome (albeit simple) art in the first few days of learning, and you will certainly not have the feeling of "ahh... this is all crap" like you will have with 2D art. Oh and non-computer people will be amazed by your l337 computa skillz ;)


But who am I kidding here... you probably downloaded Blender (or another non FOSS modeling application) already, and the complexity of the programs made your head spin, right? Yes... those are full modeling suits meant for experienced professionals, and can do much more than you will ever need for FOSS game development. But don't get scared away by this... there are other options and once you got the basics concepts, Blender and the like will suddenly appear much less scary and actually quite easy to use ;)


The maybe easiest 3D modeling application is Google's Sketch-up, but due to it's non-FOSS nature and the severe limitations in what it can do, we will not go into much detail here... but have a look at it if you like to get some simple models done fast.

Primer to Wings3D modeling

There is another really great FOSS modeling application next to the all over shadowing Blender however: Wings3D!
It is not a full 3D suite, however and only focuses on the modeling and texturing part. In those parts it is generally accepted however that it is among the best of all programs out there (FOSS or non-FOSS)! So head over to their new website and get the latest version 1.4 now!

Now, the advantage of limiting the program's feature scope is it's much less cluttered interface and the quite a bit lower learning curve for the beginners. But don't get me wrong... it's not a beginners toy (like Google's sketch-up); Wings3D is capable of everything you will need for even the most professional models!


Have a look at this video to get an first idea what to do (I suggest you to use Blender camera style movement ;) ):

Wings3D camera overview

More video tutorials like this you can find on the Wings3D Youtube channel, and other nice tutorials here and a user manual here.

One of the especially helpful features of Wings3D is that all menus are context sensitive, so you will only see the options that make sense to use at that time. Also all features are available through the menus and are not hidden behind obscure keyboard short-cuts like in Blender (but you can fully customize all commands to shortcuts in Wings3D to speed up your work-flow). And last but not least... at the bottom status bar you can always tell what options are available with each tool upon different mouse and button combinations... so it is very easy even for the beginners.


However due to the way model data is set up in Wings3D, it is really geared towards box-modeling, e.g. a standard work-flow approach that works by extruding features from a single original box, instead of shaping the model from individual polygons (like normally preferred in Blender)... but don't get scared by this tech-babble ;) It's the better and easier way anyways, and just think of it as if working with a real-life clay model.

Ok I got the basics, where do I start contributing?

Well you could of course look for a FOSS game directly... and there will be for sure plenty of projects happy to have you helping out. But as a beginner you can also first practice a bit more. A good option for that would be for example to participate in the weekly challenges over at OpenGameArt.org. There you have a simple topic every week and you can also discuss with other 3D artist about techniques and so on. Definitely a great way of practicing.

Oh and one last word of caution: You might realize at some point that making 3D models and contributing to game development is actually more fun than playing games... but don't say I didn't warn you ;)