[Bf-committers] CAVE like extension for Blender Game Engine

[Marko Radojcic]

> Hello,
>
> I already posted this topic to the 'Coding Blender' forum and there I was
> adviced to send it to this mailing list:
>
> I'm a computer science student from Germany and I'm currently developing a
> new CAVE like Virtual Reality System (spanning 3d environments over several
> screens connected to several computers in a network to create a cube around
> the viewer or whatever...) for academic research. I started from scratch
> using NVIDIA Scene Graph, PhysX and wxWidgets. Well, it works so far, you
> can import VRML data, create scenes with the imported objects, define
> screens, apply transformations, watch the whole stuff in the 'CAVE' and play
> a bit with the 3d objects while running but it's far away from running (and
> creating) real applications with logic and interaction and from the
> possibility to import complex data with animation and behaviour definitions.
>

It sounds very interesting, I have had some experience with seeing in
action similar
projects on Europrix Multimedia Awards.

>
> Because of all this will need lot of work and time I recently thought: Why
> should I waste so much time reinventing the wheel? We work a lot with
> Blender at our department, so why not extend the Blender Game Engine to CAVE
> like functionality? Several machines run Blender with the same project, one
> is the 'server' running the full application (with logic, interaction,
> physics simulation...) and the other machines only apply every change to
> their scene graph which the server does (either by using a simple own
> protocol like I did for my application or by using a middleware like CORBA
> or ICE)...
>

I'm not sure, but maybe you can reuse some of the client server protocol for
distributed rendering to to this.

> So here are my questions:
>
> 1.) Are there already some ideas or projects relating such things?
> 2.) Are possibly other people interested in such an extension?
I am definitely interested, but I probably won't have enough time with
my schedule
being crowded.

> 3.) Will the Blender Game Engine have a future (I read about plans to use
> OGRE or CrystalSpace with Blender...)?
I hope so. :D

> 4.) Are there any good resources describing the Game Engine internals and
> where can I find them?

There are many good resources, like wiki pages and numerous examples
of Blender Game
Engine API and usage... You should probably talk to people who are
maintaining BGE.