[Bf-committers] Blender roadmap article on code blog

[Benjamin Tolputt]

On 17/06/2013, at 11:46 AM, Daniel Stokes wrote:

> Furthermore, I would like to point out that the BGE is at least
> on par with the free version of Unity feature wise.

Firstly, let me state that whilst I actually approve of Ton's moves regarding BGE, I'm not writing this email in an effort to discourage those that want to keep the BGE (or their favourite elements thereof) in core Blender. Whilst I prefer alternate engines for various reasons, I see no problems with there being an official game engine for Blender should the issues Ton raised in the blog be resolved (in particular, the developer effort issue).

With that said, and without actually being a Unity evangelist (I too don't use it), the above is false and needs to be corrected in the same email archive as the claim was made. BGE is *not* on par with the free version of Unity feature wise. 

Unity has multiplayer support for free, BGE does not
Unity has (working) animation tools Blender & BGE do not. Including animation specific state machine & blend tree support.
Unity also has built-in PVS occlusion culling, LOD terrain & foliage, automated texture atlasing, integrated Web Browser plugin (with bi-directional API access to/from the browser), one-click iOS & Android deployment, and so on. That's just the free version (the pro one has quite a bit more over & above BGE).

There are features "out of the box" that BGE has that Unity Free does not (Detour/Recast nav-mesh routing comes to mind), but that means BGE has an "alternate" feature-set to Unity Free, not really one "on par" with it.

As one of the reasons Ton mentioned for the decision regarding the BGE was the lack of a competitive featureset compared to other offerings, we need to be honest about these things if we're going to discuss changes to his proposal on the matter.

--
Benjamin Tolputt