[Bf-committers] restore Game Engine project

[Patrick]

  I think I see the advantage of seperating it out now.  I'm looking 
into open scene graph as an alternative rasterizer, as it already has 
culling, is fairly up to date with special effects and opengl 
extensions, and seems less bloated than the current favorite Crystal 
Space.  If we seperate out the engine it will have more flexibility in 
plugging these kinds of things in.  We need to get together and make a 
major combing through of the source documenting/figuring out how it all 
fits together.

    I've been thinking a lot lately on the speed issues, and I'm not 
sure that the lack of culling is the only culprit. Having a lot of 
objects seems really slow regardless of how many polys they are.  If I 
have 100 cubes all joined into one mesh, it has no trouble running 
that.  But if I have 100 cubes all seperate objects it really dies.  I 
think this may be because of how it adds the objects to the scene but 
I'm not sure.  Ton or carsten, do you know of any other culprits for the 
game engines aparent lack of speed?  All throughout game development 
these past few years, no one has ever really figured out what keeps 
speed down the most.  There are some guidelines to follow, but sometimes 
it doesn't really pan out.  I know in my game I've run numerous tests 
and can't find any surefire speed bottlenecks.  I guess we'll have to 
keep testing and scanning through the code.

    And to the fellow who says kill the game engine, I can see you're 
point of view, as I hardly ever use the rendering functions, or nurbs, 
or metaballs etc.  I pretty much exclusively use the game engine.  It 
might be a good idea in the future to restructure blender in such a way 
that the user can decide what things they want in their blender.  Like, 
I would have the game engine, but I would take out the render module, 
and metaballs, and paths, etc.  And you could not put in the game 
engine.  But there are too many people using the game engine right now 
to just can it.  And there are a lot of really good games so far, you 
must have missed them:)  There are less good games than there should be 
however because there are 4 or 5 major bugs that slow development down 
trying to find workarounds.

    The modular approach would be desirable I think, and we can start by 
seperating the game engine out.  The rest of blender would be much 
harder to do that with :/ 

Anyway, I am optomistic about the future of the engine.  I think with 
some work it could become the premier game engine for hobbyist game 
designers and proffesional RGD (rapid game development), although I 
really do hope some more programmers can help us out:)

Cheers,
Saluk