[Bf-committers] restore Game Engine project

[bf-committers@blender.org]

Quoting Patrick <saluk@flashmail.com>:

>     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.

I think it would be a shame if the game engine were torn out, and I say this as
one who uses blender to render film clips and as one who has little interest in
playing games as such.

Why?  Because I think the blender game engine has the potential of becoming an
excellent tool for doing machinima type animations, if there is ever a recording
mechanism put into place (not frame capture, although that would be nice, but a
mechanism whereby object states and locations in a game could be recorded on a
timeline and played back later, with camera positions selectable during
playback.  Sort of an animation with user selectable pov during playback).  I
have an interest in combining realtime machinima type animations with
traditional animations in order to put together a little film project I'm
developing, and am tracking the blender game engine development as one possible
tool to achieve that.

Certainly with blenders NLE capabilities, rendering capabilities, and game
engine capabilities, the potential for blender to become *THE* machinima
platform is promising, and throwing away that opportunity by tearing out the
game engine would IMHO be a crying shame.

The fact that it allows gamers to make and play their own games is nice, too, of
course, but perhaps this argument, coming from the other side of the blender
fence (the animator side) will add to the discussion, rather than reiterating
previous pro v. con game-engine arguments.  Food for thought, anyway.

regards,

Jean.