[Bf-committers] Game Engine

[Alexander Ewering]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, Jason Ward wrote:

> I know that blender is grreat for developin games. It has a fast development
> speed.
> But I need to know if it is fast.

You are not being very accurate. What do you mean by "it"?

I assume you mean the Game Engine and its graphics. Well, it is fast for
simple, low-quality things. As soon as you want good specularity or complex
lighting though, this is mostly achieved by using subdivision (remember,
per-vertex lighting), and thus it will get slow. Concerning static lighting
and shadows, this can recently be baked from renders, but the workflow for 
that is very dodgey still.
For getting dynamic realtime lighting, subdivision is needed -> can get
slow.

> Plus, the physics engine was dodgey in V2.42
> A cube inside a cube would fall out after a while. And other funny things
> would happen.

A cube inside a cube is a very inaccurate description. If you mean that you
just added two cubes and scaled one down, this will never work because a
cube is a solid object. It seems to be that you need to read a few docs ;)

> I would write my own physics engine for it in python with scripts but
> another problem arises.

A physics engine in Python? Have fun buying a supercomputer :-)

> Realtime shadows are crap and transparency with alpha values doesn't work
> properly.

There are no realtime shadows at all in the Game Engine.

> Ok, so VC++ is great you say. Some links, and links to tutorials would be
> great.

Links to VC++? Tried microsoft.com?

The developer documentation on mediawiki.blender.org should contain
tutorials on how to get started building with VC++.

| alexander ewering              instinctive mediaworks
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