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

[Chris Want]

Stefan Zimmermann wrote:
> 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)...
> 
> 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?
> 3.) Will the Blender Game Engine have a future (I read about plans to use
> OGRE or CrystalSpace with Blender...)?
> 4.) Are there any good resources describing the Game Engine internals and
> where can I find them?

Hi Stefan,

Regarding 2.):

I have some limited access to a CAVE-like environment also,
and I have interest to see such a project succeed. The
CAVE-like environment here currently runs VirTools to do
simulations, which is pretty expensive and has some
bugs -- so having Blender as a replacement would be great.

I've done some experiments trying to get Blender to work
using a tiled display on a small cluster of machines with
fairly decent graphics cards (via DMX and chromium,
using a cluster management software called Rocks
VizRoll). The problems I usually faced were GL related,
but at least in theory this might be a rather easy approach
to take. My eventual plan was to make a desktop that
spanned three displays, then to make a game with three
split screens, and send each split screen to a different
display and get that to work in the CAVE-like environment.
Sadly, getting Blender to run this way isn't a central
focus of my work, so I haven't yet reached this stage,
and probably won't anytime soon.

Regarding 4.):

I'd recommend joining #blendercoders on irc.freenode.net
and talking to ben2610 (Benoit) or erwin_bullet (Erwin).

I remember there was at least one architecture document
released around the time of the open sourcing of Blender,
but I don't know where it is, and it's probably out of
date.

Regards,
Chris