[Bf-committers] Steam-powered Blender

Jörg Müller joerg.mueller at student.tugraz.at
Tue Aug 13 21:04:23 CEST 2013


Hi Jan-Peter,

I am interested! Since middle school I am interested in game development 
creating my own simple games and I came to Blender with this background 
in mind. Somehow I got caught in the audio code of Blender however and 
today I am the module owner of the Blender audio code [1]. However I'm 
also working other areas of Blender, including the Game Engine where I 
am currently mentoring the Level Of Detail Google Summer of Code project 
of Daniel Stokes [2]. I've always thought about using Blender as Game 
Editor for external Engines instead of the Blender Game engine similar 
to how I used Hammer for mapping in my Counter Strike 1.6 days. I even 
added that as idea [3] for Google Summer of Code, but unfortunately no 
student applied for that.

A little background about myself: I'm currently studying at Graz 
University of Technology where I started in March 2010. I started 
working on Blender in summer 2009 and then participated in Google Summer 
of Code as a student in 2010, 2011 for Blender and 2012 for Stellarium 
[4] and this year as a mentor for Blender. I finished my bachelor's 
degree last winter and spent my first Master's semester as exchange 
student at POSTECH in South Korea. I did lots of small game projects 
during my middle and high school time, but most of them are unfinished 
and none released to public. Since I started working on Blender I've 
been mostly focusing on tools for game development, but also did some 
game related projects like a taking part in a small community contest 
[5] that my team won and organizing a game jam in Graz [6] where I also 
helped all the unexperienced teams during development (the latter two 
links are in German, but your name suggests me, that is no problem for 
you?).

As I'm still a student I have holidays now and university starts again 
in October, so I could work on integrating Steam Workshop in Blender in 
September if you are interested in collaborating. My dream would be to 
be able to create Source Engine maps with Blender, but that's definitely 
not possible within a month. Maybe a simple integration for DOTA 2 items 
would be a good start as you mentioned. I would appreciate any further 
information.

Regards,
Jörg

[1] 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Template:ModulesOwners#Render.2C_Video.2C_Audio
[2] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kupoman/Level_Of_Detail
[3] 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2013/Ideas#Game_Engine
[4] http://stellarium.org/
[5] http://www.blendpolis.de/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=25061
[6] http://gamejamgraz.wordpress.com/ergebnisse/

On 2013-08-13 10:25, Jan-Peter Ewert wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers.
> So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2.
>
> Long story:
> Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern).
> Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click.
> This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into.  Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one.
> What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop.
> If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you!
> Best,
> Jan-Peter
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