[Bf-committers] Blender roadmap article on code blog

[Ronan Ducluzeau aka "zeauro"]

I think that Ton should be conscious that people don' t really know how 
to use BGE.
Serious ressources about BGE like mike pan's files are 2.5 .blends.
You have to find a complex project to understand the meaning of states 
in logic editor.
Yo!Frankie is outdated. There are few games that can demonstrate that.
But if no major informative sites like wiki or BA points to them; you 
have to hope that a kind expert of BGE answer your question.
Often on forums, we see a guy that want to update Yo!Frankie to 2.6.
It takes much more time and effort to produce .blends with game 
interaction rather than a modeling or a Cycles tutorial.
Since 2.5 development, there are rumors telling that devs will drop 
completely BGE.
So, new incomers who are triyng it are really warriors.
Let them time to produce content.
I know a guy who was making games with 2.49 and directly passed to unity 
without testing BGE navigation mesh.
A month ago, during an afternoon, we tried it and character type; we had 
a lot of funs, some difficulties with animation of linked characters. He 
found charater jump great.
He was amazed when I talked to him about BGUI. He never heard about that.
It is not because features are discussed and developped during months on 
dev-mailing list or irc that users will automatic be conscious at 
official release that it exists. They finish their 6_8 months project 
with the same release that was used to begin it. Then, they read release 
logs of the last version and ignore release logs in between.
The discussion around BGE could turn like stupid interface threads where 
people who use unity or other engines are numerically proeminent and 
will ask to re-invent what is already there.

I have also a lot of doubts about the "3 series period".
I made a book on 2.63 (Bmesh).
Somebody asked me to make a demonstration about "blender for 3D 
printing" before 2.67 release.
So, I showed 2.67 printing tools with a build of the day instead of 
offficial 2.66, explaining that tools would be quickly available.
And a guy asked to me why I based my book on 2.63 instead of 2.62.
It was the version in packages of his linux distribution.
Do you really think that people will understand the purpose of these 
series ?
They will download what seems to be the last version 2.8 and then 
complain :"blender sucks because there is no documentation and no 
ressources about this release."
And when people will go on forums to find a specific feature; the answer 
will be :
"_Try the last 2.7 unstable release. All basic functions are bugguy but 
this specific feature is far better than in 2.6 and does not exist yet 
in experimental 2.8.
_Finally, I prefer to wait 3.0 to test blender."
I think that you can give a special cool name to the serie like 
BlenderGTX 1 to BlenderGTX 20 without the error of communication to name 
it 2.8X.


On 17/06/2013 08:00, Daniel Stokes wrote:
> I would like to know more about what Ton means by the line "What should
> then be dropped is the idea to make Blender have an embedded “true” game
> engine" from the blog post.
>
> What exactly is proposed to be dropped here? It looks to me all that is
> proposed to be dropped is an idea, changing the focus of the game engine to
> make it better at what it can do rather than making it a clone of other
> game engine/game editors. Are we actually talking about removing features
> and/or the ability to publish a game? The blog post mentions creating "3D
> interaction for walkthroughs, for scientific sims, or game prototypes".
> This can still make use of existing code/features as well as the ability to
> publish and distribute these creations.
>
> As a BGE developer I have often considered a closer integration of the BGE
> and the rest of Blender for their mutual benefit. At its simplest, closer
> integration means better viewport visualization, and more maintained code
> for the BGE. Stronger integration yields even more interesting ideas as Ton
> outlines in the blog post. As I said in my original response, this sounds
> like a great idea as long as those three conditions (mostly we aren't
> losing a lot of functionality for current BGE users) are met.
>
> As to the idea of me changing GSoC projects, I am not entirely against it,
> but I would like to better understand both Ton's proposal and the potential
> new project before jumping ship to a vague/undefined project.
>
> Regards,
> Daniel Stokes
>