[Bf-committers] blender as ui for game engine

[Owen Hogarth II]

I've seen these projects before and they fail to tackle the root issues
make it difficult for blender code to be used in any serious projects.

These projects are basically glue code like jni to c in java, it's hard to
maintain and very brittle. Every little change that happens in blender they
have to do a lot of work to maintain their projects.

The main issue is that the internals of blender needs to be reorganized a
bit. It can be reorganized without changing the outward interfaces so all
the current code will still compile and work but i'm sure you guys on this
team know that diving into that c code is not for the faint of heart also
the massive cmake build system.

cmake is great and I use it now but the first time I looked at the blender
source tree i was truly lost. I took some time to learn how to use cmake in
a non trivial way, see how the blender source is laid out. A lot of these
projects use the python code which is okay in one way but there's no way
your going to get python running in a portable cross platform way BUT the
python api is just a wrapper around the c api which can work anywhere.

That's the different approach that I've been taking and the reason that I
haven't participated in those other projects. It's the internals of blender
that needs to be reorganized to allow this to happen in a more seamless way
not necessarily applying these seemingly quick but brittle fixes.

Best,
Owen

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 2:13 PM, Mitchell Stokes <mogurijin at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello Owen,
>
> Instead of creating yet another engine, how about make it easier for
> Blender to be used as an editor/front end for various engines? There has
> been some work on this front with the BlenderRealTimeEngine addon[0] (more
> of a framework than an addon itself), and BlenderPanda[1], which uses the
> BlenderRealTimeEngine addon to integrate Panda3D[3] as a render engine into
> Blender.
>
> If you really want to make another engine, I have some ideas on that as
> well. Either way, feel free to chat with me on IRC (my handle is Moguri).
>
> Thanks,
> Mitchell Stokes
>
> [0] https://github.com/Kupoman/BlenderRealtimeEngineAddon
> [1] https://github.com/Moguri/BlenderPanda
> [2] https://www.panda3d.org/
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 9:56 PM, Owen Hogarth II <gurenchan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi guys
> >
> > I initially spoke with ideasman on irc about 8-12 months ago about this
> > idea and I wanted to message this list to see if I could get some
> support.
> >
> > A lot of small teams and single dev guys use blender as a major part of
> > their asset creation pipeline for their 2d/ 3d games but then they spend
> a
> > lot of time writing some editor for their game that usually bogs the
> > project down.
> >
> > I'd like to create the engine that can run blender applications as stand
> > alone games. BGE is currently working on an implementation but I think
> that
> > things can be done differently. Mainly that we do not need the entire
> > blender python API in a game engine. Only the core blender api which is
> > written in C although currently the source code at that level NEEDS some
> > refactoring.
> >
> > I have personally written and published quite a few smaller games for
> > android, ios and the blackberry platforms. So I know how to take an idea
> > from start to finish but taking this on is a pretty big task and I would
> > like to focus on taking this task to completion.
> >
> > That is what I would like to do, I would like the support of the blender
> > community to get this done and so I am mailing here to ask for your
> > support. Is this something that the blender community would be interested
> > in supporting me while I work on it?
> >
> > Best,
> > Owen
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Bf-committers at blender.org
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> >
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