[Bf-committers] UPBGE Discussion.

[Mike Erwin]

I'm in the "support external engines" camp but that does not mean we drop
BGE. I follow the UPBGE project on GitHub and they're doing really great
work. Look forward to further discussions on IRC and bf-viewport!

Mike Erwin
musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire

On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 4:25 AM, Jorge Bernal <jbernalmartinez at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Let me introduce a bit more the purpose of this request for all people that
> don’t know what UPBGE is.
>
> During last BGE meeting, around one and half year ago, it was established,
> at least, 3 ways to follow regarding the blender game engine. To summarize,
> one of them was to adapt the blender code to embrace existing external
> engines (under this way are Armory, Panda, Godot, etc), another one was to
> create a new internal and tiny game engine (no one is working in this way
> at this moment) and the last one was to refactor the BGE progressively to
> reach a new up to date standard (UPBGE is a project that follows that last
> way).
>
> Then, taking into account, that the current workflow that we were
> conducting to modify the BGE (through developer.blender.org differential
> diff/patches) was so slow for a big refactor as this one it was done a new
> branch/fork in github (https://github.com/UPBGE/blender).
>
> During this last year a great effort has been put by UPBGE/BGE developers
> to refactor the code with that goal in mind. Now our purpose is to try
> backporting all the new changes and refactors into the 2.8 branch (or a
> parallel one) to bring the BGE to a new life (and successful one, we hope)
> life. :-)
>
> Here below there is a summarize of main modifications done to BGE (check
> release notes in https://doc.upbge.org/ for a deeper explanation):
>
>
>
> -          *Main Refactors*:
>
> o    The event system was totally reworked. Now there is a Device folder
> containing all device related code (keyboard, mouse and joysticks). With
> this refactor we can assure, at last, that the game engine won’t lose
> events even with low-very low fps anymore. Additionally, the joystick part
> follows the new database standard defined by steam to homogenize the
> joysticks nightmare.
>
> o   A new common launcher system was developed. It was done to reduce
> duplicated code between embedded player and external player.
>
> o   New FBO renderer using GPU_framebuffer / GPU_texture. Off screen
> rendering consists in render the scene directly to an off screen (FBO with
> color texture and depth texture) and at the frame end render the off screen
> to screen. Internally a lot of things are improved and simplified like the
> 2d filters, render textures and soft particles.
>
> o   Multitexture mode was removed to fulfil with new OpenGL 3.3 & on goal.
>
> o   Vertex Arrays + Display lists were removed too. At this moment, we have
> only VBOs. The VBOs were improved a lot to overpass the Vertex arrays +
> Display List performance.
>
> o   Refactor of Rasterizer OpenGL calls. The goal of this refactor is to
> reduce the opengl calls outside of Rasterize module.
>
> o   New 2D Filter python Proxy. The user can now access to the filters from
> the scene in python from a filter manager.
>
> o   Variable vertex memory size implemented. A new system with template
> vertex class is used internally. This system allows to reduce memory usage
> by reducing the number of UV layers used, in the same way the mesh
> transformations are optimized.
>
> o   Triangle rendering. All the meshes are rendered as triangle now.
>
> o   Lots and lots and lots of more tiny refactors and cleanups. You can
> check them in the release notes.
>
> -         * New features implemented*:
>
> o   Geometry instancing
>
> o   Parallax mapping
>
> o   Subsurface Scattering
>
> o   Realtime Cubemaps (including reflection and refractions)
>
> o   Python components
>
> o   Mipmap per texture
>
> o   GLSL Text Highlighting
>
> o   New LOD system
>
> o   New movement Sensor and Joystick Vibration actuator logic bricks
>
> o   Joystick Sensor adapted to Xbox360 joystick standard.
>
> o   Constant material values
>
> o   Geometry shaders
>
> o   Ray sensor mask
>
> o   Update of bounding box in realtime
>
> o   New python console interpreter can be launched in-game
>
> o   Soft particles (also called Depth transparency)
>
> o   Static shadow rendering
>
> o   Sky background render
>
> o   Material Texture and lamp texture LOD bias
>
> o   Access to Vertex UV list
>
> o   Access to collision contact points
>
> o   Access to additional properties of material and texture in realtime
>
> o   ImageRender and ImageMirror HDR
>
> o   Physics shape replacement and duplication
>
> o   Physics suspend and resume
>
> o   Access to Text Dimensions
>
> o   Access to python polygon and vertex
>
> o   Debug bounding box and armatures
>
> o   Percentage closer filtering shadow
>
> o   Material switch
>
> o   Multiple vertex color per layer
>
> o   World exposure and range
>
> o   And a few additional ones. You can check in the release notes.
>
> -          *Work on-going at this moment*:
>
> o   GPU Hardware Skinning
>
> o   Planar reflections
>
> o   Audio effects (revert, echo, etc)
>
> o   Deferred rendering
>
> o   UV Scroll
>
> o   Static Batching
>
> o   SCA refactor and cleanup.
>
> o   And a lot more.
>
> -          *BugFixes*:
>
> o   Lots of bugs (around 40-50) reported in developer.blender.org fixed.
> Also fixes for bugs not reported.
>
> For contact and discussion the UPBGE team are composed of
>
> Official Blender BGE devs:
> - panzergame (Tristan Porteries)
> - lordloki (Jorge Bernal)
>
> And only upbge devs:
> - TwisterGE (Diego Lopes)
> - youle (Ulysse Martin)
>
>
> Regards,
> lordloki
> El 13/11/2016 5:24 p. m., "tristan panzer" <republicthunderbolt9 at gmail.com
> >
> escribió:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I propose to everyone interested in BGE to talk about a possible
> > replacement of BGE by UPBGE (upbge.org) this week on IRC. The discussion
> > is
> > to know if UPBGE can be choose, what change will be needed for BGE
> related
> > to 2.8 viewport, and more…
> >
> > The team will be here all the week after 21 GMT in #blendercoders, and
> > frequently in #upbgecoders.
> >
> > Tristan.
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
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