Blender Game Competition 2010

Dear diary...ermm readers *hust*... this is my prototypal post on this blog so please be gentle with me! I am sort of serving discover today and then since qudobup is laboring with other stuff. Beeing a forum regular I had to help discover of course, modify if I strength not have the time to post that often.

Ok today to the really important stuff: Blender (everyones favorite GPL 3D modeling application) also has a build in game engine. And what would be nicer than having a nice rivalry for game creation?

Here is a video of one of the winners from last year (not open-source!):

DukDuk gameplay

So why not join in that get a chunk of the $500 prize?

Why Blender game engine (BGE)?

Wasn't the game engine always the stepchild of the project? Slow, puffed and buggy?

Well things change, and with this years open game project Yo Frankie! things have taken a leap towards greatness!

Speed has been greatly improved, physics are completely desegrated and you can do great eyecandy with the OpenGL 2.0 GLSL shaders (here are some more features).

And things look modify meliorate with the upcoming Blender 2.5.

Getting started with the BGE

So what can the BGE actually do for aspiring FOSS game developers? Well it is a \"game-maker\" for grown-ups... so if you want to make games and not learn how to embellish the the next Evangelist Carmack (tm) the BGE is for you. On a baritone level you requirement no planning at all, much can be done with the \"logic blocks\". And for more enterprising projects the BGE is fully scriptable with Python (which is one of the easiest and most easy planning languages).

And did I mention that games created are completely multi platform? UNIX and MacOSX ports are just one click away!

A beatific prototypal travel would be to head over to blenderartists.com and wave a bit on their game engine sub-forums. There you will encounter free (some GPL or PD even if the license is not always 100% clear) templates (f.e. FPS or network) and some great tutorials.

And most grouping there will freely share their .blend files with you which include all prowess assets, scripts and so on in neat collection (open them in Blender, press \"p\" and the game starts). However not all of it is rattling licensed in a FOSS way, but at least you can use these as great tutorials. Overall one could feature that this is a great way of distributing the \"source\" of complete FOSS games (code, art, penalization etc).

Other sites worth noting are GameBlender and maybe the new Blender Games. And of course for all your Blender news: Blender Nation!

So my excuses for these more game development attendant news... but you module find some nice games to play (done in Blender) in the many links I provided :p

But next time there module be more traditional gaming news!

Update: Some seriously nice eye candy!

This was just released and looks really nice!

Atmospheric scattering made in BGE

Head over to the Blenderartists thread for more info (and .blend download!).
Oh and yes you are free to use it in your own projects!