Last month we reported that Blender Game Engine (BGE) was being removed entirely from the source code of Blender for the upcoming major 2.8 release. Judging by the comments section this was certainly a polarizing decision, with replies basically falling into two camps. On one side there was a lot of “good riddance to bad rubbish” type replies, while in the other camp it was mostly “I’m done with Blender if this happens”. Clearly the decision impact enough people that something had to be done. Well, that something was just announced on Twitter:
The linked article from the developer mailing list:
Hi all,
The Blender Foundation Development Fund has reserved a number of bigger donations (also on donator’s request) for game engine and interactive 3D related features.
Now 2.8 is getting shaped up, it was time to check on this topic. Yesterday afternoon I met with Benoit Bolsee and a couple of Code Quest participants, to discuss the future of Blender’s real-time 3D needs and “interaction mode”.
The outcome is that Benoit accepted a grant to work as designer and lead developer for one year on bringing back a good real-time interactive 3D system in Blender. He will do this part-time, in average 1.5 days per week, starting July 1st.
Obviously all work and further discussions will be done in public; using our regular channels (mailing lists, code.blender.org, developer.b.o, devtalk.b.o). Help from other Blender developers is very welcome. This will be further announced when Benoit starts.
To summarise, work will first be done in two areas;
– Implement a high quality real-time viewport with physics/event handling. This should result in a pleasant & usable environment to setup and bake simulations.
– Design and prototype a new nodal logic system.
Related to this work is also to enable good support (export or some kind of integration) for external game engines such as Godot, Armory, Blend4Web, Unreal, Unity, etc.
I especially invite the first three (open source) projects to connect with us to find ways to keep a high level of compatibility.
Work on typical GE features such as super-fast drawing (LOD, etc) are welcome too but should be part of the regular work on Blender’s viewport and our internal drawing engines. That way everyone benefits. Laters,
-Ton-
Blender Game Engine is not coming back, but a great deal of the functionality that was removed with it will be returning. Additionally Blender will be working directly to support Blender as a game development tool for existing game engines.
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Art, GameDev News, Programming Blender, Engine
LOD tools, blueprint bookmark support, the ability to export sequencer data in Final Cut Pro XML format and a switch to Visual Studio 2017 for the default C++ projects.
