ton | 
12 5th, 2007
Hi everyone!
And here’s another Open Project starting… this time it’s a game, the Blender and Crystal Space communities joining forces to realize an awesome and industry standard 3D game experience!
Last weekend we’ve selected the team (Heya Qareeb, Darius, Chris, Frank, Pablo and Campbell!). Darius now is working on making this blog possible, and on our mailing list we’re already discussing game play, technology targets, production planning. animation issues, and so on. Great, an enthusiastic team!
The Europeans among us (shorter travel time…) will meet 2nd week of January for a long weekend to prepare for productional issues. But the real start will be the first week of February. Only then real decisions will be made on game concept, game design and other targets, although we do know it’ll be derived from Project Peach, furry & crazy characters in a forest.
As for the previous open movies, a pre-sale campaign to purchase the DVD set in advance will be organized to allow the Blender and Crystal Space communities to support this project. Again there’s the ambitious target of reaching a 1000 DVDs sold in advance, before February 1st. Expect on the DVD the complete game, all content in Creative Commons Attribute, video blog material, and clear examples and/or tutorials for how to extend the game, add levels, change characters, and so on. Early purchasers of the Apricot game will get their names credited on the game intro and final credit roll.
And don’t forget; although we aim at a creating compelling gaming content, the real Apricot target is to improve the open source pipeline for professional game creation. This focused around Blender as a modeling and animation tool, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and some Python scripting magic to tie it all together.
Thanks for the support!
-Ton-
Cool – I should be 2nd on the list of credits! 🙂
I put my option as the Blender sponsor, rather than the CS sponsor though – hopefully that doesn’t affect the ordering 🙂
Good luck guys with the project! It’ll be interesting to see if getting the 1000 sales might take a bit longer than ED / Peach, due to the perceived smaller community etc.
Excellent news 🙂
looking forward to seeing all of the hard work come to fruition,
LetterRip
My best wishes!
DVD Ordered 😉
Carsten
Cool project. But what I want to know is for the tutorials and examples on the DVD, will it have more than just teaching you how to extend the game. More things like documentation on the entire process of how the game was made. Like how blender and CS comes together modeling/logic implementations and then parts where CS is used completely for the gamerendering and gamelogic aspects.
*first*
I’m so looking foward to this! I expect many teasers and a beta… please.
With Cherries on top.
And whipped cream.
Please.
Great! I expecto to buy the DVD soon, and the best wishes for the apricot project team 😉
Regards,
Salvador Mata
Good luck guys! I’m sure it will be a fun game and also a there will be a lot to learn from this experience!
This is such a great initiative! It’s really exciting to see more open-source games being made available, and now in a professional enviroment. I’ve already pre-ordered my DVD (as well as a copy of Essential Blender book 😉 I’m sure you’ll make the 1000 mark before Feb!
Cool project ! Which kind of game will it be ? MMORPG 😉 ?
Great idea I’ve been waiting for some more development for the game aspect of Blender. Well I think y’all should do a mario party style game because it consist of a lot of mini-games you can countinualy update the game with more. Good Luck.
goldentaiji : yes, also about making game from a scratch using Blender and Crystal Space
All the best for this team! This is a very important project.
I hope this game will be better than most games that are made from movies. I’ll have to scrape up some money to pre-order it. Time to check the couch cushions.
What is the difference between ordering as a Crystal Space sponsor vs a Blender Foundation sponsor?
Given that CS is listed as the default presumably those who aren’t paying attention will go under the CS sponsorship.
LetterRip
Is there a minumum spec for this game, or will it run anywhere Blender does?
Donations of € 250,- or more: you can get your name mentioned as Main Sponsor in the movie credits.
– What movie credit??
To Robin: in the credits of the Peach movie.
I’m also curious about the platforms you can play the game on… Will it also run on Mac OS X?
And will there be a lot of “bonus material” on the DVD? Because I’m not such a great gamer, so I’m not sure yet, if I should purchase it. (Actually I’m sure I will at some point, because I can’t resist anyways… :P)
To MasterDomino: yes, MacOS/X is one of the targets. The DVD will be filled with all sources to make the game (both code and sources for artwork). Lots of tutorials and documentation and also video material. Video tutorials and so on.
Hi!
This is really cool!
I’m wondering for which platform(s) you are planning to release the game.
I’m a programmer myself and would like to help out.
Konrad
Ordered the DVD right away !
This will be great for Blender, great for opensource development, and great for gamers!
After we will watch the move, we’ll be able to play with those lovely characters! I hope the humour will transfer well to a game environment.
I suppose Blender’s game engine will be used to prototype, then the logic transfered to chrystal space for deployment. So we will be able to drop any game developed with the GE played back trough Chrystal Space ? is there an intermediate layer so people can choose their engine / subsystems ?
Can’t wait to see how those tree’s will transfer to a realtime environment…
And last but not least… would this project allow for the development of a GE logic nodes editor, using the existing material nodes infrastructure?
To jorrit:
Sold. 😉
To KonRad: Linux, Windows, and MacOS/X.
BEST WISHES!
(btw, rss feed has some troubles:
perhaps
/?feed=rss2
instead of
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blender3D/apricot
)
Hi guys,
now you’re in the starting blocks ! A great opportunity for you and all the community. Do your best, I trust you, and.. I’m a little bit jealous 😉
rednelb: true, thanks
mmmmmmmmmm…apricots………I’ve ordered already….what next….pomegranate I hope…….mmmmmmmm
sweet. I have been checking this url for a while now and I saw onblendernation so I have subscribed to the rss feed. I will buy my copy soon
great idea. i´m sure that this project is necessary and has the capability to push blender one step further to the top.
with regard to the powerfull graphics cards, apricot is a must. go on, advance real time!
best wishes
ingo
A big step fo open source video games.
My best wishes. juan.
Bonne idée de projet !!
Project goog idea !!
You guys really should get announcements on the linux/open gaming sites like happypenguin and freegamer etc.
@Ton.. what sort of sweet blender improvements do you think we’ll see? better texture painting and object space normal map generation?
Hey, it’s started 😉
you can count on me, for adding 2d-filters to cs, i think that it hasn’t it yet.
best wishes,
have good programming and modeling days
–zaghaghi
I am interested in one of the points mentioned in the targets for the game: EDUCATION. Is this still an objective? Many K-12 schools are turning towards open-source as a way of keeping up with costly software. Blender is taught all over the world.
If this is of benefit to educators then please keep us in the loop! Schools are a great market, you know!
Eric: hard to say at this moment. I hope so, but on other side people expecting something fun not alphabet game. Would be great make it for OLPC but in other side people expecting hi quality 3d effectcs…
But game will be Open and easy to extend/reuse content. It’ not that bad idea for a community to make after Apricot something very educational using our characters in 2d.
I love the the characters. Hope you successfully finish it 😉
keep going guys
cool, that is one of the best ideas
i hope you guys can pull it off, from my own experience (but i am not that good) creating a game is very very hard (or should i say, time intensive, because time always was my biggest problem)
Perfect! I’ve always thought that the blender game engine was a bit…lacking. Now it looks like most of my major issues will be taken care of.
Is still possible to be candidate?
Still it possible to integrate the team?
Hope Blender will be enhanced to be sutable to do a game level editor. Currently we can only edit object from an outer point of view. Not an inner point of view (except with the camera). In fact it should be possible to move the camera while in camera mode … And get rid of the rectangles indicating where the image will be taken.
Long live Blender!
More free mults and models!!!
G.
googolAlphabets
Of course Blender will take notification of all your wished and the team will try to do their best 🙂
I am currently in the Creatures Community, and this has popped up. By the sounds of it, it’s highly promising!!
I was wondering if the gameplay had a possibility to involve genetics? Or was that not even under consideration?
silvak: Crystal Entity Layer supports genetics alghoritm. Hard to say at this moment but if yes – then for enemy AI (involving neural networks).
this is definitely cool
but it also makes me worry a bit
i have seen talk and vids and papers on
improvements to the blender game engine
but i’ve seen little to none actually added
(forgive me if i missed these in one of the updates)
but now it’s looking and sounding more
and more like the blender game engine has been dropped from the development pipeline completely
i was really hoping that this game would bring new life into the dated game engine and add much needed improvements like elephants dream did for the character animation system
saddened was i to find this information
doh, nvm, i should have checked the forum first
i did read through all the blog comments to see if anyone else had asked 🙂
i love blender so much is there a way i can get so tutorial on how to do human figures and animations??
@Kagilo, yes there are plenty of tutorials for that. Check the blender wiki.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Books/Essential_Blender
Just try some of these they may be of some help to you!
keep going I hop you have a lot of sucss.
Good bless you al, good luck
🙂
hey guys nice idea and i hope you guys do vcery good on this project
the only question that i have is that are you guys going to make the blender GE better or use blender to make Crystal Space look good?
Srry but why would any one want something from out side of blender if you ask me it is a way of getting around the Blender GE bugs that need to be fixed \
good luck
Steven: Blender+CS. You can read about reasons on the forum. Greetings
Blender just keeps getting better. I’ll support a project like this every time.
Blender Rocks
currently it doesn’t look like more than 500 preorders will be reached if it goes on like that. maybe more advertisement is needed? 🙂
How can I donate instead of buying? I don’t want to spend 34 euros, but I would like to donate some money to the project.
Buck: Clicking on “PayPal” button in the About/Donations section here /?page_id=8 Thanks
Are there any screenshots of the game yet ? I know it’s still in development, but I’m not going to pre-order anything without at least viewing some screenshots.
kafox: It’s not in development at all just in planning stage. We starting at 1st Feb 2008. Pre-ordeing is for people who want to sponsor this project, DVD it’s only additonal gift with our thanks not main purpose of buying.
I hope that I don’t need a super-duper, hot-rod machine that has 2x overclocked quad core, quad CF/SLI video & 1.21 Jigabytes of RAM to run the game. I hope the planning stage will consider developing with the lowest system denomination so that people with low(er)-end systems can play the game at its fullest potential.
Oh, may bad. I thought it was already in development.
I too hope it will not take a supercomputer to run it, because I don’t have one and I won’t be upgrading for a while 🙂
I’ve made my contribution, Since I pre-ordered the Peach movie I thought I’d pre-order this game too…
Hope you get it up to commercial quality.
Please, for the love of God, do not make another shooter, but a game with a story. If it has to be a shooter, make one with a story, single player. We need better stories, less random shooting.
I’m responsible for a small dome theater at the University of North Carolina. We’re always looking for innovative new content. Any chance of giving this game a “dome” mode? Cheers, ek
Eric: But what exactly game needs for this ? Big resolution ?
OHYEAH!!! is it gonna be like Steve Jackson’s TOON?
DVD ordered. Looking forward to seeing what can be produced.
Chalk up one more sale! I think it’s a great idea to give people the opportunity to (optionally) pre-order the game + movie + sources, etc.
I look forward to seeing what kind of game this will turn out to be. I agree with Norbert. While I really love shooters, I think that a great storyline/single-player mode is a must for such a breakthrough project/game; I really hope that Apricot teaches the gaming industry a few new tricks on how to make a cool game. 🙂
Is there a development mailing list I can get on to watch the progress?
Best wishes!
Will the Game/Movie also be aviable in other languages such as German?
Metus: Game – yes, no idea about movie
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader
mui bom este sait nota 10
tenquil a tosdos
when will the game be out.
i m deign to play it.