ton | 
09 20th, 2008
With all great improvements in the Blender Game Engine we’re getting flooded with positive response all over, including professional game makers, colleges and studios. It really looks like this poor neglected part in Blender has love and attention again from everyone! A 3D creation tool combo with a GE is still a great concept, opening up new opportunities and markets for Blender artists.
I’m very happy to announce that Carsten Wartmann, writer of many Blender books and main author of the Blender Gamekit, has accepted to start working on a fully updated version of the Blender Gamekit! This project, including DTP/design by Samo Korosec, is scheduled to finish during november. Should be in time for Santa to deliver it under the Christmas trees. Follow glenoriegrowers for more information.
The updated Gamekit will cover all new functionality, glsl materials, multilayer texture, character animation and logic states and bricks. Carsten will also clean-up the old tutorials to make them work well and add new ones, also based on Yo Frankie! As soon as the first tangible results come back from the designer, and we know more about final scheduling, we’ll add the new book in the store for pre-ordering.
As for all recent Blender Foundation/Institute products, we’ll publish it all under an open license too: the Creative Commons Attribute. The work Carsten realizes will also be provided to the wiki team.
This also means that’s it is about time to make the old Gamekit pdf + CDROM freely available too. Download the pdf and the cdrom (includes Blender 2.25) here:
http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit1/
Have fun! And please note that the book and .blend files were written for Blender 2.25.
-Ton-
That`s wonderful news!
good luck Wartmann!
Hello Ton,
This is a really a most welcome surprise! I often thought: O heck, some of the old gamekit examples showed a bad behavior under Linux or ran under MSwindows on a modern CPU just too fast to be playable, though I liked them a lot (especially the speedboat race): couldn’t Carsten give them some overhaul so that they would be playable again ?
And now that’s exactly what you have planned !
And that you make the old files downloadable for free is also a wish come true, especially for educational purposes…
Thanx a lot & have a nice weekend !
!!!! yipee, updated gamekit!!!! The BGE improvements have brought my attention back in that area, thanks for all the hard work Blender Foundation!
Maaaan this is amazing…you know that you’re a true revolution for this industry ?
-Gian
Awesome!!
I want this.
YAAAAAAHH! Blender Gamekit 2.0! (The CD(Open) will have Yo Frankie right?
This is great.
Very welcome, that news!
This is great news!
I hope it’ll be informative AND creative. 🙂
Is it possible to pre order this book?
I remember that i bought the Blender Gamekit at Bcon 05 and it is now a family treasure…
Once, my brother asked me to to lend him this book for a while and then we have a fight because i said NO! Are you nuts?
Guys take care with trojans this time… lol.
And that’s some news.. Thanks for the free download..
Wow interesting, downloading now!!!
you guys rock how many times can I say this
xD
When i first came to Blender, the inbuilt game engine was the ‘selling point’ for me. Id come from a background of making 2D games (and animations), and wanted to get into 3D stuff.
The updates and publicity the BGE have been getting lately is amazing, its certainly got a very exciting future for something many thought was dieing.
Cant wait to see this new Gamekit book, if theres going to be a pre order sometime ill definitely do that. Im sure many others will as well.
Awesome stuff!
At least in the gamekit.pdf version chapter 1 comes after chapter 3 so that the numbers on the page go 49, 50, 3, 4 and so on. I am not sure if this is on purpose (I think that not including chapter 4 is). There should be an obvious note somewhere alerting the reader of these changes.
I am glad that this is available and look forward to the updated version
I am going to feel stupid when I find there is a note that i missed 😉
another step in the right direction for BGE
IMHO BGE is still missing web plugin, because market is moving on the net over and over, I believe a web plugins for major browser would be a strategic priority.
@zoiba: Nice idea! Would like that, too! Plugin for IE, gecko based, safari, opera…
wich other software does this ? ha ha .
Yes , blender is going to be the software of the future . video games is a huge industry now , great !
will the book also availible in a german translation?
Some replies:
– pre-order starts when I can show something tangible and know more about delivery date
– a german publisher is going to talk to us about it, but this is uncertain
– we put some yofrankie stuff on the gamekit cdrom, but the DVD will have all! nice bundle (hint hint!)
– yes there’s some export bug skipping an introduction chapter in pdf, not very important now… (export happened 5 years ago!)
german would be nice for me, too ;), but I will by it in english, too (if there is only an english version upcoming)!
of course i will -> BUY <- it 😉
There’s a revolution going on in amsterdam!
The reincarnation of the BGE is a famous gift to us all.
Thanks!
Mario Galaxy takes care. Yo! Frankie is comming. uhuuu
thats great , pitty is i already bought game kit 1 the downloadable version, made me understand the logicblocks better , good luck with nr 2.
I hope in a future the b-foundation release a spanish translation of this book.
Hi, talking about BGE and the new standalone compiler/player, I had a new thought beside brother plugins. what’s about console compiler/player (xbox 360, wii, ps3, psp, nintendo ds, …)?
By the way: Are there any interfaces to a bge that enable to insert not only python code for NPC, but for network programming, so that entities can be steered by others over a network (multiplayer)…??? I did not do anything complex with bge yet, so my question might be … silly ;).
eehh, browser plugins, please; No brother plugins. What’ the hell is going on with me?
Yeah, a OpenGL based browser plug-in would be a nice thing.
A must-have!! no doubt 😉
Been using blender for some time now. That good news falls at realya good time. Thanks a lot for the good work!
great !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
While speaking about features of the future: The developing of the gameplay seemed to be quite fast. I hope this means that it is intuitive and neatly arranged, too! 😉
Although, there was a complaint about the game ‘teaching kids how to abuse animals’, I welcome the variety of gameplay elements like carrying, throwing, and NPCs who are following or running away depending the distance and whether the player looks at them or not etc. – Those are features which could be expanded easily to offer a template for non-violent games. I mean ‘non-violent’, because there are templates for shooters or RPGs or RTSs already within the packages of other engines, and, because as an Open Source project blender could have advantages against commercial projects, to try new things in a new, still not approved, direction. Maybe, universities or public sponsorship are willing to invest in such things more than ever before.
In case, it is an option to focus the further developing of blender on such a template, I were glad to add my suggestions.
Maybe, blender won’t remain to be only a tool for artists, but becomes a tool for developers and authors, too. 🙂
And what about translations of the book? Maybe we could achieve broader audiences if the book is in more than one language. I am pretty sure that brazilians would buy it! I volunteer my self to translate a full chapter to Brazilian Portuguese. 🙂
Hey Victor,
Allan Brito is writing a book about BGE in portuguese, maybe he will finish the book this year.
Eu vi a notícia no blog dele mesmo.
Would it be possible to get a torrent of the 200MB CD file?
Thank you for releasing the earlier version of your game kit.
I have been reading through the earlier version, since I downloaded it. I will definately be purchasing the second version when it is released.
I hope you can incorporate the latest changes that are ni the upcoming blender 2.48.
Keep up the good work and once again, thank you for the free downlaod of your gamekit.
Thanks. greetings from Mongolia!
We need some skeleton spirits so that people have a base to build their own characters on. Some raw skeleton for man, woman, kid, dog, cat, monkey, bear, lion, mouse, fish… The sample spirit should be physically sound.
Then people can skew the skeletons. Make it fat, thin, long, swallow head, butt…
@Johnny: It would be incredible if we could play the games we create on a game system, except it would cost blender too much money for this to happen. There would also be legal ramifications.
Oh but to dream…
TON!!!!
THE CARIBBEAN FRENCH MAN.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH, DON’T KNOW IF YOU REMEMBER ME BUT I CAME TO BLENDER STUDIO IN AMSTERDAM A COUPLE OF MONTH AGO AND HAVE SPECIALLY REQUESTED THE UPDATE FOR THE BLENDER G.E
THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
MY DREAM HAVE COME TRUE.
I AM SOOOOOO HAPPY.
Yeah, good news.
Not for the Mac users though …
There is no Mac binary in the package.
It’s sad that the game engine is still on the backburner.
Bill
Amazing… will definitely pre order!
thanks for thats, how are you doing for this xmas? i took your reccomendation and purchased a
proximate for my wife
http://www.jeancharest.org/story.php?title=fun_christmas_presents_for_kids
I have on short yet clear comment about the Gamekit:
DIBS!
(gimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimme)
This is great news. “After all these years,” it is great fun to watch Blender suddenly pop-up in even the most mainstream American bookstores and for Blender to be referred-to as “a definitive professional 3D application.”
”
You know, “it’s not just fun-and-games anymore.” Here we have “a readily-available technology that can do real-time graphics and physics simulations,” plus anything else you can dream up to do with Python. You can do educational things with it, make movies quickly with it (a la “machinima”), and dramatically speed-up a conventional Blender render-pipeline (until those good folks get off their duffs and start putting in real OpenGL-based rendering components)! I’d like to see the new “game”-kit documentation project talk about these things, too.
Thanks. I need books about Gamekit .
Hello, I can’t download the released book, it keeps on saying server connection reset… help?
thanks.
Can’t download. Link does not work.
Saw the update on BlenderNation a few weeks back, any new info? Really looking to use this a textbook in class for the Spring Semester starting January 12, 2009. Will this be available by then?
@Lorax: The Magic 8-Ball says: “Signs point to yes” :o)
@Samo: Thank You! Do you have a Table of Contents ready? That way I could start modifying the syllabus. Thanks again.
Same here, no tutorial “tube cleaner”on the CD rom
Oups…. it’s on the “game folder”, instead of the “tutorials” folder as said in the book
Dats cool. Check out my websight thats all about the 3d and rendered images and stuff. A cool blender sight