The Blender Gamekit book update project is now in its last stage. We’re reviewing the designed pages, finishing the cd for the book, and hopefully within one or two weeks it goes to print! (But you know, planning doesn’t match human limitations always!)

You now can start pre-ordering copies even. Up to december 15 with a nice 20% discount!
Click here to visit the Blender e-shop.

Needless to say: revenues will help Blender Foundation projects (and me & Brecht coding 2.5! 🙂

-Ton-

The long wait is almost over, today the dvds were delivered to the Blender Institute. Tomorrow we’ll pack them all for our sponsors/customers, monday it gets picked up by the Global Mail service.
Delivery is usually 2-4 days for countries close, 1 week for rest of Europe, 2 weeks for USA and rest of world.

In case you’ve moved to another place after ordering, make sure the e-shop knows! (Mail shop at blender.org order number and new address).

-Ton-

Just a short note! DVD is done, we’re still doing some tests, and we need Campbell for final blessings, but tomorrow it will be ready to go to the DVD reproduction factory!

Printing takes 2 weeks, shipping will happen during weekend of 1-2 november, customers will then get the copy within 1 (europe) or 2 (rest of world) weeks. Exciting 🙂

• Blender 2.48a update: A serious bug in the GE requires a new build of the players/runtimes, which we want to include this on the DVD. Meaning our planning shifts with a week… sorry.

• Nov 7 update: DVD factory started printing! We expect the dvds in end of the week, and ship saturday 14th.

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-

As usual, we will thank the the early dvd-pre-sale sponsors with a prominent credit. There will be a special section on the DVD, but also in the game itself!

On the link below you can find the dvd pre-sale sponsors, who have ordered and paid before we started in February (but we’ve been flexible a bit!).

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Please check for errors! If your name is missing, please email me (ton at blender org), preferably with order ID from blender shop. Thanks!

-Ton-

(Note: some names don’t start with capitals yet, or are capitalized entirely, will be fixed. There will be also no nicknames, nor corporate names added!)