Time for an update from the Blender Game Engine team! and guess what.. we’ve got something you can play!

Being this the first Blender Game Engine demo we publish, it will only focus on the technical side, so don’t expect big gameplay experience, in this demo we provide a small level with a few platforms and some characters running around, so you can test if the blenderplayer runs on your computer and we can have nice feedback from that.

Please check the yo_readme!.txt file, it will guide you through the controller keys, and how to setup Blender for running without some gfx features for older computers. (even a spanish version! : )

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You can get Yo Frankie! Demo #1 right below, basically there is a version with and without GLSL, while GLSL gives you nice shaders, real time shadows and other features.. it can be very expensive, so if the game runs any slow in your computer, you should check the version without GLSL).

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Update #2

YoFrankie! Demo 1.2!!
Updated the Source files, Linux, Windows and OSX binaries!

Release logs 🙂
– Press F1 for help!
– Fixed major slowdowns in game.
– Plenty of fixes in the GLSL side and some warnings in game.
– Updated Bullet Physics System.
– [Linux] built-in (static) libraries!: OpenAL, FreeALUT, libGCC, and Python.

Remember you can always use the source files with a recent Blender build!

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Update #1

Updated the Linux version to use static python (so it doesn’t depends on the one installed in the computer), also doesn’t use gettext, exr, and some others.
Tagged it as 1.1 so you can keep track of which version you’re playing.

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Linux:

• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – with GLSL support – Linux 32bit [~27MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – with GLSL support – Linux 64bit [~27MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – No GLSL (Texture Face Mode) – Linux 32bit [~27MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – No GLSL (Texture Face Mode) – Linux 64bit [~27MB]

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Windows:

• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – with GLSL support- Windows [~31MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – No GLSL (Texture Face Mode) – Windows [~31MB]

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OSX:

• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – with GLSL – OSX 10.4 intel [~32 MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – No GLSL – OSX 10.4 Intel [~32MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.0 – No GLSL – OSX 10.3 PPC [~30MB]

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• Source Files: Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 – Source Files [25MB]
  

At the right is an image you can see how the game should look with and without GLSL.

Note: If the binaries doesn’t run, you can always open the ‘.gamedata.blend’ in a very recent Blender build (trunk, not the apricot branch, built today or yesterday) and run it (the readme file is also embedded in the Text editor, so you can read it in Blender).

We want to make sure you all can play the game before we give more features away, once this demo is successful and we know it plays well in most computers, we plan to release a new demo with more gameplay and features.

We hope you enjoy it!, leave any technical problem right below, gameplay suggestions are also welcome but this time we are focusing mostly on having YoFrankie! running 🙂

You can now test the Linux (well, for Intel machines) packages for the “CrystalSpace Edition” of YoFrankie. There are basically two ways to obtain it:

• Automatic downloading: go to http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.xml and follow the instructions on screen. This will download all required packages etc. onto your system and has the added advantage that the program can be kept up-to-date automatically as well – i.e. when a change is made, either to the game or CrystalSpace, the changed component is downloaded automatically (and only that) and used. (Note x86_64 users: you need a very recent version of 0install, 0.35 or newer, to run the package. That means you may have to install that manually on some distros.)
• One big package: download http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie_run.sh, set it to executable and run it. This is also the file that will go onto the DVD.

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Meet Ramiro the Ram! our new character, actually it is there since a while ago but now is time to put it in game.
He is the male sheep, the Ram protector of all Mandy‘s around, and will not hesitate in hitting if you get too close to them!

This week we got the sheep game (catching, throwing, animations, etc) working at a level we can move on to other games, like the piranha, rat, buck, turtle? and its logic.
But still there is a lot of things to do/tweak in our levels/hud/effects and here is where we can use your help, we have this character, the Ram, but no animations still, there are scheduled for the next week (not the one that starts tomorrow monday), so we thought that with the nice response we had with the “Animate Frankie!” post, we could try this again and let people contribute with their own animations so when the next week starts we have some already there, for tweaking/integrating and some nice extra time to work on the levels or make even more animations, we can always re-schedule 🙂

What are we looking for?, this character doesn’t have any animations yet, so we can use any kind, but most needed are:

• WalkCycle
• RunCycle
• Idle animations
• Hit / being hit (by a nut)
• Being kicked
• Death animation
• Drowning
• Charging to hit with the horns, pissed off animations, everything you think will fit to this character.

Grab the .blend file here. (Packed, ~1.2Mb). Animating at 40 frames per second (like Frankie’s) will work.
Nothing really fancy on it so should work with recent builds of Apricot, that you can find at GraphicAll, thanks to our build monkeys, also the Apricot branch (linux) have an special place in the “Automated Builds” section, under “Current Hot Branches”.

* You don’t have to leave your .blend file always, you can use Vimeo (good)/YouTube (bad) to upload the OpenGL videos (?) there, and we can ask for the .blend file later (you may want to do some tweaking before release or so).

As a side note, if you’re not an animator and would like to contribute with any other stuff (modeling, texturing, etc). Check the “Contribute your own stuff!” thread we created at blender.org forums and leave your questions/thoughts there.

That’s all! looking forward to what you blenderheads do with this character, hope you like it!
(Feliz Día del Amigo!)

There is an open ftp space on blender.org. It works like this:
ftp to: download.blender.org
user: anonymous
password: your email address

When logged in, go to the directory ‘incoming’. What you put there is visible here:
http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/
This upload space deletes all old files after a couple of weeks, so don’t use it for permanent storage.

Production with the bge is taking off. We’re really motivated by how enthusiastically the blender community received the news about using the bge in this project. I’ve had my doubts as to how many people were actually interested in the bge, but evidently there are a quite lot of you. Make more noise!

We’re making all new levels for the bge game, and we’re bringing in new characters. Campbell is finishing up the game logic for Frankie, and then shifts focus to implementing enemies and animals to bully. By the beginning of August we’ll be wrapping this game up into a complete package with menus, etc.

We’ve also gone over the animation submissions! The animations we decided on using in the game are:
Marcus Feital’s “Sleep Idle”
Mango Jambo’s “Show Off” Idle
Joshua Huf’s throwing and minor damage
Glenn Melenhorst’s run cycle

Thanks guys! Great work. Mango Jambo, for crediting you, is that your real name, because that would be awesome.

Now below are some wip screenshots from our first level in the bge. The environment is missing enemies, plants, ground props, special effects, and all importantly, shadow/ambient occlusion maps.

Just like you read it, Real Time Shadows in Blender’s 3D View *and* in Blender’s Game Engine!

It uses Shadow Buffers, so is only available for Spot lights now, and it works with the same settings as for rendering, like OnlyShadow (very useful!), or ClipStart, ClipEnd, SpotSize, falloff, Bias, etc. They are not filtered (yet!, so don’t complain : ) so no Soft shadows for now.

I don’t like to take attention from other’s blogposts but this feature totally deserves it.

Made a quick video showing how it looks right now in both our game demo from Chris’s blogpost and in 3D View, is speeded up a little bit also for not to bore you too much.

This feature was made by our code hero Brecht and is still under development, so go compile your apricot branch, test, and share your happiness here with a nice comment.
That’s all folks! 😀

Watch in crappy quality at YouTube
Download/Watch the  AVI Video