Just one and a half weeks since we started using the bge, and the progress has been insane. There’s way too much for one post.

GLSL is now integrated in the BGE, just enable it in the game menu to preview it in the 3d view, and it’ll look exactly the same when you press P. Support for nodes, multiple uv layers, all blending modes, stencil maps for splatting, color ramps for that precious falloff, and much more. One more week like this and my grin will be permanent.

Ever wanted shape keys to work in the game engine? Well support for shape keys has been added! There’s a brand new actuator called “Shape Action”. Grab yourself an apricot build and go nuts. And there’s been some really impressive speedups to the game engine. Just enable “Vertex Arrays” in your preferences and “Generate Display Lists” from the game menu for the fastest performance. Our test scene gets almost twice the frame rate. The devs helping us are really doing amazing things.. Things are really progressing quickly.

Have a look at our latest demo from the BGE, showing some new gameplay and playing with new features like glsl. Most of the main actions for Frankie have been added, plus a small environment to play around in while we work on the world for the game. Things are getting really exciting around here. We’ll post more progress this weekend, and, if anyone is interested, we may be looking for help soon. More info on that later. Of course one really big way to help this project is to pre-order the DVD!.

In the beginning the game designer (Darek) created a floor plan of the first test level containing some puzzles, jumping, fighting, collecting items. We want to make a prototype to test gameplay. Everything is described in our design document.

Beautiful.. isn’t it?

After this Qareeb made some concepts how it should look:

I realize that they are not as beautiful as my floorplan, but well… not bad 🙂

Last weekend we had the first workshop for the Apricot project. Frank Richter from Germany, Pablo Martin from Spain, Campbell Barton from Australia,
Dariusz Dawidowski from Poland, Marten Svanfeldt from Sweden, Jorrit Tyberghein from Belgium, Brecht van Lommel from Belgium, Margreet Riphagen from the Netherlands, and Ton Roosendaal from the Netherlands met at the very nice and new Blender Institute Location in Amsterdam. There we discussed plans, ideas, and practical arrangements for his ambitious Open Game project. In the mean time we also met with the Peach team and saw the amazing work they have been doing so far. The work they did and are still doing will provide the perfect foundations for the Apricot game project.

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