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-

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 🙂

Windows installer package for YoFrankie is available for testing: http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.msi

The Linux packages have been updated since the last post. Currently the latest version is available through automatic downloading: go to one of the URLs listed below 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.)

Available variants of the Linux packages:

• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.xml
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-MQ.xml (no shadows)
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-LQ.xml (no shadows or reflections)
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-VLQ.xml (no shadows or reflections, reduced lighting quality)
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-VHQ.xml (additional bloom and HDR)

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

As on special request (thanks for the hint Bart!) I decided to organize a small party for the last Apricoters (Chris & Pablo & Brecht). Just intimous, for those who were involved and dropping in regular anyway! But nevertheless, it was awesome and give the team the right incentive and drive to make the final presentation a perfect premiere!

In the vimeo clip you can see a complete 6 minute walk-through the main  game levels. This, plus more goodies is going to be finalized on the DVD. Hopefully in 2 weeks it’s ready for print. End of september we then can ship it to everyone!

by the way! you can start pimping your desktop with our quick-made wallpapers :), check them out!
This is PSP sized, needed to do it 🙂

Wallpaper: 800×600
Wallpaper: 1024×768
Wallpaper: 1280×800
Wallpaper: 1280×1024
Wallpaper: 1680×1050

Chris flies back tomorrow, Pablo the day after…. <sob>. Thanks Chris, thanks Pablo, you’ve been great to work with! Good luck!

-Ton-