NLGD expo in Utrecht was very successful. People likes Apricot and our tools. Most important thing was that organizers supplied free beer for us ! Also we meet some cool guys from other teams/companies (cheers!) so it was very good experience. We have some photos, and also movie with current work-in-progress Apricot powered by Crystal Space 3d engine.
Apricot: Crystal Space Preview #1 from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.
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
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!.
The NLGD Festival of Games takes place from 14 to 22 June 2008 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
The event is a platform and a meeting point for the European games community. NLGD is one of the sponsors of the Apricot game. The NLGD offers a platform to the strongly upcoming game-industry. Too often one tends to think about games as merely games for the youngsters. The NLGD shows by means of activities, publications and events that games and the game-industry have a huge social, economic and cultural impact.
Blender Institute will give short demonstrations on Thursday and Friday in the Expo Village. If you are interested please pass by and on the artists or main developers will give you a demonstration about Blender and Crystal Space. Also Ton Roosendaal will give a presentation on Friday in the Central Museum, de Refter, from 10.45 till 11.30. For more information about the venue, route description and speakers download here the pdf.
Planning a game project is not easy… and especially not to define when things are really good enough. On many parts you can work virtually forever! To ensure we have a good balance between quality and quantity, we’ve defined three main focus points for the next 6 weeks.
1) Full functional CrystalSpace game prototype
2) Project presentation
Getting the main character system finished on industry quality level is most probably going to take Pablo and Darius full-time. Frank will 
continue work on visual quality and speed.
To allow Chris and Pablito to work ahead, and provide them with sufficient challenges, they’ll work on prototyping the other characters and a new level in Blender’s game engine:
3) Blender Game Engine version (new!)
It’s been surprisingly easy already to quickly rebuild in Blender the basic Apricot game experience. Will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks how it compares! However, I still expect that CS will allow far more detailed and advanced games… and Blender GE prove its value as tool for artists to design and develop ideas with.
But, we’re glad that there’s time and interest in using and hopefully improving this part of Blender!
-Ton-
(Images: today’s snapshots of work in progress. All with unfinished shadow/light mapping. First and third is CS, others is Blender GE.)
darek | 
06 23rd, 2008 