Re: Blender 2.0, Linux 3D book

[nlin <nlin@geocities.com>]

> What is the Blender 2.0 game engine? How does it work? Is it just an extended
> editor mode or a library or something?

It is a self-contained development and run-time environment for
modeling and controlling interactive environments.

First of all, Blender allows you to model 3D objects, rooms, etc. just like
any 3D modeler (3DSMax, etc).

Secondly, and this is the new stuff with Blender 2.0, Blender allows you to
classify polygonal meshes as being sectors (i.e. rooms), props (static
objects), or actors (dynamic objects). Then, a run-time engine applies
physics and user-defined behaviors to the objects.

Execution of the game takes place within the Blender environment itself.
Therefore, Blender (for the time being) is best viewed as a self-contained
engine and environment for developing and creating interactive content.
Running games created with Blender requires you to run Blender, as sort of
a run-time wrapper. Blender does not yet, IMHO, appear to be usable as a
library which can be called from external programs (although Blender
does have a built-in scripting language for doing some programming).
Therefore, depending on your goals, Blender may or may not be for you -
if you want to play around with creating interactive content in a visual
development environment, Blender is the way to go. If you want to experiment
with new low-level rendering, voxel, or visibility algorithms (BSP, portals,
octtree), you will need (as has always been the case) to write your own
3D engine because Blender's engine has made specific design decisions
which are - for the moment anyway - difficult to change. (I wrote the
company asking if they could provide a plug-in interface to allow low-level
access to some of the engine's internals, but have gotten no response yet.)

My upcoming book, "Linux 3D Graphics programming" (available for pre-order
on amazon.com now from Wordware Publishing), has 2 Chapters on using Blender
for creating games, as well as other information useful to Linux 3D graphics
programmers.

Norman Lin
nlin@geocities.com

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