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BDX - 3D Blender-Integrated Game Engine

A topic by SolarLune created Feb 07, 2016 Views: 6,267 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 7
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Hey, there!

I wanted to just pop in here and let you guys know about an open-source cross-platform 3D game engine that I've been contributing to called BDX.

What Is This?

BDX is a 3D Java-based game engine integrated with Blender and powered by LibGDX. Being that it's integrated with Blender, it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. As it runs on LibGDX, it should export to Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5, Android, and iOS.

Hahaha, OK, But Really, What Is This?

Overall, BDX is a fairly light "engine" that's kind of a bridge between Blender and LibGDX. It provides advanced functionality that's not there under vanilla LibGDX (like per-pixel lighting, components, and input maps), and exports data from Blender to use in the engine. So it kind of turns Blender into a full game engine.

It's just easier to call BDX as a whole an "engine" than explain it all completely, haha.

But Why, Though?

The biggest reason to use BDX is that it's Blender-integrated, which means that you don't need to import or export anything. You push P in Blender's 3D window, and the entire Blender scene gets exported to run. This means that in addition to there being no importing and exporting, Blender can directly serve as your world editor. You place things where you want, and they'll be there when you play the game.

The second is that in this integration is supported lots of built-in features that are available from Blender's GUI itself, like the materials, physics settings, object properties, parenting, and other things. For most of this stuff, we use the settings available under Blender's Game render mode (at the top of the 3D view), though BDX comes with a Blender add-on to add a couple of game-related panels (and perform the heavy stuff behind the scenes).

Another reason is that we have a clean, game-focused API, which makes things like moving, rotating, coloring, tinting, swapping materials or models for, or checking for collisions between GameObjects simple and pain-free. To make things easy, you can either code in Blender's text editor, or set up an IDE to code with (which I'd recommend). BDX can use either one.

And How???

We've got documentation over at the Github homepage. The General Overview page lists some of the features alongside some example code for you to see how the various aspects of BDX work. The creator of the engine has video tutorials up (which, by now, might be a bit outdated), and I've started on a set of written tutorials, though they're kinda... Well, they could be improved upon, haha. They just don't really go into making a full game, but rather explain the game development process from the beginning, more-so.

What's It Look Like?

Most of what you'd be looking at is just Blender, but here's some old shots, nonetheless.



Anyway, check it out!

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It is nice to see people using Blender to make games. Myself I use the integrated blender game engine and while it's far from being the best one, I enjoy having everything in one tool.

Even if I don't know/use libgdx I hope your project will get more visibility :)

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Ah, wow! I dunno if I've met another BGE user out in the "wild", haha. I used to use the BGE extensively for years, but stopped around last year after I wanted something lighter and simpler, with less surprises (hopefully), and that I could more easily debug myself.

Thanks!

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Yo! Here's another update - version 0.2.4!

___________

Here's a concise change-log for this latest release:

- Saving the meshes from Blender has been optimized, which can make the starting process a ton faster.

- Rendering to a depth texture for depth-based 2D screen shaders is now possible.

- Additional built-in screen shaders include: Outline, Invert, and Depth-Of-Field shaders.

- You can now color, tint, and otherwise alter individual materials on a GameObject.

- Camera functions have been added to allow for view changes (i.e. changing the viewport width of the camera view).

- Various bug-fixes.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

I have blender, sorry im a nub with this stuff how do you install it on Linux?

Install the add-on? You go to the add-ons section in Blender's User Preferences and press the Install Add-on button on the bottom-left. Then you give it the add-on zip you downloaded. Check the Github page for clear, precise instructions.

ahh cool. Sorry im new to all this stuff :/

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Nah, it's fine. Everybody needs help sometimes. :)

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Yo!

So after quite a few months, there's a new release of BDX, a cross-platform, open-source, 3D, LibGDX-based, Blender-integrated game engine!

This was mostly a bug-fix release, though there were a few good additions, as well. Here's a quick break-down:

- Render-to-texture is now supported.

- GameObjects can now be invisible on select cameras, simply by adding a reference to the GameObject to the camera's "ignoreObjects" list. This, when combined with render-to-texture support, allows for some nice shader effects.

- Texture loading and texture switching on Materials is now supported.

- A new Mesh class has been added, allowing you to easily alter vertex information for GameObjects' meshes.

- Fog / mist is now fully supported.

- Support for a Viewport has been added to allow you to tweak how your game scales onscreen.

- Many bug-fixes, and other tiny added features.

For more detail, see the commit log over on GitHub.

If anyone wants to learn more about the engine, there's a rather good (in my opinion) amount of documentation over on the GitHub, and the General Overview does a good job of explaining the basics of different concepts surrounding the engine.

Thanks!

WOW! I didn't know anything about BDX before but now thanks to you, you made me amazed by it and more interested to try BDX .

This looks really really cool! I spent a while playing around with the BGE but, myself at the time not doing much coding, I had difficulty finding exactly what I wanted in the blender node system. It's really nice to see someone going after making blender more accessible as a game engine! It looks beautiful as well!

Ah, yeah, it's a pretty great engine. Lacks some features, but it's fairly simple and easy-to-use, for sure!