Blade 3D Game Engine!! The Visual Game Engine!
polycounter lvl 17
Hello fellow polycounters! It’s been a while! As many of you know I recently relocated for a new job to Washington state (which has been nothing short of awesome, great place to be and live.) Anywho, for those of you who don’t know I was recently employed by Digini, the creators of Blade3D - A new game engine that has sprinkles of awesome all over it.
Well as many of you know, dominance war is right around the corner, and once again we will all be taking part to represent our home turf of the black and green. I want our home turf to have a slight advantage.
I think it would only be fair to give back to the community that helped me get to where I am today, so after talking to my work people, we’re going to open up testing of the Blade3D game engine to some of you.
But I guess many of you are like: ‘But seforin, what does your engine do for me?’ Aside from giving you backrubs as you import your models and make them awesome! This engine has many MANY MANY features that I could go on all day to explain. But in short I’ll give you a few run downs I found really neat.
First off lighting! I can not stress how simple the lighting in this engine is to use. I’ve used many lighting packages in the past in both 3d modeling programs and development engines, and even though all of them had their own advantages and disadvantages as an artist I always liked to play and move and control light in a simpler solution. Lighting in Blade3D is fantastic! From simple key lights to advance light setups , it takes only minutes at a time and its all displayed real time with no slow downs, top of that it is displayed based on your camera view port, so you can setup a light and where it’s pointing by just looking at it or attaching it to your camera till you feel the light is in the right place. There’s no need to rebuild lighting and wait minutes at a time to tell if your lighting will look good or not.
As far as shaders go, we support many different effects with room to expand upon, meaning you can stack a motion blur with a real time AO , and then the best part is everything works on sliders! So you can create your stacked shaders (pre existing OR ones you write yourself if you’re that awesome!) And everything is made simple for the artists where it is sliders like photoshop so if you don’t like the intensity or the hue of a model it can all be changed real time with no real slow down!
Like any engine we support normal maps, spec, diffuse, and reflective maps, but what’s neat is we have additional effects similar to make for blinns vertex blending for terrain , the ability to keep detailed maps on certain points of models, baked on masks, etc. Its simple enough that you can import in a model and get it to work.
And not to mention animation, physics, and our marketplace! A place for the artists to upload models they made and either sell or give out for free!
For more more questions about features and videos and such you can visit our website at www.blade3d.com!
So we will be doing some major tweaking and such before GDC but we want to have the art community have a go at our engine and really give to you guys and hopefully see some of your awesome models, assets , animations and characters (and hopefully maybe a beauty render or 2 for dominance war!)
::::::::::::::::::::BIG TIME EDIT ,EDIT:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
We got all the applications thank you all who submited , I will post in the future when we will have more open trials for everyone!
Well as many of you know, dominance war is right around the corner, and once again we will all be taking part to represent our home turf of the black and green. I want our home turf to have a slight advantage.
I think it would only be fair to give back to the community that helped me get to where I am today, so after talking to my work people, we’re going to open up testing of the Blade3D game engine to some of you.But I guess many of you are like: ‘But seforin, what does your engine do for me?’ Aside from giving you backrubs as you import your models and make them awesome! This engine has many MANY MANY features that I could go on all day to explain. But in short I’ll give you a few run downs I found really neat.
First off lighting! I can not stress how simple the lighting in this engine is to use. I’ve used many lighting packages in the past in both 3d modeling programs and development engines, and even though all of them had their own advantages and disadvantages as an artist I always liked to play and move and control light in a simpler solution. Lighting in Blade3D is fantastic! From simple key lights to advance light setups , it takes only minutes at a time and its all displayed real time with no slow downs, top of that it is displayed based on your camera view port, so you can setup a light and where it’s pointing by just looking at it or attaching it to your camera till you feel the light is in the right place. There’s no need to rebuild lighting and wait minutes at a time to tell if your lighting will look good or not.
As far as shaders go, we support many different effects with room to expand upon, meaning you can stack a motion blur with a real time AO , and then the best part is everything works on sliders! So you can create your stacked shaders (pre existing OR ones you write yourself if you’re that awesome!) And everything is made simple for the artists where it is sliders like photoshop so if you don’t like the intensity or the hue of a model it can all be changed real time with no real slow down!
Like any engine we support normal maps, spec, diffuse, and reflective maps, but what’s neat is we have additional effects similar to make for blinns vertex blending for terrain , the ability to keep detailed maps on certain points of models, baked on masks, etc. Its simple enough that you can import in a model and get it to work.
And not to mention animation, physics, and our marketplace! A place for the artists to upload models they made and either sell or give out for free!
For more more questions about features and videos and such you can visit our website at www.blade3d.com!
So we will be doing some major tweaking and such before GDC but we want to have the art community have a go at our engine and really give to you guys and hopefully see some of your awesome models, assets , animations and characters (and hopefully maybe a beauty render or 2 for dominance war!)
::::::::::::::::::::BIG TIME EDIT ,EDIT:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
We got all the applications thank you all who submited , I will post in the future when we will have more open trials for everyone!
Replies
It has? :P
ok by has , I mean by has been a while since Ive given crap back
I'm not a very good 3D artist. But I am a fiddler. I love playing around with new tech, and trying to see what I can achieve with it. So yes, I would be interested in putting Blade3D through the paces.
I do have a few questions. Many of the game engines and tools I've tried out before focus on their rendering features. But I've found that in the long run, rendering prowess is actually one of the least useful features an engine can brag about. It's important to game artists and art directors, but has only cosmetic effect on the end product. And most game even have the option of scaling back on such features in order to improve performance.
Of course, this is polycount, a community brimming over with artists. So its entirely understandable that you would tout such features. But I want to know about what Blade3D has in terms of GUI features, logic, scene management, physics, and collision detection. What can Blade3D offer towards the basics of getting a decent gameplay system up and running quickly? Can I develop menus quickly? Is there anything to assist in dividing rendering and game logic for different scenes? (to make different gameplay modes easier to manage) What kind of physics implementation do you use? Is there a system in place to optimize collision detection?
I recently tried using Python scripting to develop a simple 2D platforming engine using Blender's built-in game engine. I met with a decent amount of success, but there were several quirks that hampered my progress. Blender's collision detection is good, but not great. It is definitely not optimized for 2D gameplay conventions. I would like an engine that is a bit more flexible in terms of what I can use it for.
un-intuitive interface
horrible ( non customizable ) viewport navigation
crashes often
Sparse documentation ( heavy wiki dependance always a bad sign )
All in all very very painful.
Nice to know they are adding more artists into the dev proccess. very re-assuring.
I would suggest not pulling any punches regarding workflow tho. Being a cheerleader will not help the dev.
best of luck.
talon : many things in my opinion, the biggest thing is how many things can be done real time to be honest and how more graphically easy they made it for a artist, alot of things are similar to photoshop as far as sliders and stacks of things go, the real time lighting was a big one with me many many visual graphs from particles ! To setting up advanced camera work with graphs.
Sec:Im trying to get some nice screenshots together give me a bit of time later today.
If theres still questions of things we have a video page you guys can check out, but im trying to give you the first hand skinny so if you have question specifics I'll answer them / show you what I can.
link to videos:
http://www.blade3d.com/Support/tabid/189/Default.aspx
also the text book answer Features
http://www.blade3d.com/Features/tabid/195/Default.aspx
http://www.blade3d.com/Support/tabid/189/Default.aspx
1) Source code. - There is always something you need to change for your specific game. "Access to source for Pro's" doesn't sound to me like you're giving me the engine and tools source; It's close, but I smell a caveat.
2) Tools. - Engines live or die by their tools these days. Particle Editor? Level Tools? Quick Export Viewer? Designer Exposed Script Support?
3) Non-oppressive licensing - The monthly charge sounds neat, but how long does one pay it? For the duration of development, or is it continued thereafter somehow?
4) Features - I ask myself : what works right out of the box, an what does one have to add?
5) Future proofing - with 18-24 month dev cycles, I think optimization for a 64 bit pipe is well-advised.
Good luck with your engine, I'm excited to see how the pricing model works out.
sounds great, revisited the website and the documentation pdf's look like a great start as well!
wasd is hard for me to navigate when editing.
As is the spacebar in photoshop
And everything in zbrush.
because I spend 99% of my time in Maya.
In a sense yer correct... after awhile u get use to it. which is even worse! Cuz then u git back into yer main app ( Maya ). and find yerself trying to navigate with first person shooter dyslexia. UGHHHH!
A standard viewport navigation or at least customizable navigation should be international law.
wasd is pretty much standard for level editors though
creds for the gesture tho, what goes around comes around
I think that's what the dom-war outreach program is for
however to get people try your thing and give it some value/time to play with, that mostly is a matter of screenshots, which at the end is much more a matter of Art and not tech. Cause even the viewport of dcc apps has most effects these days you would need for static scenes. I am sure one could use most buzzwords on engine "features" on the viewport of 3dsmax as well
The full production of games to pimp the engines capabilities / max limits, is often not practical, unless your Epic
johny- yes the amount of eye candy I will admit is limited, Im working on stuff to show off the engine but my job is only a very small portion of creating art, I also have to do white papers, content pipelines etc, so it takes big chunks of my time every day....im working on it though!
The goal is , to have more artists (professionals hopefully) show case there works off and just really get some feed back on what the general artist thinks of the engine. I personally love the engine and have no real complaints but in retro spect my experience with game engines never went past modeling/texturing /some shader work, theres a TON more with game engines that can be showed off that way.
claydough- yes you are correct documentation is limited, thats the reason they hired me, jebuz give me a bit of time dude ive only been there for like a month! haha, but dont worry my job is to ensure good documentation / white papers and overall just making it easier for the artist in the future, so experience much like your own wont happen again!
crazy- agreed but to be honest im not a money mongoler and im not getting paid money to do this, my job is generally just interested in the artist and what they think , Im just trying to give away some trials for everyone to try for the sake of being nice because polycount has ment alot to me over these years and this is the first real thing ive ever been able to give back to this community that I feel has some worth!
to everyone else, understand that I want to PROMOTE this for dominance war only for the fact I want us to have something the other forums dont! I mean theres what 5 -6 forums competing this year? So I think its only fair I can give something to my home town the others dont
BUT dont be afraid to email if you dont want to compete for dominance war! This isnt limited to just that!
anywho I apologize the pics arent up, I Was trying to get some things that arent from our site to show, but alot of our new stuff is GDC promo, so Im trying to find some other things that can show off the engine to you guys.
well were not exactly giving out group licences... more like individual tests...I read through your email though....like I said email the one in this thread with what you PM me about, and if your friends are doing it for dominance war and not for what you PM me about , then they must send emails as normal in the above address
Alt + mouse ftw. Pan, zoom and rotation is pretty much more intuitive than strafing. It is at least less awkward, and more accurate. Edit: though to be honest one should be able to switch between either. I can see how the FPS movement is useful for placing splines within the editor, etc.
Some tech q's.
-Are softbodies coming in physics? Nothing too advanced, but say like water displacement and such.
-Is there a development demo that my programmer can load to see what he thinks? (edit saw the link will pass on)
-Inverse Kinetics?
-Real time shader previews? Or ability to take example max hlsl files and the engine converts onto its shader support?
-Networking support? I see no mention. If networking support, basic physics allowed? How closed is the master server code for developers?
-Will it be supporting development beyond PC/Xbox?? Linux and OSx, possibly iphone support are big ones. OpenGL engine support would be a inbetween step towards this.
-Web 3.0 support (plug-in to play certain games in browser)
-Flash integration? Example: Front Ends.
-3D interfaces possible? Or just 2d?
-Ability/Licensing for developers to have a custom editor to allow modification of particular game levels by end users?
We have been waiting on Unity 2.5 to see if we might like to go in that direction. But who knows when that will happen.
-Are softbodies coming in physics? Nothing too advanced, but say like water displacement and such.
Were working on buoyancy,and in the near future we will also support basic cloth.We probably will not be able to support softbody meshes that interact with physics for
some time.
-Is there a development demo that my programmer can load to see what he thinks? (edit saw the link will pass on)
email us privately and we can discuss this more later.
-Inverse Kinetics?
we already have some of this, allthough currently it does not support direct imports from 3d modeling programs such as max or XSI. Right now its more of a programming tool
that can be accessed from our visual graph editor.
-Real time shader previews? Or ability to take example max hlsl files and the engine converts onto its shader support?
We support standard hlsl, We do not automatically convert max hlsl/maya/xsi shaders.For lighting shaders we provide templates that allow you to plugin your own
functions to control diffuse spec etc.As you edit the hlsl, materials are automatically updated on the fly!
-Networking support? I see no mention. If networking support, basic physics allowed? How closed is the master server code for developers?
networking is currently in progress! We are working with microsoft to intergrate with windows live. This probably wont be rolled out until some time in summer.
-Will it be supporting development beyond PC/Xbox?? Linux and OSx, possibly iphone support are big ones. OpenGL engine support would be a inbetween step towards this.
No, pc and xbox only for now..although we're looking hard at supporting additional platforms.
-Web 3.0 support (plug-in to play certain games in browser)
The web plugin is currently in development, and this will support IE , Firefox, and chrome.This will be a high priority after GDC.
-Flash integration? Example: Front Ends.
were working on swf support although you will not be able to use action script.
-3D interfaces possible? Or just 2d?
Yes we already support that.
-Ability/Licensing for developers to have a custom editor to allow modification of particular game levels by end users?
Yes.
first off this model is from the 3d creative magazine but I thought it would be good to show a rather decent sized poly model in the engine
along with some lighting and camera work and show the frame rate with it running live as well (in the corner of the screenshot)
Heres some of the terrain editor with the water shader on.
Hers some scripting.
This is the market place and how it is setup up, were a artist can upload there models and they can be catagorized and viewed by the public and either downloaded for
free or for a price set by the artist
our hlslEditor
Our help editor while in the engine
our visual graph editors (used for many different things!)
And of course, orcy!
you know I keep it real ;p
When we have more trials open for artists I will post again!