BlendELF game engine, video posted on youtube

Hi! Its me again! And yes I'm working on a new engine...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uImg_zP0P2k



This time I'm getting somewhere with the engine...

As said in the video the primary goal of the engine is to be my portfolio project and enable rapid development of prototypes and small games. The engine is still under heavy development. More information at http://blendelf.com.

Well very good 3D art !

For the engine you should make a world editor and particle editor also !
Or is the world and characters imported directly from Blender ?

Is this only for personal use? Or are you going to release it?

@ratchet

Yeah I currently have a blender exporter which exports the whole scene to blendelf formats. I do plan to make a level editor too though.

@Germanunkol

I do plan to release a new version of it at some point.

i guess am not the greatest of programmers and since i learnt to script with 3dgs, i find that am really accustomed to it and i know i wanna change engines at some point but most times the lack of a scripting interface pulls me back to a7 but a7 has a really slow art pipeline and level design pipeline, meaning, it can accomplish great stuff but consuming alot of time, so any plans for a scripting interface? BSP renderer?

alot of engines i've seen, you can import an object easily but when it comes to the time to attach your own custom actions, it gets rather annoying, i kinda like how in 3dgs, everything revolves around the script editor, changing levels and all and then you can preview your changes immidiately, so, any information on your plans for this?

and what do you plan to do about physics?

@darkinferno

Currently the scripting side of the engine is pretty simple: each object can have a single script which is ran for it once on each frame. Additionally a scene can have a INIT script which is ran once after the scene has been loaded. When I get to making the editor, I guess I'll just put the scripting stuff in the same place where you can choose the object properties...

For physics I already use bullet engine which is one of the most popular physics engines around, it does it job well .

sounding very interesting, am keeping my eyes on this

@ darkinferno:
"...and then you can preview your changes immidiately"
actually, that's one of the things where I believe A7 is behind many other engines, because you can NOT see the changes immediately. There's engines out there that require, to my knowledge, no compiling of the entire script when you make small changes.

you mean in Unity I dont have to restart the game if i changed a script? awesome!
(btw, if you would make a game that runs of text files in A7; you can change the textfile, and those values are read out real-time, meaning you CAN update script values at real time... agreed though, a bit of work involved there :P)

I tried BlendELF, and my question is kinda stupid, but how can I pass the stupid intro screen?

im getting a really slow framerate on that sphere scene here.

EDIT: forgot to say, other than that, beautiful. its nice that the scene in blender and blendeelf are so close together.

@Cowabanga
Intro screen? There are no intro screens! Maybe you mistook the intro demo for an editor? The editor is not in development yet, have to implement some stuff before that...

@lostclimate
Which GPU/CPU?

I got a new demo up of the scene you see in the video! http://blendelf.com/downloads/tommy.zip

Slightly improved(?) site too: http://blendelf.com

I think he had the same issue as i did for your second demo. there is no way to move the camera (that we couldfind?) so it just looked like a rendered image (possibly a good credit to your fx programming?)


I know the gpu is a geforce 9800 GTX+ that is a little underclocked because I still need to buy a third fan power connector for it (it needs 3 of them!) , but it should run it pretty well.

as far as the cpu goes, its not great, its an intel dual cpu e2180 @ 2.00Ghz.

still, most intense parts of this demo are all gpu intense, and I should be good there.

cant wait to check out the second demo!.

If you are talking about the development kit which was previously available then yes, the intro scene didn't feature a moving camera, it was just a kind of a placeholder there, an example to get people started? I guess it wasn't a that good idea then... The current dev kit has the Demo 1 as the intro scene.



The demos should run more than fine on that card. I'm not sure but sometimes you don't get the full framerate that the card offers because of power management, the card might detect that the work being done atm isn't that intensive for it and slow itself down a bit.

61 fps in that tommy demo (I'm guessing it's fps max value is around 60? Why not make a demo without that max setting, to show how fast it really is?)
Beautiful presentation of the engine, awesome. Can't think of anything to make it better.
Model has seams on his wrists, other than that, great!

Anything on collision/movement so far?

Edit: Lua script, OpenGL... even a blender exporter which exports to blendelf? this ROCKS! just what I've been looking for... only thing that keeps it from being my next choice for a game seems to be that it's still in development and I haven't seen any game demos made with it...

Also, these rendering tests are quite nice, but could you also make a demo with lots of things showing at the same time? lots of trees/lots of shadows/lots of characters/lots of buildings... whatever?

And Am I reading the licence correctly: this is free for commercial use? (Apart from these small additions, that are pretty obvious)
If so, how save will it be to plan a game with this? I mean, many of us here are hobby artists, who start a project, get somewhere and then don't have the time to finish it. What I mean: if this is really free, you can't make a living off of it, and you also stated it was mainly for your own portfolio. So how sure can I be that it will continue to improve? Or are you even planning on doing that at all?

thanks, for the help, and that might be it for the card.

I got 85 so thats not its max setting.

As lostclimate said, 60 fps is not the limit. The engine doesn't turn your vsync off by default so vsync must be the culprit in this case. So many people have been asking me about this that I might just turn it off by default...



Believe me, I'd love to do that, but I just don't have the time at the moment. Have to focus on developing the engine and studying at uni.



As the project is still young and not that established, its not that safe to start a project with it, but at least I'm not planing to stop developing it any time soon. And yes the engine is free at the moment.

If you get that documentation you've been talking about to a state that allows me to understand parts of it, I may try making the many-objects-thingy myself, to see if it works nice. Shouldn't be too hard; placing lots of objects in the scene.

This engine allows to develop on Linux, as well as allowing to export the finished game to a be Linux-Compatible, right?

Yeah it allows both developing on linux/windows and exporting to linux/windows regardless of the development platform. So you can make a linux game on windows and/or a windows game on linux .

Is there a OS X release planned?

Those are some impressive videos/shots, Ambassador. I like the fact that you are making this engine cross platform.

Keep up the excellent work

@Sylar

My bro has a mac book, might be able to compile something with it, not sure though...

*pressure* soo.... any news on this? any new ground breaking features? *pressure*

Hope you're not stuck on some mysterious pointer error in your engine, like I am...

If you're having some issues, problems or ideas I suggest to post them to the BlendELF Forums.

@Germanukol

Have been working on the GUI, now moving to other stuff needed for the editor (registering collisions, ray cast, etc). Killing two birds with one stone since those will be needed by a lot of other stuff also, like game logics in general

@Redeemer

I get those every once in a while ;D doesn't usually take that long to fix them though.

So I worked on debug view for my engine a few days ago...

LINK TO FULL SIZED IMAGE



I'll probably be using this for the editor. Other than that, have been working on ray casting, etc. Also got 6000 lines of code eliminated by rationalizing the LUA script bindings.

Looks beautiful, do I see parallax occlusion? Or is it a different method of one of those 100 versions of pom?

Just virtual parallax mapping for now, not parallax occlusion mapping .

but that's just a shader, right? if you're using directx, shader support is already there, isn't it? what about other engine features such as physics, light and scene management, user interface, culling etc.? i'm curious ^^

Yeah its just a shader. Since its written in GLSL, it doesn't work on DirectX and my engine doesn't even have a DirectX render. Not sure will I ever implement a DX renderer, the architecture of the rendering in the engine would allow that to be done pretty easily I think, so if I ever decide to properly learn DX, then I might just implement a renderer for DX too . But for now, just OpenGL .

As for other engine features: simple physics are already in (BOX, SPHERE, TRIMESH collision shapes, adding force and torque, setting velocity), joints and more collision shapes will probably come later on. Also collisions register to the objects and rays for the user to read (collision position, normal, depth, colliding object).

Light and scene management is pretty simple at the moment. Some simple occlusion and light culling is in already, will work on that more when I get to it (as said, the current priority is to finish stuff for Alpha 3, for example the fbx converter)

User interface elements are completely skinnable (actually there are no default skin elements for them so you HAVE to skin them). The following user interface elements are implemented: Labels, Button, Pictures, Text Fields, Screens, Sliders (more like gauges, works similarly to a slider), Text Lists, Check Boxes

that's a quite impressive list. i'm looking forward to hearing more about your engine =).

New release, BlendELF Alpha 3, this time with tutorials!

Website: http://blendelf.com
Development kit thread: http://forum.blendelf.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12
Tutorial thread: http://forum.blendelf.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18

Whats new?
- open source!
- fixed a lot of bugs
- vsync automatically turned off
- disable window resizing
- new gui objects: text fields, screens, sliders, text lists, check boxes
- register collisions
- ray cast
- debug draw
- dropped xml format for binary only (easier to manage)
- enhanced the quality of DOF and bloom
- user controllable main loop
- new features to the blender exporter

Thank you so much for sharing your engine. This engine really interesting especially Lua, Bullet, cross platform, blender exporter, open source, just those are extremely hard to find something similar on the engine market.

Wow, nice to see that as an Open Source project!

Just a quick question, can I try to port/run it on OS X? (Or does it already run?).

@Sylar

Please do try to port it! I don't have a OS X port yet. It should compile on it just fine as long as you link with the necessarily libraries and have the include files available. You can see what libraries BlendELF uses from the Makefile or the LICENSE.txt file.

I've got one question. What criteria did you choose for your model format? Do you use a proprietary one?

Yeah I use my own format. There is a blender exporter, so if you want your models to blendelf and you don't use blender, you can import them to blender and from there export them to blendelf. There is a tutorial available for blender exporting: http://blendelf.com/tutorial5.html

Also, made a new video! Playing around with dof and bloom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg7_N2-H4Wg

Hehe^^, on the sphere Demo i have 240 fps and on the tommy demo i have 400fps.
So, enough space for MOOOORE^^.
(ATI HD 4870 )

The engine looks great, did i miss something or doesnt 3dgs offer a shadowmapping shader yet?( i know slin and others worked on some but always had some problems)


Greets
Rackscha

Interesting!
I tried your first Tutorial, but when i execute BlendELF.exe, i get an error that my execution configuration or something is wrong. I'm using XP at the moment.

@Razoron
wonder if you have the MSVC redistributables installed on your computer? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...;displaylang=en

Made a new demo testing some physics and stuff. Shots and a video (Football model by Jani Lintunen aka Jerico):

Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/blendelf#p/a/u/0/KTDDhPoeWpo

http://blendelf.com/images/balls_shot1.jpg
http://blendelf.com/images/balls_shot2.jpg

Yes, thanks, I was working on a netbook in my holidays. Thanks, it works .

Astonishing... I think that's a good word.

Great video, really like the shadows on everthing.

Developing engines can't make you addicted, can it

TWO: if you mean writing engines is addicting? I'm working on fourth version of my engine. I think this is ambassador's fifth or sixth engine...

Every time I learn a new trick or thing about these things. It's always a great experience to attpemt to "finish", or attempt to get even to this stage

That's what I meant

Experienced that myself, I love to build up such big systems and all the stuff. But I never really finished ANY project, it's bewitched. But thanks to version control I might be able to pick them up years after. \o/

Good luck!

Its prolly my 7th engine? This time I have gotten far enough for releases though. Motivates you when you get stuff out in the open . Also motivates you when you are doing it for your portfolio...

You three ever thought about joining up and developing an Uber-Engine?

Dunno if we are that willing to drop our projecs and start a new one at this point .

I was thinking about joining them all up to make blendelf better, since this was the blendelf thread^^ But I guess the tech is usually so different it'll be more work than to code the different parts from scratch, so nevermind. Just thought an engine supported+developed by 3 people will get further than three engines developed by one person each.

That said, I'm really glad you don't wanna drop your project

Some WIP particles from the WIP BlendELF 0.9 Beta!

http://blendelf.com/images/blendelf_mesh_emitter.jpg



Still have a few things to implement for particles... before moving to other things.

Would you consider integrate SPL or Pawn scripting language, I like C style syntax.

http://www.clifford.at/spl/
http://www.compuphase.com/pawn/pawn.htm

Pawn is quite interesting indeed.
http://codeplea.com/game-scripting-languages

@Frederick_Lim

SWIG (the script binding generator I use) doesn't suppor generating bindings for spl or pawn, so adding support for them at this point wouldn't be trivial. Also there are no plans for adding new scripting languages soon since lua does its job pretty well. Ofcourse if you know C/C++, you could try to add the bindings even yourself, since the whole bindings API resides in binds.h, which is just a big list of defines and function declarations . So it isn't completely impossible.

Wow, looks great Ambassador !

Everyone who likes to code in C# or other .NET languages, should check out this post in the BlendELF forums.

Basically, I spent some time on writing a .NET wrapper for BlendELF today which lets you use the engine in, for instance, C#. It also allows you to use the renderer in a Windows Forms application:




Michael

Wow, very nice

Very very impressive, Ambassador. Keep up the good work!

Are you adding something like the streak or beam flags?

Also, just out of interest, can parameters be given to the entities? (As in parameters that aren't predefined)

No streak or beam flags yet .

Parameters as in properties are on the TODO list (pretty high on the TODO list might I say). Scheduled for 0.91 release.

@Ambassador: could you clear your inbox? I was not able to send you a PM.

@Joey

Sorry about that, cleared now .

Spent yesterday coding light shaft post processing, finished up on it today.

Also MichaelGale has been working on some simple but powerful networking for BlendELF: http://forum.blendelf.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=29

Light shaft shots (model from dexsoft ):

http://blendelf.com/images/blendelf_dexsoft_mech_light_shafts.jpg



http://blendelf.com/images/blendelf_dexsoft_mech_light_shafts2.jpg

pp light shafts, am I right?

nevertheless, looks good

Yeah pp light shafts

Network! Yaaay!

Lightshafts look overdone, but it's okay, cause this is supposed to demonstrate them...
I saw some real lightshafts this morning, in the forest... looked very cool...

What I'd really like to see is more stress-test stuff. A larger level. More stuff. LOD... you know, game-situation type stuff. But I assume you have all hands full with the work you're doing atm...

Great. This will probably look fantastic with some vegetation.

BlendELF 0.9 Beta released!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVrqOvGFKvE



Whats new:
- skeletal animations
- C++ and .NET API
- particles ( + mesh emitters )
- light shaft post processing effect
- joystick support
- physics updates (joints, restitution, sleep threshold and limiting physics to axises)
- IPO curves (for animations)
- more tutorials (GUI, particles, C++)
- rendering optimizations
- bug fixes
- Misc.: global tick rate and speed controls, errors recorded to elf.log, scn and gui built in variables removed (functions now return these objects, check the tutorials), over riding F10

Big thanks for Michael Gale for the .NET bindings.

Great, I love it. It all looks superb.

Maybe you could send us a couple of images and some text and we promote it in our User Gallery:
http://www.dexsoft-games.com/gallery/index.html

We could also use it in the future to showcase our models with it instead of using Marmoset or others. Maybe we can talk via MSN, PM or Mail about it.

Cool stuff and you are very good at presenting it
I didn´t yet look into it in more detail, but is it possible, that your "shader system" is a bit inflexible? I mean, how easy is it to implement something on your own, without touching the engine itself?
It reminds me a bit of ShiVa, in both, the good and the bad, but so far mainly the good And well, I like that license, even though I like MIT even more .

In the current API, there isn't a possibility to create your own shaders (they get chosen automatically depending on what texture maps you specify for a material, like normal/parallax/specular maps). I might make a somewhat easy to use system for custom shaders. Assuming that I'll write a deferred renderer at some point, that feature will might/will be gone for a few or more releases though (assuming that I'll have it implemented by then which is very unsure), since deferred rendering is the most inflexible system ever xD.

already thought of implementing a Light pre-pass renderer?

I looked into it a bit, I don't know yet what kind of system I'm going to implement, so it might be deferred rendering, light pre-pass rendering, inferred rendering, etc. Have to do more research when the time comes.

the probably fastest lighting system is what the Crytek people call 'deferred lighting'.
In fact this uses the basic idea of the light pre-pass but does not relinquish on the advantages of MRTs.
I uploaded an test project with 700 light sources some time ago in the projects forum

Maybe something you'd like to check, could be replicated with OpenCL perhaps? If you ofc decide to take a GPGPU route.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20090827/deferred-shading-with-compute-shaders-in-frostbite-2-engine/

The slide from page 19 and onwards is about the pros and cons and other info.

Interesting stuff. I'll have to think about those. Atm a variation of deferred shading seems to be the easiest and acceptably fast way.

looks so grat,good luck.
clean and easy code-great shaders-physics are good"good choice using BULLET",(even if i prefer AGEIA ;)).
but what about soft shadows for entities?

Hi and sorry for the late reply. Yeah I have been thinking about soft shadows, they are on the TODO but I haven't made up my mind about how high in the priority list they are at the moment.

if you put 3dgs shadows in account,you should absolutely give soft shadows high
priority!.

Looking good,cant wait to see the final release....

Posted some shots of EditorELF progress at the forums: http://forum.blendelf.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=99

More progress with EditorELF:
http://blendelf.com/images/EditorELF_shot007.jpg


As said on the BlendELF forums, the UI looks ancient, but I decided to focus on functionality instead of perfecting the UI .

Some more nice dexsoft models in BlendELF.

http://blendelf.com/images/BlendELF_shot001.jpg

Really nice!
If I have some time, I will finish the promised Mac OS X port to see the engine in action.

Btw, what about an flattr button on your website? I can give you an invite if you need one.

And another thing: Is there a git/mercurial/subversion repository to checkout the latest source?

great

http://github.com/centralnoise

The code should be somewhat compatible with Mac OSX at the moment. One user has been able to compile it on it (he reported some bugs that were happening on mac osx and fixed some of them, I fixed the rest). There are some compile instructions in the INSTALL file in the root folder of the BlendELF source.

BlendELF 0.9 Beta 2 has been released! Major new features are support for Common Model formats, like Collada, 3ds, md2, etc., new scene editor EditorELF, sprites and improved physics.

BlendELF.com
Development Kit

Yay! Downloaded

Experimenting with a deferred renderer, looking good so far. The scene has 2 spot lights and 3 point lights, showing a significant performance increase compared to the previously used forward shaded multipass renderer. (about 17% for this small scene, will probably be more with a bigger scene and more lights)

http://blendelf.com/images/EditorELF_shot011.jpg

I somehow completely forgot about BlendELF...


I really like the new screenshots


Does that mean I can now use c++ and not lua(that would be great :P)?

Yes, I already tested it.

Btw, 2000 posts, gz.

Ah, totally missed that, thanks I do not really feel as an expert now

Some progress...

Anti-Aliasing is now supported in the current development build. Also added fog, manually specifiable occluders, improved asset importing and made a little library package for visual studio 2008 to help ppl compile blendelf...

Also tried out a high poly model (140K tri) in BlendELF, seems to work just fine. (sculpted the model in Sculptris btw )



Currently I'm trying to improve the rendering performance some. Have to see how that goes...

Released BlendELF 0.9 Beta 3 some time ago with some early support for legacy hardware, blender 2.54, fog, improvements to occlusion culling and improvements to the asset importing system.

Also started improving the GUI system. Added a default skin for it for starters:

http://blendelf.com/images/EditorELF_shot013.jpg

The 80's stopped calling.

It's been quiet in the office since you updated.

Started working on a bit nicer editor

http://blendelf.com/images/EditorELF_shot015.jpg