Blender Gamekit! Does anybody have it?
 

Hi!!!

I've been surfing a little in the internet and, at blender homepage and I've found this:

http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/prod...396a7b7295b7bb

Well, I've been trying to create games for like, ever, and so far so buggy. First with Visual Basic/DirectX... to slow, then Visual C/DirectX, the documentantion is poor and really, really bad designed.
I've tried some RAD as jamagic and 3D Game Studio, but they were not what I was looking for. Jamagic promises portability to other OS, but Java like for games is complicated. I also tried SDL, but I could not get it work with kdevelop. No problems in Winslow though. It was great, did not take a hole month to draw a triangle to the screen as DirectX did. I wonder if this blender gamekit is good. Looks really nice and portable and the price is friendly too.

Does anybody have tried/own this? I would like to hear what you think about this software as speed and ease to use.

Thanks in advance

Well, as nobody seems to have ever heard of Blender Gamekit, my book + software has arrived last week :). I would like to add this here if anyone ever make a forum search about it.
It's simply great. Although, not recommended by the developers for large game projects or even modeling, Blender is the coolest thing I've played around so far. The book covers since basic introduction to 3D in general (not only blender stuff) and how to use blender to map, animated and create control to your game(Using Blender's game engine) or animation and tips in how to model low poly objects, which are crucial for Game development. Blender's engine can be extensively customized if you know how to use the interpreted language Python (the book also covers a little of Python). The CD includes a lot of textures, models and editable games for you to play with. To sum up, it's a great book to learn general game development techniques, modeling, texturing, animating, adding sound and other effects such as light for a scene or game. You can create simple games using only gui's (which can limit you a lot sometimes) but great for artists who wish to show their stuff and cannot program. If you are good at programming, sticking with OpenGL/C or Pygame/SDL would be the best shot (and Blender for 3D Modeling, but not the engine off course). But the price of this book is well worth in all aspects :)

My 2 cents ;)

P.S: This is no commercial of any sort. I'm just a happy and satisfied costumer answering my own question :)

hi

ya blender does modelling very nice. opengl programming can be done with mesa. sdl wont work with kdevelop but its good on its own areas


there is no directx for linux

Yeah, thanks for the comment. I had the very same problem getting kdevelop t with sdl. Althought few peoples could get it to run, I've found pygame. It's just THAT good ;). I've nothing against C/C++ and I'm relatively good with them, but when it comes down to game programming I kinda want to push my hand thru the wall. When I used Windows, it took me like 2 months to init() DirectX and draw a triangle to the screen :S. OpenGL was easier, but those Nehe tutorials are terrible explanatory. Check out Pygame:

http://www.pygame.org/

It makes use of SDL and Python scripting language. I wish there was a book for it though because I don't like the online tutorial much in there, they skip to many steps and I love books :)

If I remember well too, pygame is part of Debian distribution. Man, I wish I could try Debian, it's the only distro I could never get to install :(. Sounds like a good dev platform ;)

hi megaman

one of best ways to install debian is to boot into knoppix and run knx-install. it will get you into debian up and running is just around half an hour with almost no input

try it. its really nice and give me a treat later :-)

Oh man, that's actually an great idea :) Everybody says that Slackware install is scary, but Debian really made me sleep (the latest stable one). After a considerable amount of coffee reading it's long and tedious installation, it failed at the end :) hehe. I will see if I find a CD-r somewhere in my messy table and get a knoppix. Everybody says good things about it, specially hardware detection :)

Thanks again

hi

knoppix has many uses

debian quick install and more up to date packages than woody(debian lates)
good hardware detection
rescue disk
demo disk

but i am not a knoppix zealot. just letting you know its really easy. debian isnt hard but its boring when you want to get a system up and running. once you install knoppix make sure you change the sources.list to debian stuff. running apt-get update with the originals can mess up your system

regards
rahul sundaram

HHmmmm I might have to try this.....looks pretty cool

Man thanks A LOT for the tip about Knoppix. I've just got an iso and burned it. It was no problems to boot it up at all, the hardware detection was indeed powerful as peoples says :) (I've a bad sound card in this box that is terrible to get Slack to work with it). Knoppix is now my best pocket buddy. I won't visit any friend of mine without it and be forced to use those Winslow system they have :) Now I need to read a little about it and try to make a full harddisk install in an older machine of mine for learning purposes ;).

Thanks again