New Game Engine Publishing Addon

One of the common complaints with the Blender Game Engine is with publishing games. While there are many issues related to publishing with the BGE, one issue is the lack of a simple, user-friendly way to publish to multiple platforms. Steps are being taken to resolve this with a new Game Engine Publishing addon that has been recently committed to master (should be available in buildbot builds by now). This addon is intended to replace the old Save As Runtime addon, and currently provides the following improvements:

  • New panel in the Render Properties to control publishing (this also means publishing options are saved in the blend file)
  • Easier cross-platform publishing (this requires downloading the binaries for the desired platforms, see the addon’s wiki page for more information)
  • Ability to create archives (e.g., tarballs and zips) for published games
  • Ability to automatically copy extra game files (e.g., scripts, unpacked textures, logic, other blend files, etc.) when publishing
Game Publishing Panel

Screenshot of the current addon

This addon is still a work in progress, but users are encouraged to start playing with the addon and providing feedback. Some current goals for the addon include:

  • Creating a better way to download needed binaries for publishing to other platforms (the current operator for doing this hangs Blender until it is done downloading, which can take a while)
  • Add an option to compile scripts
  • Add a way to ignore files when copying assets (e.g., __pycache__ folders, *.xcf, *.psd‘s,)

More information about the addon as well as some documentation can be found on the addon’s wiki page.

30 comments
  1. It would great, if I can make games for android using BGE.

  2. I think BGE developers should change the main philosophy of BGE. You may heard Godot Engine. It has great export templates to publish game for cross platform with any license. We don’t want to GPL for our games and blenderplayer too. We want to close our game, please make another MIT, BSD or Apache licensed export template to compile our game without blender or blenderplayer needed.

  3. I only read the last comment but I would like 2 +…

    I am about to start work on something that will do this. I will give it all but moments of my spare time.

    In the meantime I will enjoy life.

    N:~)

  4. I am a creator of videogames and hate having to use other tools like Unity, I hope someday to do my work completely in Blender.

    He also pienzo the GPL licencia not be any impediment because they always can create multiplayer games without publishing the code servers.

  5. So glad the BGE is still going. The people behind all of it should really understand that the BGE is remarkably easy to work with given some understanding. Improvements can be made but I mean you still need to use Blender to model content for UE4 while UE4 has the type of UI that is setup where you almost feel restricted. It can boil down to ease of platform deployment with BGE. Already tried this new add-on with a game project from 2.69. It was easy. Published from Win7 and then ran it on a machine with Win10. Worked fine, even loading faster to the main scene. With BGE you can work faster and test much more so easily. The project was initially a test to see if BGE could construct my little dream game and it passed with flying colors. Now I need some more documentation and cross platform publishing availability. About the extra power the BGE has hidden under the hood.

  6. I don’t get it why don’t they finally make it possible to export for an iPhone, Android Phone or even Windows phone…
    That would be soo cool if they’d do that…

  7. You guys have to understand that the Omni abilities of Blender are really taking shape and is what makes it so great. Just keep up the great work.

  8. I love this!!! Finally someone is pulling through on working on publishing games! Quick Question: does this avoid the GPL License that was on the old “Save as Runtime” addon?

  9. I could think of a couple ways right off the bat that performance issues could be fixed with a good programmer. Good thing I’m a programmer and can do such myself. The main reason I want to use Blender for game designing is the setup for programming, it’s beautiful. Thank you Blender for this awesome tool!

  10. where to download and try its functioning

  11. Download? Instructions?

  12. Question, we still have issues with license of blender right? :\

  13. propably i am a bit dump today…. but where is the Download of that File? I cant find it, event on the Wiki Page?

  14. I would like to use blender to create an game for android or iphone.
    Like unity 3D. If that happens i would use blender directly.

  15. Amazing work Moguri,

    Hardware skinned multithreaded armatures is a amazing development.

  16. I like this addon! This will make cross development way easier. I understand it may not be possible to export this to other professional consoles, but maybe instead it can go to other open source consoles… Like “OUYA” for example, or other future open source console games…

    Just thinking of other great possibilities that this amazing addon has to offer to the whole Blender Community! :D

  17. Excellent! im so glad to hear that Blender is finally addressing publishing issues! Ive been using the BGE since late 06 and i was hoping since then that this issue would be resolved! Im just hoping we can get something working on mobile,consoles and “plug-inless” web browser portability soon as well. I can totally see the BGE rivaling with the like soft unity in a couple of years. Once this publishing issue is taking care of and is behind us and we focus on making better development tools. This is a good step forward! GOD Speed!!! :)

  18. Whats with the GPL ?

  19. Great addon! For the Android the viewport fix will bring the Opengles and then a cleanup on the raster need to be made.

  20. I want to compile a android :)

  21. My system is : intel q6600, 8gb ram, nvidia geforce gtx480. ( I guess the cpu is holding it back ) How ever, the same computer was in action with the Unity3D’s test, so the delta is what that matters.

    How much does this GPU hardware skinning can improve it? Will it be able to match Unity3D’s performance ? And when do you think it will be released ?

  22. This is very nice but what about the poor performance issues it has ?

    I’v made a comparison with unity for example :

    Blender ( not full resolution ), 9 characters animating WalkCycle – about 5fps :
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9ttlyBJ54uSZ1VWZXhTT1BzZkE/edit?usp=sharing

    Unity ( full res ( 1920×1080)) 25 character animating WalkCycle – about 47fps :
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9ttlyBJ54uSZy04QVdGcWU1QkE/edit?usp=sharing

    This performance limitation is really annoying, I mean, Is is missing a few stuff anyways ( particle system for example ), so it would be nice if we could build our own, but how can we with this performance limitation !?

    • Skinned mesh performance is a known issue with the BGE. 2.71 takes some steps to begin fixing this with threaded skinned mesh updates. I also have working hardware skinning (doing the mesh deformation calculation on the the GPU), but it needs to be cleaned up before going into master.

      That being said, something feels off about your performance numbers. I can get 160 characters (69 bones and about 5k verts each) to run at around 10~11fps on my machine, which isn’t a very strong machine (Intel Core i7 Q740 @ 1.73GHz, NVIDIA GeForece GT 425M). Here is a screenshot (and resolution is not affecting the framerate for me in this case): http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=73280. I don’t have a build with hardware skinning on hand for testing, but I think that same scene was running at around 40~50fps.

      • Yep hardware skinning is a huge win. We rely on it in Blend4Web too. JavaScript is fast but still slower than native code.

  23. Awesome, now I don’t have to have two computers with (Windows/Linux and OSX) just for exporting games. With the recent updates the BGE gets its place in Blender again. Now just normal map node for GLSL materials and BGE will be perfect. :) Who am I kidding, BGE and you guys ARE perfect.
    (But the normal map node would be nice ;) )

  24. This looks like a great addon and a big improvement, thank you for your work. Hopefully it will help publish many great games made with BGE.

  25. You can use http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html to Compile Python3 to modules, Ive done it with Blender already…

  26. This is an excellent development. Together with the recent FBX fixes and Cycles baking, this is sure to get a lot of people to take serious interest in the BGE.

    Out of curiosity, Could this addon possibly pave the way to publishing for mobile or console platforms in the future? (Assuming significant contribution from the community of course!) I am not a programmer bu any means, but it does sound feasible, in theory.

    • If we ever get publishing to mobile (consoles are very unlikely due to the GPL), then this addon would be used as a front-end to do the publishing. That being said, the real working in publishing to mobile is to first get Blender/BGE running on mobile (cross-compiling, OpenGL ES, etc).

      • What exactly are the obstacles for making BGE work on consoles? Why can’t GPL software exist on a console?

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