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

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.