Happy Monday: Android and BGE Tests

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Do you know Momo? He is a cute little monkey traumatized from being a second character in the Yo Frankie game project. Now what if you could carry Momo with you wherever you go? Your dream is closing to come true!

(wth are you writing about? — if I had an editor for my blog she would probably write that down)

Alex Ku is working in the Google Summer of Code 2012 to bring porting the Blender Game Engine to the Android platform. His work is progressing smoothly and there are already some visible-shareable results. Today he announced the first Blenderplayer.apk release, so I couldn’t help but testing it.

So it works, is that all? well, not really. There are still bugs and non-supported features. But skinning-armature, mouse click, glsl shaders (partially), physics they all work.

This sample file is part of the examples that go with the book I’m finishing up writing with Mike Pan. We are already on author review stage, so I should be able to talk more about it soon. Since I’m ‘giving the file away’ anyways I may as well explain it 🙂 This file showcase the use of dynamic parenting and bone parenting in BGE. It’s a good technique for character customization (as you can see with the hats).

Kudos for Alex Ku’s work and all the other developers that are helping this project,
Dalai

Burster – BGE webplugin – is in great shape!

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From time to time I go to re-visit some projects I keep track of. This week I resumed working in a BGE (Blender Game Engine) project and decided to test if the file would work online. How so? Burster is a webplugin for the BGE that allows you to embed (and even secure) your .blend files in a website.

Burster got some really good upgrades lately, and not it works as a plugin is expected to (it tells the user a new version is online, suggest it to update, …). So what you see next is a screencapture of the Nereus Program (the project I’m working on, aka my day job) website.

BGE embed in a webpage, cool

 

Where you see this Baltic Visualization box, it’s a BGE application running. Cool, right? Before someone ask if this is all realtime let me explain. This is a fancy videoplayer made in the BGE to play videos (also made with Blender, but not necessarily). It’s all about point-click, animate, sync videos, … Next you can see the same file running in the BGE with Physics debug on.

Physics Visualization on

In order to have this going I had to:

  • pack all the textures in the file
  • open all the external scripts (originally in //scripts/) in the Blender Text Editor
  • remove all the ‘from . import’ from my scripts (the modules were calling each other)
  • fix all the python module controllers:
import bpy
for obj in bpy.data.objects:
  for cont in obj.game.controllers:
    if cont.type == 'PYTHON' and cont.mode == 'MODULE':
      cont.module = cont.module.replace('script.', '')

 

Note: not all modules/python functions are supported. Read the  are Security page in the Burster plugin site.

And I did all my tests locally. Mainly because I had to hardcode the address of the videos in my harddrive. I believe it may be (or it will at some point) possible to load videos from the server. I’m yet to find the right solution for this.

For questions on Burster please refer to their website 😉

Cheers,
Dalai