Blender Game Engine Evolution

As you can see in this demo, Blender's Game Engine has come a long way in a short time (the video above was rendered in real-time, not frame-by-frame). Actually, the GE is capable of even more than what this video demonstrates; the latest version (2.49) was recently released and includes a bunch of cool features including video textures and real-time dome rendering as well as improved modifier support, speed, logic and physics.

As the GE gets better and better, more and more people seem to be interested in using Blender to create Machinima and digital puppetry. You can download the latest version of Blender from Blender.org.

The next release of Blender, version 2.5 is a major overhaul of the program's underlying code, some of which dates back to 1994(!). I'm especially excited about the proposed new animation system “Animato” and the new event system, which you can see demonstrated below:



Although I don't think the GE is the focus on the 2.5 release, you can bet that at least a few improvements are on the way. Experimental builds of Blender 2.5 can be downloaded from Graphicall, but they may not be stable and aren't necessarily suitable for production use yet.