So this post yesterday by Mark Sibly has the Blitz community all excited, and rightfully so. The promise of a modern 3D engine with the same mixture of ease/power that exists in the current B3D engine is a dream that a lot of us have had for awhile now. There’s a couple megaposts in the forums now, with people going back and forth about wishlists and whatnot. Immediately, all I cared about was built in support for things like shadows, reflection, shaders, etc. However, the more I’ve thought about it, there’s def some additional non-graphical upgrades that would be incredibly substantial. Cross-platform compatibility would be tremendous for the community, as right now we’re unable to publish for anything except Windows. Being able to export to Linux would be significant for me personally, as I’ve had a few conversations with people lately about building games for proprietary hardware.
Going back to the visual side of things, obviously an upgraded graphical engine is what’s going to bring in the customers so I assume the majority of the focus will be in this area. The big one for me is shadows. I’ve lamented about this in the past, most recently with ERH. To be able to add a light (either hardware of software) to a scene and define it’s shadow casting properties in a single line of code would make my life easier in so many ways I can’t even begin to try and express here. I have maybe 20 or so mockups for games I’ve done in an 3DS Max that never make it to the coding stage because the shadowing system would be impossible in the current engine.
Interoperability between B3D and standard shader languages would be another huge upgrade for me as well. Things like reflection, refraction, and other common things I use everyday in 3D animation would finally be made accessible for my games. The key here is the built-in support, knowing that I won’t have to code one-offs and hackjobs to get someone else’s hack maybe working in my game.
The promise of an end of the year availability sounds exciting but is most likely wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to know that work is being done on my engine of choice and thus the necessity of having to learn a new language very soon is significantly less now. Looking forward to more news on the matter.