Apricot Blending Crystal Space

I haven't followed Project Apricot in a while - I've been out of the Blender & Crystal Space 3D scene for a while now. It appears to have taken an interesting turn however.

It appears the final name is "Yo Frankie!" - finally available online or retail, including all the code & assets that went into the game. Both of them.

Errr... what?

Evidently the project forked - one fork was done entirely within Blender, the other built specifically for Crystal Space. There appear to be differing accounts as to why the for occured; the Blender Foundation claims that this was due to advances in Blender's own game engine, while at the same time they appear to say that there were too many technical difficulties to marry the Blender Game Engine and Crystal Space 3D. Ultimately Blender's game engine remains an entity on its own, and Crystal Space walks a separate path. It seems the Blender community wasn't happy with using an engine outside of their own doors and so they walked away from integrating with a more sophisticated game engine. Integration with other engines and projects... something that could make Blender thrive in a production environment... was abandoned to work on the more primitive Blender Game Engine.

The Crystal Core project seems to have re-adjusted its ultimate aims as well, similarly finding its initial objectives far too ambitious. That makes two flagship titles that haven't been able to reach their intended goals.

I'm wondering why Apricot and Crystal Core are both having such difficulties. My guess is that content generation can be done well, engine development can be done well, but the interoperability between the two is an equal if not greater effort. Compare the tools Eskil created for Love to the Blender + Crystal Space tools: building models and meshes in Blender can be fairly arduous and requires a lot of reference material while Loq Ariou can create meshes using freehand and UV texture mapping in Blender is a multi-step process while Eskil has created something that can do the UV mapping in a few short steps. Verse seems to be the glue that the Blender <-> Crystal Space interoperability was missing, creating a uniform way to remotely process assets and scenes.

The effort to have a Crystal Space 3D game engine within Blender would have been tough, but I believe it would have been worth it. It is definitely no easy task, but these kinds of tools are sorely needed. It is too bad Blender decided to push Crystal Space aside - I was looking forward to big things with their collaboration.

I've Never Been So Excited for an Apricot

Blender has been the model editor of choice for CrystalSpace for a long, long time. Most of my CrystalSpace documentation has revolved around using Blender to create content for CrystalSpace code. The two together are like peanut butter and bananas. Fantastic.

Recently Jorrit made an exciting announcement on behalf of the CS team - Blender and CrystalSpace are partnering to build Apricot, an independently developed and completely open game title. To fully understand my unbridled enthusiasm you have to understand Elephants Dream, originally called Blender's project Orange. This was an open movie project - a full movie title with all content released under a flexible Creative Commons license. Textures, models, all production files are freely available. This did unbelievable things for Blender. Not only did this give users access to professionally generated content, new documentation and a whole new realm of tutorials it also pushed the envelope for Blender itself. Orange generated demand for whole new genres of features, and kept the Blender development team pushing point release after point release to keep up. If I recall correctly, Blender's hair generation system was largely built due to demands made by artists creating content for Elephants Dream. Not only did the movie promote Blender, it made Blender a production-quality product that could demonstrate it was ready for prime time.

The same envelope is getting ready to be pushed for CrystalSpace now. That's where my unbridled enthusiasm lies; CrystalSpace has been a commercial-quality 3D engine for a while now, but now every stage of the production process will be thoroughly tested and fleshed out. While I have no doubt that this project will result in enhanced functionality grown by the demands of the game developers, I'm most excited about the tool chain being completely fleshed out. In my mind while the Blender exporters for CS were fantastic, all the corner cases hadn't been completely covered. With Apricot, model exporters should be polished, skeletal animation should be more integrated into Blender armatures, physics should be more strictly related to Blender riggings and meshes should have attributes that more exactly equate to CrystalSpace equivalents. This should make the entire end-to-end content generation process as smooth as a polished stone.

Nothing like a real-life, production quality project will take the edges off of the various and sundry tools used for development. It's amazing how much one will forbear when it's not a "huge issue," but when you encounter the same "not a huge issue" twenty times a day it suddenly becomes something worth tackling. Ideas and features may be the result of inspiration, but the remaining 99% of time spent refining a project is sheer perspiration. I'm looking forward to both projects' continued trial by fire, and seeing what has been forged once the fires have quieted down.