All the way back with the release of Blender 2.8 over 5 years ago the game engine functionality was removed from Blender. Thankfully the UPBGE project has kept the game engine alive with a special fork called UPBGE. Following hot on the release of Blender 3.6 the UPBGE project have released a major update, 0.36, bringing the game engine project up to parity with the most current release of Blender. This moves the project from the 3.0 version of Blender to 3.6 version bringing tons of new functionality and improvements such as the new real-time viewport compositing, which should make creating several special effects a great deal easier.
UPBGE adds a number of features on top of Blender such as:
- a Python based game oriented API
- a node based and a sensor based game logic system
- integration of the Bullet open source physics engine
- an audio system build on top of audaspace
- the ability to create OpenXR powered VR titles
- a complete navigation system for controlling AI characters
Key Links
Blender Diorama Scene From Video
You can learn more about the UPBGE Blender game engine and about the 0.36 release in the video below.