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Global Varible in the Blender Game Engine

So, I didn't quite make "tomorrow" with this post, but better late than never. I've actually decided that the Blender physics engine is not predictable enough for what I need to do, and I've decided to try using some of the great gaming libraries available for C# to roll my own. I have a bunch of Blender tips I still want to get out, though, so I'll keep posting stuff here for a while.

A lot of head scratching has led to a number of Blender realizations. First is that I discovered the Blender API reference here, and it took me quite a while to realize that the GameLogic API, which you need to do anything related to the sensors and actuators, is here. In a completely separate page. Wish I had caught that one a litte earlier.

I spent a long time poking around trying to find example of mouse input in a Blender game, but came up largely empty handed. I found this tutorial, and this thread which convinced me that Blender could handle things of the complexity I was shooting for. That was nice, but I still didn't understand exactly how to get scripts to run, say, once. I could get them to run "always" but not once, when the game starts up.

It turns out, you really can't. Or at least, you don't. You just let scripts run "always" and then cross your fingers that things run smoothly enough. You could try to use global variables to get things to run once, but global variables don't persist across "frames" of "always".

In fact, there is only one way to get global variables to work in the game engine that I found. You need to store them in the GameLogic object, which persists. Like so:

  GameLogic.yourvar = "your value"

Unfortunately, if you put a statement like that in your "always" script, it'll run over and over, re-initializing your variable in every frame. And it's not exactly a "variable" if it stays constant now, is it?

So, you'd think you could do something like:

  if  not GameLogic.yourvar:
    GameLogic.yourvar = "your value"

But that doesn't work either. You get an error when you try to use GameLogic.yourvar without initializing it. What you have to do instead is a little more circuitous:

  try:
    GameLogic.yourvar
  except AttributeError:
    GameLogic.yourvar = None

  if not GameLogic.yourvar == None:
    GameLogic.yourvar = "your value"

And that, my friend, is the way you get some code to run once, and only once. You set a global variable called runonce, in the method explained above, and then if it's unset you run your code.

What a hack. Now you can see why I wanted to bail out of Blender.

A journey begins

I've just started trying to make a game with the Blender Game Engine. The game is called "BusyBodies". The goal of the game is to try out a new kind of programming, where instead of writing out code, you orchestrate a whole fleet of single-function robots. These little guys do very simple, stupid things, but together, according to your master plan, they can do great things.

A good description of my vision for BusyBodies is on my wiki.

But this blog isn't about the game itself, it's about the trials and tribulations I've been running into with the Blender Game Engine. The tutorials, help files, and insights necessary to implement BusyBodies are strewn all over the web, and answering each question that comes up often requires me to find that very special Google search that will reveal the solution. As that happens, I'll document what I learn here so that other people will find what they need a little quicker.

Without further ado, the first useful bit of information I learned is:

The first thing I did was followed the first few steps of the Blender 3D: Noob to Pro tutorial, which helped me get used to the Blender interface, and showed me how to manipulate objects and such. Since I didn't have any experience in Blender, this was a great starting point.

The next step was to get the basics of the game engine, for which this tutorial was key. The kind of game they describe isn't exactly like BusyBodies, but it gives a great overview of the basics of connecting up sensors and actuators.

My first goal, however, was to get drag and drop mouse input. And none of the tutorials I could find said anything about mouse input. My first brick wall. Tomorrow I'll post about how I solved that one.