How was this engine able to avoid being GPL?

I love that this engine is under zlib but how did they integrate with blender without being GPL since Blender is GPL?

I mostly ask because I would also like to build on top of blender.

Thanks

The engine is not built using Blender code, it uses Blender as one editor and exports the data to the engine. This means its the same as rendering a movie using Blender, you retain ownership of the output.

The old Blender Game Engine actually had Blender code in it’s player so that meant that any game you published included Blender code and therefore subject to GPL

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Blender Developers (also a youtube channel) mentioned the Blender Game Engine was being replace with a Real-time Interactive Mode this will allow external game engines to plug and play better down the road.

That is a long way off and may or may not do that depending on what the final result is and what engine you are speaking of. They is talk of some more support for external engines like armory and the blender developers are well aware of armory. There is also talk of building a new Blender game engine and possible some interactive control with the All Nodes system being worked on. Much is still up in the air. Lubos (the developer of Armory) has said that some of this work really bodes well for armory in the future.

Jacques Everything Nodes project sneak peak looks interesting. A brief demo is shown towards middle of the video. Some related details about Benoit’s 1yr grant for real-time interaction mode is listed on twitter. There isn’t an eta per say but Ton wanting to bridge the gap between Blender and Game Engines does sound promising on all sides.
https://twitter.com/blender_org/status/1001110824012967936.

The real time interaction won’t work for Unity or UE4, those users won’t create gameplay in Blender. It would be years of work for Blender to emulate UE4 whole Blueprints or emulate all Unity Apis without getting errors, and this would be even more harsh when Unity and UE4 has now many releases per year with lot of Api changes.
They only want Blender files able to update smoothly on their engine choice when they make changes to the original Blender files.

It is another option. It’s fine if currently people use blender with the other engines. But I for one love what is happening here and really don’t care what the others are doing. Graphically we are already on par with Unity and mostly with unreal. So with more time the rest will come. Look at all the game engines in use around the world that have no chance at doing PBR or other realistic graphics. Armory represents something different and that is a good thing. Yes it will have limitations but people should realize that and not try to create games that out do the engine at this point. Unity and Unreal didn’t get built in a day and they still have major issues. Lets just see what we can do and help @lubos. Not keep demanding all the things the biggest engines in the whole world didn’t have when they were pre alpha.