SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Hi I was looking over the forum history and it seems like quite a few members were using AGK and then went elsewhere . What and why did you move onto instead. just curious .

I myself have tried to jump ship a couple of times and I think TGC have something to do with it although after a month or 2 I have returned to AGK as I like it more than the rest. The Game creators say the language is very easy and anyone can write games in it and with just a few clicks your games will run on Android . Not true for someone starting to program from scratch , I personally think they are shooting themselves in the foot with these comments . AGK basic is a programming language and it has a learning curve as does any computer language . like months rather than days to get into . I feel by acting this way they are devaluing the efforts of people using this system . Have a nice day and may the force be with you .

what I have written above maybe total garbage and if so please let me know . Thanks for reading . And also I wish to add that AGK studio is a very nice language and for a beginner or pro is well worth putting a few months into to get going .

I bought AGK wish i could get my money back! It had examples for AGK MANIC MINER.

Tried using it and gave up after a few days. I remember setting up a project folder and when ever i wrote something else it kept updating the program i was using before and making building the old one!? Not enough worked Examples to learn from. For a Language it must have as many worked Examples as Possible! Be easy to install using one .EXE file. and just run/Build. Any language when you have to find third party languages. browse site run Link files and make files will only be used by a few! C for example fast but inaccesable for the normal coder.

I have tried many examples and Blitmax is the best!

Ive recently moved to Blitzmax Ng. Why keep inventing other languages and wasting time making them when we could just make Blitzmax get better and better! This forum has a very good community actively supporting coding problems.

However it still lacks Documentation for every command with a worked Example. You can not use an instruction if you don't know it exists and finally you cant use it if you dont know how to!

I stick with Blitzmax as it is. If you have some sort of Basic coding experience you can get of the ground pretty quickly. I wish the IDE was more configurable though. It does lack some features id like to see as i code a lot with it.

Yes indeed baggey  I have to agree and in the studio version the documentation is really not good enough . I wanted to use an array a couple of days ago but ended up finding another way as the information I needed was just not good enough. Thanks for the reply . 

@Baggey have you looked at sokol? I only mention this as it is used as the base for a number of chip emulators (spectrum, bbc, c64, z80, 6502, cpm, etc).
Here's is link to the online sokol samples
https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/index.html
And also the online emulators:
https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/
(I am currently working through with a wrapper for wonkey and the file sizes are super small 500k) - I'll post something in a new thread

Sorry Pfaber11 <derail over>

That's fine Adam

@iwasadam: Suggesting Sokol to someone who is not able to work with something simple like AGK is quite a challenge.
Anyway regarding Sokol... been there. Mojo runs already but I think I will pass it. During the weeks I was working with it, Flooh keeper changing things so I am not happy to chase another running target. Mobile is enough for me.
How do you get over the problem of Sokol by nature being a static solution when it comes to resources and on the other side having a dynamic toolset like Wonkey. You don't know how many objects are created upfront. Creating buffers at runtime is quite a performance break. Do you limit your users and create a pool of buffers for Wonkey? How do you go about shaders which I am sure are build dynamically each frame in Wonkey?
Don't get me wrong, Sokol can be very performant, when the amount of resources are known upfront.
As a backend for a programming language, I am uncertain.

Yep. I will absolutely agree with you about sokol changing and the author has said similar things.
Wonkey has a fixed solution, that doesn't update, and I am using that as the core.

The static vs dynamic is an interesting question. shaders are by their nature static - you compile once and then feed them. Wonkey has bindings for both windows/linux and macos metal! But you will have to know shaders... Hence I am working on a wrapper.
As for dynamic buffers. BlitzMax, Monkey, Monkey2, cerberus and wonkey use Marks 2d mojo core - which is a dynamic buffer system. I am taking that concept and seeing what happens - so far it's working. The key is you need a back end system that can deal with both 2d and 3d, leverage the cpu and gpu and split the tasks with the cpu doing the initial 3d into 2d. It's much more akin to ps1/n64 style.
My thought here is if you want AAA then go elsewhere only unreal/unity offer this.

We can discuss this further via the other thread
https://www.syntaxbomb.com/worklogs/sokol-wonkey-tests/msg347052867/?topicseen#new
<no more derail I promise>

I've been using AGK2 for quite a while now and I'm getting on quite well with it. I purchased AKG Studio a few weeks ago but haven't got around to using the drag 'n' drop bit yet, I'll be experimenting with that side once I finish working on my current game.

Morning Steve. I've been using Studio for about 6 months or more and have not yet tried the drag and drop as nearly all my stuff is 3D but if and when I use the 2D side  I will give it a go . My main thing when upgrading to Studio was Vulkan support and I'm using #renderer "Prefer best" at the moment and will probably be using #renderer "Advanced"  in a couple of years when Vulkan becomes the main API . Have a nice morning.

@Pfaber11
Good luck on your project mate, what are you working on?

The game was going to be off road cycling or maybe motorcycling just sorting the terrain out first . This time up and down hills whereas in my earlier games I've had flat roads/paths. Coming along ok although had to make a restart which has set me back a few days . I wasn't happy with the accuracy of my paths so am in the process of remaking them . Not hard but quite time consuming.

Cool, sounds like a fun game.

I've made 4 projects and one Android port so far with AGK. I like it a lot. If you expect you buy AGK and suddenly become a game programming god it's a false assumption. AGK makes some things easier, but it can't eliminate the need to grasp basic programming and game design principles. Which is a huge field. I think it is not misleading: AGK is easy to learn and handles a lot for you.

One serious flaw for me is the lack of feedback to the community. Updates are slow and critical bugs remain unfixed way too long. Godot ist catching up fast and becomes more attractive every day. I'll closely monitor how they go about fixing the newly reported bugs. I'd like to stick to AGK, but if they don't care about those either, I'll stop using it. Which hurts, because I see great potential.