What happened to Blitzbasic

[Rick Nasher]

It's more easy to understand George Lucas' thinking than Mark Silby's.

Ah well, hope he's happy now working for another company, wish him all the best.
Still a pity though, didn't have to be like this..

[Dabz]

Hello!

I'll just punch something in as well.

For me, BlitzMax was great, I loved tinkering with that, I loved all the Blitz line of stuff Mark knocked out, at the end though, and for whatever reasons I'm not really sure about, I had more success seling anything with GLBasic. Maybe it was probably due to the uncomplicated angle of the GLBasic language that I finished stuff, whereas it was obvious BlitzMax was more language driven then game dev driven, which followed through on the Monkey line of languages he knocked out...

Don't get me wrong, I know the workings of reflection, lambda expressions and all that jazz, I've used them in many languages, but for game dev, I couldnt give a rats arse about them... People were wanting a DX9 renderer in BlitzMax (Before a member released one, which was then consumed into the official build), loads and loads of people asked for one, three people or something daft wanted reflection... Mark implemented reflection... I was like "Eh?"

Again though, that is how his following languages span out, sadly.

If I had a choice of using C#/C++ or Monkey2, I'd fire up VS, I found he was reinventing wheels where they didnt need reinventing, Monkey/MX2 was a great idea, but it just lacked so much when compared to other languages. I'll go back to GLBasic... With Monkey you had to download this, then down load that, change this config file, change that config file and on and on it goes... GLBasic... Just download the GLBasicSDK, install, create a simple app, then build for whatever platform you were aiming for, it was that easy, yes, for iOS, you had to be sitting in a VM on a Mac, then build again with xCode, but, that was just the way it had to be, but it was pretty painless still (Until you first put an app on the app store, lol)

Monkey[2] became a lesson on language gymnastics rather then the aspects of the media side of game development, the bit the end user sees, but, I cannot blame Mark for that, that was his thing, his interest mostly, we all know this.

Anyway, whatever angle it was supposed to be aiming for, it was all packaged pretty badly when lined up against, say, TheGameCreators, their website is bouncing with all sorts, it's inviting, just look at it:-

https://www.appgamekit.com

Now go to the Monkey2 website:-

http://monkeycoder.co.nz/

The whole Monkey2 webpage is a wall of text, its got the word "fuck" splattered on the home page in the news bit, there isnt really much inviting you in, the two languages are just poles apart, there literally isnt any real game development vision with Monkey[2], and it never had any before anyone starts, if it did, the VR stuff would of surely been followed through, but like everything else, it was dumped.

And then you had the fairies that patrolled the forums, if you spoke out, they were on to you in a shot if you had something negative to say... I still cannot understand why some people thought Mark was a mythical god like entity where he took on a religious form and people thought it was their "duty" to protect him at all costs, I mean, hes a nice enough bloke from what I've seen over the years, he goes in a huff on occasions when he reads something he doesnt like, but we all do that, but these people never seemed to realise that, well, his shit is the same colour as theirs and mine, he's human, a big lad whos all grown up, the best advice you can ever get stems from negativity, why hound people because they have an opinion? I still cannot work out their mentality, but I had enough of them and buggered off, Monkey[2] and the community just wasnt for me.

I'll finish by saying the Blitz line of products from Mark were excellent, I had so much fun with them, but, there was a point they werent fun for me, there was nothing really different from his stuff, and in someways, it became a bit lacklustre on the games creation side of things.

My 2p

Dabz

[iWasAdam]

I loved blitzMax - terrible documentation but great community

Didn't like monkey and it odd way of slow compiling.

Eventually jumped to monkey2 when it was a bit more stable. <- the language is brilliant, but there are so many missing bits. all the basic drawing tools are there - and then they stop, you want to subclass to improve things but you can't, so you need to rewrite the sources.
You feedback the code and thoughts and code changes and get criticised and ignored - then magically the sources change to prevent your potential additions !&*>!@ ?

documentation - forget it. help or examples - forget it

Don;t get me wrong the language is brilliant - the editor not so good. the interaction with Mark - very poor

[Dabz]

I've just tried the AGK2 whats it me bob, had a scan through the language, seems okay, exporting is a breeze for other platforms, plenty to do, nice helper players for testing apps... Seems setup canny, oh, and it has a VR plugin, unfortunately, OpenVR only it seems so my Oculus Go wont be getting any love from that, and I cannot be chewed with setting my Rift up, but overall, yeah, I can see why many people have moved to AGK2 rather then the usual Unity calling for a proprietary game dev setup ... I'd of done the same!

Dabz

[Derron]

All languages having "easy peasy" target export capabilities provide runtimes - so you get BIG android files, BIG desktop files, ... because you always ship everything you need.

So with BlitzMax (and others) you can get pretty smaller but still "standalone" applications - if that is one of your requirements, then skip unity, godot, agk, ...


For me BlitzMax (NG) is still the preferred weapon of choice - yet it lacks a modern 3D module/support, an inviting IDE and more supported platforms / platform tools. But as long as nobody is really using or requiring stuff (and is willed to help/support coding/fixing) things won't change that soon.

bye
Ron

[Dabz]

I just hate the faff of having to jump through hoops to get an "export to..." to work, I've had times when I've had it working, then for whatever reasons, it just wont work or stuff changing and you've got to go through it again, or simply it works for everyone else, and yet, your left scratching your head even though you've followed the steps to the latter, and before you know it your balls deep in settings, native code, debugging code thats not yours to find where its failing and its a pain... I find it a pain, I just want to click a button and watch something being built... Yes, you could say its lazy, but, I'm simply not interested in delving right down into that side of things anymore.

GLBasic had a neat system where it split its exported platform options into individual downloads, not sure if they still do, but you had something like "Android.zip", "html5.zip", "pi.zip", you just downloaded the platform you wanted, unzip it somewhere special in the GLBasic root dir, and bingo... That was it, build and go!

Thats how it should be if you ask me, at least that way, everyone is guaranteed to be running the same setup, so if something is wrong, its probably more manageable to fix.

Dabz

[Yellownakji]

All languages having "easy peasy" target export capabilities provide runtimes - so you get BIG android files, BIG desktop files, ... because you always ship everything you need.

So with BlitzMax (and others) you can get pretty smaller but still "standalone" applications - if that is one of your requirements, then skip unity, godot, agk, ...


For me BlitzMax (NG) is still the preferred weapon of choice - yet it lacks a modern 3D module/support, an inviting IDE and more supported platforms / platform tools. But as long as nobody is really using or requiring stuff (and is willed to help/support coding/fixing) things won't change that soon.

bye
Ron

BLide 15 is pretty inviting, in my opinion.  it's a really solid IDE and i appreciate that it has tool tips.

[MarkG]

My biggest issue with Blitz3D is that it's not modular (includes full run-time in executable), so an empty EXE takes up more space than it should.

Empty B3D executable:
Nothing.exe: 1.26 MB (1,323,008 bytes)

Zipped (WinRAR)...
Nothing.rar: 476 KB (487,594 bytes).

Even zipped, that's almost half a 3.5" HD floppy for just the run-time! Could be worse, I know.

[Qube]

Even zipped, that's almost half a 3.5" HD floppy for just the run-time! Could be worse, I know.

Half a floppy disk

[Steve Elliott]

Even zipped, that's almost half a 3.5" HD floppy for just the run-time! Could be worse, I know.

Half a floppy disk

You should try Unity or the Unreal Engine!! Huge exe's 

[MikeHart]

Ehmmm, what year is it again? Did I miss a jump back in time? Did they finally invented the time machine. Martin? Doc?


That reminds me, I have to run to the store to get a floppy drive. Still have these 5,25" flying around in the basement. 

[MarkG]

LOL.

As much as I enjoyed that exciting evening at midnight at my local CompUSA picking up my very own copy of Windows 95 (plus a free Mouse), most of my favorite games were unfortunately released for DOS.

But fortunately I can still get and play some of the originals...
https://www.gog.com/game/f117a_nighthawk_stealth_fighter_20
https://www.gog.com/game/subwar_2050_complete

However, I often wonder what my favorite games would have been like if updated just one more PC generation (i.e. 640x480 vs. 320x200 and greater color depth), with a relative requirement of resources. That is, if the original was shipped on 3 low-density 3.5" floppies, let's allow for 4 or 5 high-density floppies (not actual disks but a reasonable updated size requirement).

Finding the answer to what that would have been like (before CD multiple-media really took off) compels me to continue with this most difficult hobby.

Doing the most with less, something I enjoy thinking about and tinkering with. But as an amateur I need assistance from the likes of B3D (BASIC + 3D). Besides, Amiga's seem to have been really cool boxes for their day, I like Blitz's lineage.

EDIT: Don't go by GOG's game sizes which include extras like DOSBox (1991 Mircroprose F-117A: 36 MB). I have the original game, it shipped on 3 x 3.5" low-density floppies. The full installation zips to fit on a single 3.5" HD floppy. 

[plenatus]

@mike: there is a huge amiga/c64 community around this time

[Dabz]

I've managed to get a couple of hours having a good play with AGK, and came up with this:-

http://www.dabzy.co.uk/test/agk/

Basically, nothing much, just a tilemap with decent collision detection surrounding the not very square tiles... Just move the cursor about and it'll tell you when you have collided with something, even daft slopes.

I should have something running about on there in no time, little edits of the code required because its been a bit of a monkey at a type writer approach, but yeah, AGK is okay, didnt take me long to get a handle on it really, and to be fair, thats the most coding I've done in months mind!

Dabz

[Steve Elliott]

Works well.   

Are you using AGK Classic or Studio?