Coding For Beginners - Blitz3D Versus Unity

Started by 3DzForMe, April 25, 2019, 23:37:58

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3DzForMe

My son expressed an interest in coding, Unity I thought - transpires I was wrong. On a 64-bit W10 machine with a reasonably good graphics card, here is the initial results:

Blitz3D versus Unity, 1-0 to Blitz3D.

Unity need to get their act together, I'm looking at Godot now and AGK. I'm too old to be bothered buggering around with.... oh, maybe x, y or z version of Unity might work (incoming.....)

What a waste of Leccky downloading Unity, ho-hum, you live and learn.

[Edit] Moreover, IDEal works rather well, it weighs in at a whole 3.5MBytes..... I could be wrong.

Yes, C# is for employment... but for those cutting their teeth - it would appear BLitz3D + IDEal still.... works. Which is more than can be said for Unity.

I was rather looking forward to trying Unity... however I echo someone elses sentiment that initially - it does not work. I don't have time to deal with flaky software.

On relection, Unity installed fine - it SEEMS TO BE VSStudio thats not played the game... if only the IDEal developer made an IDE for Unity  :D
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

Naughty Alien

..Unity used to be a 'holy grail' for game developers..so, what went wrong, if someone can explain?? Or its a random issue?

GaborD

In my opinion Unity just got too bloated and complex for it's own good.
They never were performant, even back in the old NB days you could recreate the same thing in NB and have it run 3 times faster, Unity's thing was really the ease of use and quick iteration speed. That was their USP. And I payed gladly for all the pro updates to have that ease of use.
Now it's still sluggish but not easy to use anymore. And you have to fight VS Studio bloat and whatnot? Meh.


Derron

You cannot put in hundreds of features while keeping it "easy to use". Somewhere in a GUI design you have to put all the menu elements, buttons, icons - or have dozens of drop downs.
Now add extendability/plugins and hell can break loose.


In Godot you have to know where to find stuff too.
In Blender you have to know ...

In MS Paint you have (almost) all it offers presented in the icon-toolbar.



@ Visual Studio and #C
Godot offers a .NET binding too, so you are able to code in VS or MonoDevelop too, like with Unity. So you can also whip up some code files externally, without starting Unity or Godot.


bye
Ron

3DzForMe

I was just dismayed after the initial excitement of giving it a whirl, that it failed to install. Considered bare bones C , however don't want to snuff out what coding interest he does have straight away. I still think AGore's head demo is pretty good, first time I seen it was on the cover of PCFormat.....
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

MrmediamanX

#5
Quotehowever don't want to snuff out what coding interest he does have straight away

nice, there are plenty of b3d source files out there which you and your son can sit and chill with. depending on how you want to teach him to code or make games there's also no shortage of basic tools, though old school/bare basic tools available as well.

It's a thing that doe's when it don't..

3DzForMe

@MrMediaManX, thanks for the feedback - AGK is looking pretty promising ;) :D
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

Pfaber11

Nothing wrong with AGK I use it and I'm not a very good programmer but I do get along with AGK .
More or less what I type works and the documentation is good . What it took me a month to accomplish a year ago I can now do in a couple of days . I wouldn't say it's easy necessarily but it is straight forward and well worth spending a bit of time learning . In the last few weeks I started converting my games to run on Android as well as PC and the first one took me a day and the second a few hours . Once you get to grips with it it's great. Best 25 quid I spent . The Game Creators have a sale on on something most of the time and good deals are to be had . Before AGK I was using Blitz 3D Which was good but I prefer AGK2 . Would really like the tutorial for it but it's pretty expensive but as I mentioned the Help and Documentation are enough to get by with. Happy coding .
Windows 11 home edition
PureBasic 6 and AppGameKit studio
ASUS Vivo book 15 16gb ram 256gb ssd
HP Desktop; AMD 6700 A10 16GB ram 2 GB graphics card windows 10

3DzForMe

Quote from: Pfaber11 on May 05, 2019, 16:10:13
Nothing wrong with AGK I use it and I'm not a very good programmer but I do get along with AGK .
More or less what I type works and the documentation is good . What it took me a month to accomplish a year ago I can now do in a couple of days . I wouldn't say it's easy necessarily but it is straight forward and well worth spending a bit of time learning . In the last few weeks I started converting my games to run on Android as well as PC and the first one took me a day and the second a few hours . Once you get to grips with it it's great. Best 25 quid I spent . The Game Creators have a sale on on something most of the time and good deals are to be had . Before AGK I was using Blitz 3D Which was good but I prefer AGK2 . Would really like the tutorial for it but it's pretty expensive but as I mentioned the Help and Documentation are enough to get by with. Happy coding .

Thanks for the feedback! AGK does indeed look promising.

In other news.... I seen Visual Studio Community Edition in the start menu... I though - oh go on then, I'll give it another whirl - a throw of the dice. It had an initial grumble with a pop-up stating - cannot start - view .xml blah here...

Then - mysteriously - it worked! I suspect VS 2017 needs you to 'log in' before it will work properley.

Then.... tried Unity - it works also, first tutorial is pretty impressive ;D



BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

3DzForMe

Well, 6 months on and my son opted for Python. As for me, still playing with B3d . Unity hasn't seen the light of day for a bit!
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

Xerra

Quote from: 3DzForMe on October 19, 2019, 02:44:22
Well, 6 months on and my son opted for Python. As for me, still playing with B3d . Unity hasn't seen the light of day for a bit!

Have you ever looked at Gamemaker studio 2? If you're just putting games together then it's really good for that. Obviously you're not going to write business software with it but anyone can use more than one dev system. You can get a demo for free so nothing lost by having a look.
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3DzForMe

#11
Used unicycle, a trifle unkind, amazing what can be moved around in 3d with a busted unicycle.

I think an old trusty Peugot 12 speed Racer with analogue gears is more accurate, with a 1.5Kwatt powered rear wheel! Blitz 3D still cuts the mustard for sure. Hopefully Stevie and Santiago don't mind me showing their recent B3D exploits can
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

RemiD

#12
the only thing missing in Blitz3d, compared to Unity, is shaders, (like Xors3d did, and now Openb3d does)
i have done several tests to convert my procedures/systems/templates from Blitz3d to Unity, in the past, and of course most of the time it works, but for me (more a coder/technician than an artist), it slows down me...
->you need more (unecessary) code to achieve the same things
->you can't control in which order things are updated in the mainloop (collisions/physics/rendering)
->some system are forced (included), while i may prefer to use my own systems or external systems (libraries)

of course it is good, it depends on your profile, very useful for script kidies and artists. ( trolling a little hihi  ;D )

3DzForMe

Quote
->you need more (unecessary) code to achieve the same things
->you can't control in which order things are updated in the mainloop (collisions/physics/rendering)
->some system are forced (included), while i may prefer to use my own systems or external systems (libraries)

Yeah, I like to be able to 'code' my way around issues - gives you more power rather than being shackled to a drop and drag UI, which has been my experience of unity so far.

However, coding does lead to the inevitable 'hiccups' now and then, for example, I was debugging why the joypad x componenet was not being detected when the 'y'y was working fine. Variable naming mistake!
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

Pfaber11

I downloaded and looked at Unity quite a while back and it looked awful , really could not get into it . Spent a day with it which was long enough to tell me it wasn't my thing . over the past 2 years I've used Blitz3D , AGK2 , Python  and PureBasic. The one I'm probably going to stick with is Pure Basic . Very impressed so far after a 2 week crash coarse . Spent a few days on 2D then decided to get into the 3D stuff . It really is very fast . Real shame it doesn't do Android but there you go you can't have everything . The one I wouldn't want to use for games is Python . I tried it out with pyglet which was rubbish and pygame but unfortunately it suffered from graphics shudder every few seconds and I was only doing very basic stuff . Looked at Panda 3D and it was ugly and nasty so python got the chop. Anyway yeah I would rather use Blitz3D than Unity .
Windows 11 home edition
PureBasic 6 and AppGameKit studio
ASUS Vivo book 15 16gb ram 256gb ssd
HP Desktop; AMD 6700 A10 16GB ram 2 GB graphics card windows 10