PureBasic Forum

This is the first time I've used PB for gamedev, as most people (me included) see it as more of an app-dev language, but I wanted to see what it was capable of in terms of speed etc.. and I thought you might be interested in the result. Bare in mind this was thrown together in about 3 months, and I know there are better examples of games written in PB out there.

Jewels of Egypt is a match-3 puzzle game that started out as an experimental framework for 2D games. I'll probably get flamed for this, but I used the IW (Irrlicht Wrapper) instead of the perfectly capable built-in PB stuff, but as I said, it was an experiment and I also wanted to try out both the IW and N3xtD wrappers for Irrlicht on various projects. This one just happened to use IW (sorry Fred ).



Speed-wise, the game throws 100's of sprites (2D-in-3D orthogonal quads) and particles around with ease, and only occasionally dips in frame-rate during huge chain-reactions, but delta timing takes care of that, and for this type of game, PB far outperforms the now dead B3D.

The end result is that I'll be adopting PB as a game dev language, as well as for apps; and will probably try the built-in 2D for another similar project, but will stick with N3xtD for 3D games (until Fred & co update PB's Ogre). I also think PB should be marketed more to game-devs, since it's extremely capable for games and apps, and not enough people seem to know about it.

Feel free to turn this thread into a discussion about PB's built-in stuff vs PB+libraries for game dev. I'm interested in what other people are using, and what limitations they've found (if any).

Read more on the blog: http://www.innesoft.com/blog/2010/08/jewels-of-egypt-launched-today/
Product page: http://www.innesoft.com/product.php?ID=74
Grab the 6-level Demo: http://ftp2.bmtmicro.com/Setup_JewelsOfEgypt_DEMO.exe

I did many games in B3D and have yet to translate them to PB as the models I used won't cross... maybe later with UU... {sigh}

Just curious as to why you didn't try to use the built in 2D stuff... I have written a few games with that (no 3D engine needed!) and it works great!

Like th look and can't wait to try it!

At the time I was playing around with IW anyway, and it evolved into a finished game. Turns out N3xtD is much better for 3D, but IW is pretty good for 2D.

I'll use the native 2D in future and see how that does.. but this was kind of experimental.

impressive - definitely a good addition to the purebasic showcase

I haven't played with irrlicht yet...

....I get "Internal Error", "Invalid Memory Address" the moment the demo is launched via it's Desktop short-cut.....

I've gotten that a couple of times with full screen games - do you have multiple monitors?

Arg.. can you post your system specs?

Video-card, desktop resolution, DirectX version, Windows version etc...

I'll look into it.

Hi Innesoft

WinXP 32bit SP3, 4GB DDR2 Ram, Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz

nVidia GeForce 7900 GT, 256MB DDR3, 1280 x 1024 x 32, DirectX 9.0c

0.3ltr coffee cup, max caffeine

@IdeasVacuum, thanks for the info, I'll find a similar test machine and see if I can dupe it

Looks like a nice game.

Feels and plays very professional. Congratulations.

I hope you can make some money with that since I know how much work must have gone into this.

I have played the Demo, this game is beautifull!!!

Thanks, really appreciate the positive feedback (and bug reports)

Very cool! Really!