I own Blitz (2D), Blitz 3D and Blitz plus and would consider Blitz Max. However, now that Fred is developing full time on Pure Basic there's a good chance we'll be seeing some wonderful updates. Personally I think Mark and Fred rock and that we don't need to choose between their languages when we can have both. Competition is healthy.
In my opinion, competition is lost by Mark, because it is too much shameful to have blitz2D, blitz3D, blitzPlus , blah, blah.
Seems Mark wants only money.
Put an unique product having 2D, 3D, 4D ... nD ... etc.,
Mark Sibly (Blitz Newsletter) wrote:Heya Blitzers,
We're getting close to the Win32/Linux releases of Max. There's a beta demo version now in testing and once that's been given the thumbs up, we're off!
Thanks to Skidracer's fine efforts, the new Max IDE is now going on all platforms. However, the Mac version wont be available for a while yet - at least until after the Win32/Linux release is out of the way. This IDE will eventually become the 'official' IDE, mainly because it's written in Max which I think is cool.
While Simon's been working on IDE/GUI stuff, yours truly has been tweaking Max, bug fixing and messing around with the new 3D engine (Max3D?), mainly trying to come up with a tidy-ish, high level architecture.
The way things are going, it looks like the engine will be split into 3 'layers': scene graph, render queue and render engine. In Blitz3D, all these bits got sort of mixed up together and things got a bit messy internally. Hopefully, Max3D will be a bit cleaner in this respect.
The scene graph layer allows you to manipulate things in a Blitz3D-like way - ie: setup a tree of cameras, lights, models etc, and update and render them with single commands. Much work to do here...
The render queue layer is responsible for queueing up render operations. The main point of this layer is to minimize renderstate changes - ie: it tries to 'batch up' operations that share common state. You can go to ridiculous lengths to achieve this, but you've got to be careful you're not introducing more overhead than you're eliminating! My first attempt here was not terribly successful. I could produce a 'render tree' that shaved 3-ish milliseconds off a raw render of a 'typical' scene (let's not go there...) - the only problem was, it took 5-ish ms to create! You could 'cache' such trees and recreate/update them when the scene or a scene node changes, but then you run into problems with culling/occlusion. I've since come up with a tidy compromise that I *think* will do the job nicely. More testing required though.
The render engine is the 'thin' API translation layer, with simple commands like 'SetVertexBuffer', 'SetShaderConstant' and so on. If you're not in the middle of a 'RenderWorld', you can hit this layer directly. There will also probably be a 'RenderPass' type that you can extend to perform custom low-level rendering during a RenderWorld. The render engine code is pretty sweet now and I don't expect it to change much.
I've also been playing around with ODE, the physics library. This is a really, really nice piece of software, and I just love the way the addition of physics makes so much cool stuff 'automatic'. Not sure yet if/how this will impact on the 3D engine, but my curiosity has definitely been piqued!
See, he has gone and confused the hell out of everyone
When I started with Blitz almost 3 years ago I heard people talking about it - I still don't think it has lived up to any expectations. Of course, they were set so high that nothing could have
Kale wrote:BlitzMax is diffinately awesome, i will be buying it....
Traitor
Hehe... I own Blitz2D, Blitz3D, BlitzPlus, BlitzMax and PureBasic and will continue to buy all versions forever and forever...
A shame that I also bought Jamagic... They should be sued... Not an update for over two years... and they still sell it as an "new" product on Click Teams website... Hmmm...
Last edited by techjunkie on Thu Apr 07, 2005 1:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Karbon wrote:Hasn't "Max" been out for some time now?
See, he has gone and confused the hell out of everyone
When I started with Blitz almost 3 years ago I heard people talking about it - I still don't think it has lived up to any expectations. Of course, they were set so high that nothing could have
Ehhhh... Have you seen the list of com. games made in Blitz3D - rather stunning...
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Mark Sibly (Blitz Newsletter) wrote:Heya Blitzers,
We're getting close to the Win32/Linux releases of Max. There's a beta demo version now in testing and once that's been given the thumbs up, we're off!
...
He also wrote...
Mark Sibly (BlitzMax Updates and Betas) 2005-03-18 wrote:Okay,
We're still working flat out on BlitzMax and getting the Win32/Linux release together. However, we do have 2 modules on the horizon (names subject to change):
MaxGui : A cross-platform, BlitzPlus-ish, GUI module that retains the look and feel of it's host OS.
Max3D : A next-gen, Blitz3D-ish, 3D module targetted at modern shader-level hardware.
And yes, both will cost ya, although I have no idea how much just yet.
The GUI module is actually quite advanced and should be out shortly after the Win32/Linux release of BlitzMax. It will feature FLTK/Win32/Cocoa drivers, all of which are pretty much in sync now.
The 3D module is at a very early stage right now, but I have a reasonably good idea of where it's all going. It will also feature OpenGL *and* Direct3D9 drivers. It may or may not be compatible with non-shader hardware.
Along the way, I'd like to slip in a 'NetGame' style freebie module and any other bits and pieces that seem sensible to add.
Hope that's informative enough...
Bye,
Mark Sibly
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*looks over at the boxed copy of Blitz3D on the shelf*
Sure, I've seen the games - and they are stunning! But they've been stunning for years without BMax
I'm not trying to be the party pooper, but I've heard a lot of BlitzMax talk and seen very little action over the last 3 years.. I really don't put all that much faith in any of the newsletters I get anymore.
First one:
Trigonometric functions returned by blitzmax are returned as double float, but only the first 8 (sometimes 6) decimals are true, the other 10 (or more) are literally invented
I guess it has a table of results used to deliver some math functions.
Clearly this language is only focused for games
Psychophanta wrote:Trigonometric functions returned by blitzmax are returned as double float, but only the first 8 (sometimes 6) decimals are true, the other 10 (or more) are literally invented
Yes, that's true, incredible but true.
Test yourself and compare it to Windows calculator results or any good sci calculator.
I don't know, but could be BlitzMax has tables for that functions? But tables are perhaps slower than FPU calculation
Tables are almost always faster, but when you do use them, resolution is the main problem. You can't have a practible table so large, that the highest resolution possible with native variables can be stored correctly. Hence you need to start to interpolate between table values, which is where the errors you observed creep in...
Not a problem for most games, but possibly a big problem everywhere else... It shows the target audience for this compiler, doesn't it?
They should be sued... Not an update for over two years... and they still sell it as an "new" product on Click Teams website... Hmmm...
