PureBasic Forums - English

Hi,

During the last week, I was looking around the web and asking friends what to use as a language for coding games, appli windows and so on ... Just for me something good & simple (!) as a good tool to enjoy and create.

I am not a specialist, neither in games nor in appli, but I used to program for myself on Atari with Basic (a long time ago), then with Visual Basic for app, enter a bit in Delphi and finally I was curious and begin the asm.

I found in a first time many things and in particular, BlitzBasic (3d & 2d) which seems quite well followed, quick program but oriented games (3d) and games and appli (2d). Which makes 2 progs to buy.

Then screening forums, somebody was talking about PureBasic, as a faster program. On PureBasic's site I read that it is for appli, games (2d/3d) and it seems that there is a large active community.

Screening again, I saw a large amount of people creating appli but a few creating games. And I saw that tutorials are in german (those referenced on the site).

I am looking for an advice from the specialists. I am not asking here which one is the best but if some of you can help, I would appreciate a lot.

For example, are there main differences in both compilators making one quicker and easier to use ?

I read that OGRE is not oriented games, it means we have to download others libraries, is this easy and at which costs ?

That OGRE has now its own site and I am wondering how PureBasic follows its developpement and how far they want to go with this api ?

That we can directly input asm code in the basic one (!), am I right ?

I'd like to know how the tool is followed, are there a lot of releases or a few but more stable ?

Which are the weaknesses of PureBasic (objectively) ?

Well, I have a lot of questions. Just to understand I want to choose a prog, just one, don't want to go anyfurther in this or that language specifically or changing it after 6 months.

Hoping my translation from french to english is quite understandable and clear, many thanks in advance for those who can help me in my quest.

Fiwip

Hi there!! I can tanswear all of your questions as i havent used the 3d commands but I can give you general info.
Blitzbasic is a great language for doing what its designed to do, ie blitz3d for writing 3d games and blitz plus for writing 2d media based applications, but i would go so far to say that there not as general purpose as purebasic. theres also the bases of price, purebasic is the same price as blitz plus but it can do everything blitz plus can do (in some cases better) plus it seems like it can do a lot that blitz3d can do as well.
The only thing imo that blitz has over pb is simplicity, i found it a lot easier to pick up blitz than purebasic, but after a week or 2 of purebasic i picked it up pretty well.
Theres also the thing of speed and size of pb apps compared to blitz, pb whoops blitz in both theres areas, for example i had a function to do per pixel effects on the whole screen. I wrote them in both languages using exactly the same algortihms with no optimizations and it took pb 10ms to draw 1 frame while it took blitz about 2 seconds. But I did have to do direct memory access to the buffer which does lead me back tot he bit about purebasic being more complex, when i used purebasic's inbuilt plot function it was almost as slow as blitz.
If you havent already, download demos for each app and see what you like best, but if your only looking to buy one package I would go for purebasic!!
James