What Blitz 3D needs is...

A proper ALL SINGING - ALL DANCING - TECHNICAL DEMO - showcasing exactly what it can do. I believe this will surprise a lot of 'nay sayers'.

I am serious! B3D does kick ass when used correctly.

The beauty of B3d is the simplicity of accessing the basics to get up and running with something which looks okay. Almost anyone could do that.

But what would happen if we all pushed it to it's limits (what are it's limits?).

A proper technical demo would need to include shadows al la Swift , realtime lighting al la Barliesque demo, Particles a la particle Candy, Sprites a la which ever take your pick. Levels a la Gile[s] lightmapped (or CShop).

I remember seeing the Filax Egyptian walkthrough for the first time - or Trium or TerraEd - All amazing stuff!

Halo's Singularity Engine was totally brilliant the later un released versions even had inbuilt physics, particles, seamless integration into CShop, set up lights, flare, cube mapped water, 3D sound all inside CShop - Josh certainly knows his stuff.

Rob's water in that short cubemapping demo - brilliant.

The list is endless... What if we were to put all these into one place?

Animated characters, sound effects, music the full works. Those with negative opinions will probably ask - "is it worth it as B3d is so old now?" I say well that's up to us really. How much of your life have you invested into B3d? In my case quite a lot, so I think it is worth it.

Just my opinion.

IPete2.

EDIT: I Missed the point by an AU or two

I mean a single - one off - blow everything else away demonstration of what B3d can do.

IPete2.

Stupid question time:

Why not just do it then?

Blitz3D needs DXT Texture compression.

Love, sweet love, something something something yeh, something now, the two of us...

IPete2:
*1 minute passes*

Flameduck:
LOL - so close Pete

> Stupid question time:
>
> Why not just do it then?

There's no stupid questions, just stupid people :)

Why not just do it then?

Well my reply would be I'm not good enough a programmer to do it on my own. I wasn't really waiting for anyone to volunteer either.

I was just trying to redress the negative balance that is influencing and disheartening users and potential users of B3d on this forum.

Does anyone not agree that a TECHNICAL DMEO would alay a lot of fears/questions about the future of B3D?

IPete2.

I don't think the future of B3D has anything to do with it's ability but the focus on Max3D. A lot of people are asking for new graphical 'things' which I doubt will be added to B3D.

Sorry Pete, I was just amused by FlameDuck's (typical) response, so didn't really answer your question.

Yes, I agree that an awesome technical demo would be beneficial for Blitz3D. Now you've made me think about it, the fact that it's never had one is kind of odd. I'm sure if the likes of Swift / Halo and other talented coders got together then it would be fairly simple for them. That is, if they would want to invest their time doing it. I suppose the buck stops at Blitz Research, to deliver a technical demo that would show off what Blitz3D is still capable of, and boost their sales.

Future of Blitz3D ... what kind of future?
I don't see a chance for another patch, not even a small thing like DXTC support, stencil shadow or render to texture nor something similar which is already done through Toms DLL

Yes, I don't agree. There are already great demos and games out there, and it makes no difference. I see no reason to believe that combining them into one giant tech demo would change anything. The people who have fears about B3D are mainly feature creatures, people who read the feature list and how many fancy features they don't understand and couldn't possibly use have been added recently. Hell a lot of them will just overlook it because it's DX7 and they think it should be DX9 ( or 10 maybe? )

And besides, there are elements of truth to their fears. Blitz3d isn't going anywhere. It doesn't particularly bother me, but it's true, and evidently it bothers a lot of people.

Thing is, I've done a few great demos, and I'm not trying to pee on anyone's parade or anything but time is money, I simply cannot afford to make a tech demo for free.

And a blow-everything-away demo smells of either project plasma or it's simply gonna cost too much to develop.

I would certainly do it for free, if I had the capability. I don't know why it would cost so much.

Because my time is spent making money to live on. It is called "having a job".

..I think my walktrough have all this features you mention about IPete..I'll be happy to see that as one of the Blitz3D demos..and if BRL ever decide to release Blitz3D source or at least C++ SDK kit, I'm pretty sure Blitz3D will go much more further..

That would be sweet, and I'd be happy to pay for it.

Looks like a lot of effort is being made to turn it into something it clearly is not.

And what games do you have right now that make the most of Blitz3D? or even use half of it?

Thats right, I thought so... no finished games, eh?

One Eyed Jack: Someone wee on your fireworks recently? However of course what you say is true for the most part.

Ok, so maybe you can't make the next Doom3 in blitz, but, what you can make is cool games fast. Like Syb says the people that complain the most are those who don't see the latest fancy features and assume that Blitz3D is crap because it's DX7.

Before the mention of Max3d Blitz3D was the king even over it's rivals like DBPro which is DX9. Take DBPro for instance. How many games have you seen released with DBPro that use features of DX9? Personally I've seen none. DBPro is buggy and horrible to program with. Blitz3D on the other hand is a joy to code with and you can get results fast.

I think IPetes idea of an all bells and whistles demo is good but I've seen demos like this made in Blitz before. Search the showcase and you'll find some really cool stuff or look at the Galary.

There are still diehard Blitz2D users to this day just as there'll be diehard Blitz3D users tomorrow.

my2p anyway. :)

I think an advanced tech demo demonstrating Blitz3d would be a good idea however I think it should be the responsibility of BRL to create/commision one.
The membership of this forum already act as free unofficial tech support for BRL and constitutes a major selling factor for its products.
However,if BRL can't be bothered to produce even a simple newsletter then I can't see them creating a tech demo either.

When i first started using Blitz3D i quickly asked the community why no such real demo exists? I was one of three people to start threads on this subject. In the end, people always say, we work for ourselves BRL doesnt pay us.

There have been a few separate demos that look great, so the best anyone can do now is put them on one HTML document and put a link in the sig.

Too true Smiff, especially on the newsletter front. Although the members of this forum act like a lot of other things too... *gulity look*.

I'm not about to write a new demo for BRL, but I will keep doing my own stuff and if that happens to showcase them - god for them. Odds are anything I do wont make a bit of difference and BRL wouldn't acknowledge if it did.

As I have said quite often of late, B3D is still the best lone home 3D coding language. Coders and teams who are producing and releasing games now are mostly doing it in B3D still.

There's always a next great product on the horizon and has been since the indie programming scene first found this thing called the internet.

Ignore the naysayers, on the whole they aren't the ones producing anything 3D because they dont have the tools.

Sure you can attach any 3D engine onto BMax, if you dont mind being in a community of 1 and having to solve any issues yourself? Good for you, but to those who think it gives them the right to sneer down at my little non-OO using brain, not so smart really are they.

So as for a demo, i'm not fussed really. I dont mind people mocking my choice of tool, I know that it is by far the best tool for the stuff that i'm doing and i'm not budging just because some forum perp thinks i'm wrong.

Something like that would be a lot of work. It would probably take one good programmer and two good artists about a month to produce, working full-time.

There's tons of things you can do with Blitz3D, especially when you start peeking/poking data to the mesh structures to add temporary surfaces and switch pointers to vertex arrays. But it's like, why bother?

Yep, sounds like a nightmare to put together. Though a movie clip wouldn't be too much work, and could turn out almost just as good.

What I get a lot (eg. a project I'm working on right now) is people mocking my use of Blitz without really knowing anything about it, and then I watch their growing astonishment as I not only program lots of stuff they didn't think is possible (and not just in Blitz; I mean possible at all,) I do it ridiculously fast, often on the spot.

"Ha, that's a fun toy I'm sure, but there's no way you can do X!"
"Here's a demo I wrote a month ago. It took me an hour."
"Er, well, it doesn't matter because Y is impossible!"
*tap tap tap* "You mean this?"
"Er, yes..."

lol jhocking. true eh?

tech demo's bare no relation to a actual game with sophisticated gameplay. It's relatively easy to make a gorgeous looking tech demo. Most problems come about when you have sophisticated gameplay using those visuals.

There's no denying you can't do great things, but to get a modern close to commercial game running on a low end system, and have it all run perfectly without sorting issues, surface count problems, high CPU requirements for shadows and hacked physics, sophisticated AI, and networked MP is quite an ordeal.

Graphics are only a small part, but there are still significant holes in the renderer that require features that are supported in DX7 (like compressed textures, some kind of alpha sorting less primitive than the local pivot trick, stencil shadows) infinite light falloff, limited culling and occlusion.

And just simple things like intercolision between animated objects, something that requires hacks to work around, and yet needs to be done in the majority of games which involve shooting and hitting things, elevators, working doors and what have you.

Most of us here work around them or ignore them because we know the shortcomings and overlook them in each others games. But elsewhere, people aren't going to understand.

Fortunately were not the only ones with some of these limitations, and other engines that use scripting languages often have other kinds of gameplay limitations without extensive access and knowledge of lower level functions.

I think there are plenty of tech demo's and not enough finished games. Tech demo's are just tech demo's and quite far removed from a full blown game.

Couldn't agree more.

3D makes completing a game exponentially more difficult IMO.

I think Pete meant a demo that would take care of all that stuff.

I'm often amazed at some of the stuff cygnus throws out. Our little racing game has more impressive AI and physics than the bulk of commercial games. And a torque influenced network lib that only requires the use of 4 commands for the majority of MP games.

It could still look a lot better but the demands on low end CPU's are high, and having put a self imposed limit of 32mb vram for GF2 cards on a 1ghz P3 or athlon processor means that it can't look as good as I'd like.

Better culling and occlusion could help with the vram somewhat. But DXTC seems like something that should be pretty easy to implement in comparison.

I'm with Jack and Halo here... and Smiff pretty much nailed it. I do KNOW that it would be possible to do jaw dropping tech demo using Blitz3D but it would need a lot of time and effort plus at least one GOOD coder and artist (ie two people)... but time is money and most (well I at least) of us rather use it for our own projects.

Why bother to advertize (fading) BRL product for free because they can't give us few simplish feature updates to call Blitz3D "fully featured"? Okay - I *promise* to do nice looking demo (coding crippled to my beginner level) if I get DXTC and tangent space normal maps... easy promise to make because I know I'll never get them.

That's nowhere near "close".

Actually I think it would serve better as a advertisement tool. Fears about the future of B3D aren't exactly rational, but are mostly based on the fact that patches have slowed down as the product has matured. Like you said a lot of people (filax in particular) have made some absolutely mind numbingly awesome stuff in B3D, so I seriously doubt that lack of knowledge as to what B3D can do in the right hands, is what's fueling this.

Well I guess you're two for two, since you where obviously too blinded by prejudice to bother to read my reply. Some disturbing since it was only 5 monosyllabic words.

It srtill is. For someone starting a project today, Max3D is simply not an option.

While I can certainly understand why you would think so, I'd like to point out that you're entirely wrong.

And there you have it folks - BRL's NUMBER ONE FAN :)

I think what Blitz3D really needs is a big, sloppy, wet-nosed puppy, cuddle.

Good job I have the boxed version.

While I certainly understand your reasons for believing yourself to be a human being, let me please point out that you are in fact a dumbass.

He'll probably buy your product just to stalk you.

:) - hey how come dumbass is allowed but @#!* isn't ?

note: This isn't directed at anyone in particular, I'm just testing out the filter because I'm curious.

@#!*
@#!*
ass
bitch
@#!*
@#!*

sniff - yeh, all pick on me - sniff

I'm not sure it's fair to expect Blitz to do something with us at the helm that professional game studios cant do, "le... leouw.... lowe.... low emp, em, emd, e.... end"

I'm not sure what the slagging between Flameduck and halo is actually saying... If I get this right, Flameduck thinks i'm wrong because what I produce will make a noteable difference to BRL's sales figured (yeah right) - so halo "defends me" by saying Flameduck is wrong ... which is in itself an insult.

Should I be offended? I'm confused.

Heh, I thought "halo" was dissing me - he was dissing "FlameDuck", but "Robby" thought he was dissing me too, so he dissed me too - then I thought "jhocking" was dissing me too.

Right, glad I sorted that out.

Forget it. FlameDuck lives in a different dimesion where people 'communicate' by constantly quoting each other only to contradict what they say. :)

now, you're just plain wrong!!!









LOL

I was just making a ridiculous argument the FlameDuck way: Call your opponent "stupid" in as wordy a sentence as possible. His writing sounds like a little kid using big words to sound intelligent.

Becky, don't flatter yourself.

/sigh

I've seen people mention that a version of Blitz3D should be released like DBPro which lets you use C++. The thing is how will this change the features? Wouldn't it just mean that you would be able to code in C++ instead of Basic?

Basically sort of yes Amon, think of it as a 3D engine for C++ all ready to rock and roll, but the last I looked the DarkSDK was still compiled using an old DBP core and not the 5.8+ version where DBP began to become stable at last. TGC isn't paying it too much attention which I can only guess is because the initial sales rush has already died down. There's a lesson there for early adopters...

I'm considering it myself as a temporary stop gap *if* I decide to brush up on my C++ and get a proper job in software again - but I suspect i'll get lazy or scared of deadlines or something...

It's amazing how little comprehension of the English language someone who speaks it daily has. It's also amazing that one of the people I was talking about, and who knows for a fact that I'm right, still chose to disagree.

Well I can't comment on anything you may produce in the future, but that wasn't the part I was commenting on. However, I know Worms and Skidmarks did wonders for BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga, and have no doubts similarilly polished and fun products would do the same on PC / Mac / Linux.

No that's just something you do on the Internet in public as a courtesy to the person you're trying to comunicate with, and any other people who might find topic interesting, but has a life that dictates he cannot follow all discussions religiously, and will on occasion have to do other things, besides reading forum posts, keeping conversation easy to follow and preventing any misunderstandings between who the post was directed too. Pearls before swine, I guess.

I now see the error of my ways, here is the sanitized verswion of my previous post. Judge for yourself which is most suitable for written communication in a public forum.

It's amazing how little comprehension of the English language someone who speaks it daily has. It's also amazing that one of the people I was talking about, and who knows for a fact that I'm right, still chose to disagree.

Well I can't comment on anything you may produce in the future, but that wasn't the part I was commenting on. However, I know Worms and Skidmarks did wonders for BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga, and have no doubts similarilly polished and fun products would do the same on PC / Mac / Linux.

No that's just something you do on the Internet in public as a courtesy to the person you're trying to comunicate with, and any other people who might find topic interesting, but has a life that dictates he cannot follow all discussions religiously, and will on occasion have to do other things, besides reading forum posts, keeping conversation easy to follow and preventing any misunderstandings between who the post was directed too. Pearls before swine, I guess.

All the dissing simply provides a point of life. It just does, doesn't it, people?

I dont diss! *gosh*

I merely abuse the right to misinterpret. It's a very different thing.

Not until I read Worms and Skidmarks in the same sentence did I realize the association.

I can think of alot of uses for DXT Texture Compression, Stencil Shadow Support, and Render to Texture. Which isn't all that complex at all - and can be done with DX7.

Translation: You can't speak English. You are wrong.

I shall retort!

It is with the utmost indignation that a refute your premise, good sir! I am amazed on a daily basic by your lack of comprehension of basic grammar skills! I must commend you for your amazing display of willpower demonstrated daily, when you refrain from killing yourself! Had I the capacity for ignorance you possess, my character would surely not hold the resolve to not blow my brains out!

Hmmm.

I always thought that the point of communication was to be understood, not to demonstrate ones mastery as a form of one-upmanship. Isn't that like saying, "Oh yes, I was bullied harder at school than you where, I am so the dude!"

None-the-less, if it's one-up-manship you want: basis not basic; and "avert blowing my own" works gramatically better than "not blow my"*.

*opinion only.

Antidisestablishmentarianism!

So there.

Stacking words together like that is common in the Swedish language.

Bah, Henry VIII should have kept going!

floccinaucinihilipilification

I thought my sentences were ridiculous enough to show I was making fun of him.

I thought this was a thread asking for the longest word you know.

Halo, when being a smartass, it's generally best to actually get it right, instead of making a twat of yourself. Well, you know, more so than usual, anyway.

You people are still allowed to say twat?

Calling people names on these forums does still put you at risk of being banned so please behave evryone.