Quick BlitzMax Questions

Hey, I own Blitz3D now and I'm wondering how other owners of Blitz3D feel about BMX. I can't use the demo because i DLed it already, but didn't end up having the time to use it..(30 day limit..lame) So when i finally had some freetime to mess around with it...the time expired.


I love pointers. When I read that BlitzMax has pointers for variables and functions..i was pretty excited. How is that working out? Have anyone used them with arrays?
You can create a pointer for Modules right?


From what i've seen, it looks like you can impliment C++ libraries into BMX and it'll understand. So does that mean you could say get DirectX library and it work?

Does the OpenGL have shader support?

Did he improve the sound library so you can pause and play sound. Understanding rewinding effect might be asking for too much. I mostly did graphics programming in Blitz3D, but it seemed like the sound didn't have an option of controlling where you want the sound wave to start or end or gettin info on where the sound is currently(like half way through or something). Can you now? Can you say "PlaySound(Sound, Millisecs)"

Does it have pretty solid documenting on OpenGL commands?

What IDE have you found to be solid for BlitzMax/Blitz3D?

Thanks Guys.

I used a Windows

Pointers... they are useful, but I think most people are not using them as often as they would have in B3D... with the nice new OO features and the open sourcedness, there are often better ways to implement something than to be using pointers. Of course, when you need them, they are there and for that reason they are useful. I havn't used them with arrays, I have used them to point an array to a block of memory and then treat that block of memory like an array. I don't know what you mean by 'create pointer for modules'...

C++ libs... yes Max has capacities to import functions from C++ objects and dlls and the like. I think there are still some small things that mean you'll need to create wrappers for a function here and there, but these aren't nearly as common as in B3D. DX 7 has allready been implemented by BRL and DX9 will be made available when Max3D comes out. Of course, there is nothing to stop you from doing this yourself in the meantime, short of a lack of C knowledge =]

Out of the box, OpenGL implementation is 1.2 - no shaders. However, the latest version of GLEW is supported I think, which means you can use any of the OpenGL extensions up to OpenGL 2.0. Of course, shaders in GL suck, but they are there... nobody has made use of them yet to my knowledge.

The sound library at the moment is very minimalist... it still has problems even with basic playback functions (no, you can't start a sample playback from anywhere but the first byte and you can't auto-timeout a sample, but that's easy enough to code manually)... next version of Max has an improved version which hopefully squashes the major bugs... but as to when new features will be added... I don't think there are many plans for that. I've never seen simon talk about it anyway...

It has skithouse documentation, for BMax let alone for OpenGL, however the community based BlitzMax Wiki is a good resource, many people have done OpenGL tutorials and routines and there's an infinite amount of knowledge on OpenGL on the web anyway.

Most solid IDE = the default IDE. Probably the most advanced IDE = BlIDE. And you could probably find some good plugins/whatever for other multipurpose IDEs out there. Flameduck swears by Eclipse, for example. Again, the next version of Max (due out Monday, last anyone heard) will see the release of the MaxGUI module, which the IDE was written with. The IDE will be opensourced, so expect things to really take off at that point.