Blitz gets some exposure.

Yesterday was our first Digital Media Expose at the University of Lethbridge.
The biggest attractions were an Unreal mod and.... our BlitzMax Rpg engine.

The show was a huge success and among the crowd, we were visited by a handfull of important bigwigs involved in
higher levels of the school. We took the oppourtunity to encourage the burgeoning games-development branch of
our New Media department. Blitzmax was plugged the whole time. They liked what they saw.

The point is, we got some good attention from some important people as well as the general public. These are
the first steps towards getting BlitzMax into our schools. It would fit perfectly into a New Media Degree (ours especially).

I could have (should have) gone a step further and demo'd a copy of Blitzmax and handed out information
cards, eh? That would have been pretty effective.





By the way, you can get a copy of the Rpg editor in question from my website, below.

I had been evangelizing Blitz at RISD's digital media program and somewhat at Brown, but all the people who would care were pretty insistent that they need to use stuff like Unreal or Torque because those tools are "bigger." What got me is that I would point to all the pieces I created using Blitz, and they would repond "well sure it works for your projects, but my project requires something bigger." And then of course their project never materialized. *shrug*

Top banana, Drew. I think BlitzMax would be an ideal language to teach programming with. I'm glad to see you flying the flag.

I try to sing its praises at work as much as possible, but we really require something with better software support. Not knocking Blitz support, however - we spend major grandage for support on products like Labview and Matlab.

yeah, Torque's strength is a large part in its marketing and credibility having originaly come form a AA game. Allthough the original TGE out the box it's pretty limited even in basic DX7 features like multitexturing.

Still their marketing backed by almost fanatical community dedication to the product has taken it a long way into becoming the established indie platform of choice being used in over 120 schools.

I try and evangelise blitz products too, the potential in blitz, particularly Bmax if the 3D module works out should be better than TSE. Torques rigid way of doing things and direction often lacks vision outside of commercial success which leaves it being an odd kettle of fish.

People are often amazed at what can be done with blitz, particularly when they see the driving engine and mashup.

Can't wait for Bmax3D, there's a ton of stuff were doing thats mostly in limbo waiting for the new hopefully more efficient engine to arrive.

No pressure on Mark or anything! LoL

I tell absolutely everyone who would listen about Blitz. We need a nice big community to stay big and grow.

I dont tell anyone about Blitz. I just show them my work, and if they ask I tell them. Most people I talk to do ask what language I use, I normally reply English until they've seen a game or two.

It's nothing to do with fan mentality, it's simply self preservation.

Nice job, and thanks for the plugging efforts.

Note that if anyone gets any interest from their schools, colleges, universities or whatever (and there are quite a few who use Blitz already), we do discounts for bulk orders, so please direct them to sales@... ...


Is that Brown University, Providence, of Lovecraft fame? No real reason, other than "cool!".

I talk both Blitz and Torque up. The way I see it though ... Blitz is great for prototyping new concepts easily but you will leave it behind at some point because the core isn't open for you so it's quite limited. As a one man prototyping tool I don't think there's anything better though. It should definitely be taught in schools.

Torque ... well it is pretty bad ass if you understand it all. It's a much bigger world in there than Blitz is and if you don't have that level of understanding then you won't get it and you'll think it sucks because it doesn't let you do instantly what Blitz does. However, I think that for someone with a great deal of understanding about the engine and the 500,000 lines of source behind it ... they'll get a lot more out of Torque than out of Blitz. Well ... at the moment anyway until everything takes another step up the staircase of abstraction.

I personally am still learning Torque and I'm getting quite a bit out of it. I still use Blitz though on a regular basis ... and probably always will because to me it's like poetry. However, as far as I can tell there's no movement on BR part to get Blitz3D hooked up for Xbox Live Arcade. Honestly, if that happened ... I probably wouldn't look back. Blitz3D on a closed architecture like the 360 would be a dream come true.

Until that day though ... I have to keep my eye on the tool that goes where I want to go.

Torque will take you way longer to make something. Media takes a lot longer to create as well as code.

Torque is better suited to a reliable team.

It depends on what you're making. If you're making a networked shooter ... well you can make it a lot faster in Torque. The game that I'm making with Torque ... I couldn't imagine the amount of work I'd have needed to do with Blitz to bring it to the same point in Torque. On the other hand there's some stuff that I'm sure would take longer in Torque than Blitz. Right tool for the job and all that.

I definitely agree. To make a simple game using Torque's standard features, it's easy, but if you go any farther, it's much more difficult. I've pretty much given up Torque long ago, mainly because it just doesn't work well for my purposes, I guess.

P.S. Did you ever complete any game(s) in Torque? I haven't, although I've completed several in Blitz3D.

It's not complete yet ... but mostly due to the fact that it's ambitious in every way. It's not Torque's fault exactly but mostly the nature of the game. I'm sure that I'll complete it but the game has a team around it and we're digging deep in every aspect from technology to community. The game will be essentially what launches Leadfoot Productions into a full time game studio.