How capable is BMax with 2D?

I am about to start making a game and own BMax but before I start I would like to find out just how capable BMax is of creating a polished 2D game. Does it have everything I need or would I be better off sticking with Blitz3D\Blitz+ for the moment as BMax is still maturing? I know there have been issues with a few items, sound for one, so I want as smooth a ride as possible without having to deal with unwanted problems. Am I better of sticking to Blitz3D with a sprite lib as I want to do a 2D in 3D type game.

I`m sure people here have some experience with BMax so please bring me up to speed if I am out of touch.

Jason.

BMax uses 2d in 3d and if your graphics card has 2d hardware support it will be entirely hardware accelerated. You can scale and rotate stuff easily. You can apply tints and shadow effect, lighting and shading effects, and it's fairly easy to load/save stuff. It's pretty fast and should have everything you need unless you're doing something very unusual.

As long as you don't need perpixel access, its very fast as all is done in 3D. If you need perPixel or need rendering to buffers, then you better stick with old Blitz versions, BM does not know of buffers or support them.

you can use opengl pbuffers, and I believe someone has done a closed source directx render to texture tweak too...

Yeah Indiepath.
But BM can't do it on its own.

Somewhat of a moot point tho', isn't it?

I'd say go for it. Sure BlitzMAX is still maturing, and I suspect it will continue to for some time, that doesn't mean it isn't a very capable language, just that it's getting better all the time.

BM surely is a very capable language and the 2D mod is superb :-)
But the question was in comparision with the old Blitz and with respect to that part, mentioning the pixelaccess problem and non-existant buffer drawing seemed usefull to me as it caused many problems by blitz3d->bm switchers in the past.

Well you're right ofcourse, but I imagine finding third party products that do what they want will be much less of a hurdle than automatic garbage collection and that whole objects thing. :o>

Not completely, since relying on a 3rd party plugin could be an issue if the creator drops support for it later on... Or even right now, while Indiepath hasn't recompiled & released his modules in a version that's compatible with BMax 1.18

Fair enough. rely on free (as in speech, not beer) instead then. If you have the source code you can recompile it yourself.

Go with another 3rd party plug-in then. Or buy it. I believe Indiepath has source code licensing options aswell.

I would say very capable of making a good 2D game, it's certainly better now and more simpler than using quads in Blitz3D.