Are there any good games created in Blitzmax?

Bmax has been on the market quite a while now. Have there been any good quality, commercially lucrative games created in it? The games that appear in the showcase that are made in Bmax are almost without exception pretty poor quality, so that's why I'm asking.

www.cloverleafgames.com : cbubble is BMAX (http://www.cloverleafgames.com/webbed.php)

Inca Quest is the best I've ever seen.

Inca Quest is pretty damn smart!

The Mac port of Platypus was done with BMax too, I think?

Yep.

Platypus Win32 source + BlitzMax + many four letter words = Platypus MacOS.

If I'm not mistaken, Michael also did Inca Quest. The guy is a top quality developer. Check out these shots:

funny I was going to start a thread like this today too. Really Indiepath has two games, cbubble and caboodle (the original one).

I hope to add my next game to thest list in about 2 months time.

To be honest, with the mouse lag bug and other minor issues (win98 sound bug springs to mind) I'm getting a bit paranoid that maybe not many PRO games have been (or are going) to get made in Max!

Frankly, the amount of work that will go into a 'pro' game makes solving those problems an insignificant part of development.

It would be nice if there were some good games written in the Linux version of BMax. To me, Linux versions of BMax games could probably be ported into XBox or X360 easily, since XDK uses Linux code to make XBox games (another topic).

To me, I see homebrew games becoming a lot easier in the long haul, and BMax does seem to do well in this department, just have yet to see what happens with that. Have yet to figure out how to actually run the games in Linux, they compile, but they don't run right after compilation like B3D does. That's what gets me curious...

> To be honest, with the mouse lag bug

Oh, you mean the 'lose a frame of mouse input approximately' once every second?
Man I thought I was the only person to be suffering from that.

Is it just me or did the Inca Quest release slip anyone else by?

I remember Michael (RitzenBiscuitStains) working on it, but never heard anymore about it. Well done for getting it finished!

Gonna take a look now.

People like Michael Reitzenstein are influential and crucial to development of blitzmax and should be listened to. Not many serve as such a good advertisement for the language.

Tanks Evolution was pretty good : http://en.realore.com/tanksevo/






Its kinda weird to download though...

Michael Reitzenstein: Yeah well done with your game. Anyway, sure there is loads of work involved in making a pro game but actually having to solve technical issues that are part of the language/platform are a pain in the arse and can still take hours so I'd rather not have to do them!

Inca Quest is a tour de force. Beautiful and polished in so many ways: music, graphics, visual flourishes. It oozes quality and style, and plays really well.

There are a few tiny things I could criticise, but it really would seem petty considering how professional it all is.

Reminds me of the old Neo-geo game Puzzle de Pon from back in the mid 90s....

Puzzle Bobble then :)

galactia space jam was pretty cool!

No, the 'the mousex and mousey are perpetually very noticably dragging behind the actual system mousepointer drawn on the screen (and the physical movements), and won't catch up until you stop moving'

It's like a multiple in a shootemup, basically - that bad.

I guess it's okay if you don't need to use mouse input? :-D

I'm sure there will be more and more good quality games from BlitzMax people in future.

I'm still kinda finding my feet with Blitzmax but I'll probably rustle something up before too long.

I've hit upon a slight problem, though. I've recently remembered that not only do I suck at 3D graphics, I'm not really that great at 2D either.

Gridwars is a fine example of a BlitzMax game, it's the fifth one down on this page.

Getting nice reviews too.

Yeah, now if there would've been a Linux version of Gridwars, I'd be floored up the wazoo. The only two I see are probably for Windows and Mac, any plans for a Linux port?

Don't you have a WinXP desktop and laptop though? :)

It should be easy enough to just compile Gridwars on a linux machine, to get it to be a linux version. That after all is the whole point of Max being cross-platform. You shouldn't have to make any changes to get it ported.

I have Win XP Pro on my notebook. However, I just recently partitioned my desktop, and now Xandros is my default OS on my desktop. I forgot to update my sig on that. However, I just ordered Ubuntu for my desktop (Xandros wasn't as much of a gamer's Linux OS as I thought). However, I would like to play that on my notebook (my notebook's still gonna run Win XP Pro, I'm not getting rid of this at all). Seems like I'm gonna be able to do Blitz 3D games for Windows, and BlitzMax games for Linux, that seems like the best way to do things now. Be able to build games for both platforms, and with the Linux version of BMax, I could develop some homebrew XDK games for my XBox (with that open source SDK from SourceForge, since BMax only does 2D, it should go in rather painlessly with the XDK).

OK, just had a good look at Inca Quest. It's very polished, really good use of BlitzMax, if this is what's possible then great!

Michael: I don't get any mouse lag, how did you solve it or was it never an issue? What timing method did you use: delta timing, fixed logic or just sync to a set refresh rate e.g. 60Hz (surely not)? Any other cool tips you'd care to pass on?

He uses GrabPixmap(0,0,2,2) every frame after flip. As far as I know, the timing is fixed logic.

I would suggest you learn blitzmax, and then you will be in a position to make your own judgement on it.

Don't feel bad, this is the first I have heard of it. It is a great looking game!

WOWZERS! This is a really cool & fun looking game!

Problem is now you have to test it on that platform. Just compile and ship isnt an option. You still have to test every function to make sure nothing funny is happening. That's the joy of cross platform development.

I used logic fixed at 100hz (mostly so the numbers are easy to work with). I was considering changing this with my next game, but I decided against it as it worked well enough in Inca.

Cool tip: work hard.

Gridwars is a cool game.
It is great that the source is included.

I agree, Gridwars is great, it's one of those games where you know that the author had a lot of fun developing it. Amazingly polished.

Yeh Michael, no news item or forum announcement of any kind. R U Shy?

A linux version of gridwars can be found here: http://gridwars.marune.de/

It's already helped fix a variety of bugs in BlitzMax Linux although fullscreen failure still requires a fallback window display to solve some reported issues.

Can we include games that were never finished? If so I have to follow indiepath and bring up one of our own games. Full Metal Conflict. Better physics than halo, better graphics than unreal. Better weapons than any game in the genre. Missiles that cast lens flares, explosions that rocked players and a kick ass fatboy slim soundtrack. Word.

Don't include unfinished games please.

Michael: Thanks for the info. 100Hz is quite a slow fixed logic loop. I know this one, believe me ...

Post a demo or some screenshots in the showcase forums...a lot of us would want to see!

Michael: sorry to keep asking but your answers help both me and the community :-) but ...

1) your music appears to be .dat files. So really what format is it and how did you play it given the various threads about oggs and mp3s floating about?
2) Also did you have any Win98 issues with sound and graphics, and if so, did you manage to fix them?
3) Did you really use the GrabPixmap pixmap fix as stated by One Eyed Jack?
4) What sort of framerate did you view as normal and how low a spec machine could your game run on and still be acceptable e.g. 1GHz laptop with non-big name video card?
5) Did you (are you going to) make a Mac version? (or Linux version, probably not worth it)
6) Oh yeah, just notice my profile is a txt file haha (nice 'n' easy to hack, if you could even call it that), so tell me then, what does "MichaelWasHere 0" do? is it a cheat or Easter Egg?

If you feel like answering some of all of those questions, I'd be eternally grateful, thanks :-) Maybe I should start a new thread ...

1) Ogg
2) FMod
3) Yes
4) I just optimised it until the publisher stopped complaining!
5) Yeah, but it's not released.

Maybe I should start up a new thread.

Obviously its a setting that I dont want people to know about...

do you want me to erase it from my post :-D

btw, thanks loads for the answers.

Inca Quest just freezes on the load up screen for me. Looks good from the screenshots though.

Update your nvidia drivers?

FMC's that game that Ant made a version of, then I made a version of completely unrelated.

Oh, and it's not BlitzMax Ant, He asked for BlitzMax :D

(Okay, wait a few days guys. :P)

Nah. It was easier to just uninstall Inca Quest than messing about trying to find a solution. QA is the developers responsibility, not the consumer's.

Well, actually, the QA could also be verified by a publisher, if the developer decides to throw his game over to a third-party, then that would be the case.

nah, QA is the responsibility of the end-user, always ;-)

You're hardly a consumer though, you're a fellow developer, and putting in a little effort to help someone out doesn't hurt.

Michael,

Just thought that you should know, Inca Quest does not work with my Geforce 6600 nVidia graphics card with the stereo drivers installed. I'm going to try with my other more recent drivers this evening and I shall report back.

IPete2.

Argh. My question for that is, do normal BlitzMax games work? I don't do anything special so I'm not sure what the problem is.

How does it crash? Does it freeze? Quit while loading?

Maybe its not Blitzmax...maybe its FMOD?

Michael,

I have now installed the latest drivers 84.21 - I have the latest DirectX9.x and it just won't boot up...er hold on the only thing I have doen is install it on my F drive...I will go see if thats the problem.


[Edit] Ok I have re - installed it from scratch on my C drive - that wasn't it. Yes I can run BlitzMax proggies - I also have BMax on my machine. MSN is the only thing I have running at the time of boot - er which I can see in my task bar - any thoughts???

Ok just downloaded CBubble (excellent btw) and it plays fine...

I should say that Inca doesn't even show any signs of exectuting on my system, the hard drive runs but nothing happens on screen.

I am really sad because it looks a FABTASTIC game, and I wanna play it!


Athlon 1900+
768MB RAM
Geforce 6600 with 256 DDR RAM on board
Audigy 1 Creative sound card
WindowsXP home edition SP2




IPete2.

Pete, can I email you with a debug logging exe in a day or two? I wonder if its the sound...

Good luck resolving it. I wonder if it's nvidia specific.

I had a lot of problems with a Geforce 7800GTX system running drivers 85.12.

Inca Quest ran fine on my test systems, all have Nvidia cards. Normally in BMax DX is really poor in performance, but this played just fine and looked great.

Awesome job Michael!

This is not exactly "my type" of game, but this is very professional looking, great theme and pretty original IMHO. The gameplay is very good.

I hope you are making some good "coins" off of this, because the game certainly deserves it.

Works on my 6600GT here, latest drivers too. I think that MSN has caused a few issues from threads in the forum (conflict with DX surfaces caused by dodgy MS programming in MSN?), try turning that evil-ness off and see if it works after that.

Very nice work Michael!

MSN plus extension with desktop contacts on causes a huge DX slowdown in all windowed mode dx games, it isn't blitz specific.

Can those having trouble report their *desktop resolution* please, and if they are using a widescreen monitor. Certainly sounds fmod related though?

Sorry you misunderstood my post, or I didn't put my point across properly. I was just pointing out to one eye that a consumer won't mess around with drivers and such, they'll just uninstall and move on.

Max games work for me fine. The game appears to freeze on the loading screen. You know where all those guys are just staring at you. The loading bar gets to two lumps then it stops. The system doesn't freeze as I was able, with a little coaxing, to get the task manager on screen and kill the game. When I tried again I got the same thing. It also said two minutes of my trial had past so it can't have been completely frozen.

Yeah, I had a similar thing - the game hadn't frozen, though, it just took a while to load (~30 secs or more). I did get a BSOD at the end of installation, but apart from that, all was peachy.

Inca Curse is VERY nicely produced. Great job. I think this is the only bmax game I've tried that didn't have completely distorted sound on my win98 machine.

heh, it's why my loading bar has a % so if it locks, the user can tell me the % and I know what function it's in. In fact my professional business software stores a bootlog for this purpose, AND a shutdown log.

Inca uses fmod, thats why there isn't any distorted sound bugs. Apparently a lot of test machines are getting distorted sound on Win98...

Nah, I think your missing simonh's point. I think his point was the next time you need something tested don't count on many to jump to it, as it's your responsiblity and it's easier for the rest of us to say we have better things to do.


@Michael Reitzenstein
Nicely polished game, the screenies look very promising. I'll mess with the demo when I get home (gf7800 GT OC)

Michael,

Yes that's ok - if the email is bigger than 5MB my ISP will stop it coming through. You can catch me on MSN most days peter@... is my MSN Messenger sign in. Or you could send me an email with a link.

I'll be happy to see the game running ob my PC.

IPete2.

PS sorry I did not respnd last night my broadband was down from about 8:45pm. Back now though - gosh I can't imagine a day with out it now! Isnn't that strange?