Add-Ons

Personally I think Mark is doing it the right way. BMax is feature packed.

On the other hand...Something that still bothers me to this day...have you seen DBPro and how you have to buy all the so-called "packs"? Utter BS. There's the AI pack, easy rotation pack, multiplayer pack, physics pack, and the list goes on and on. You pay xxx for DBPro then spend another $200 buying the packs to get the features that should have been in it from the start. Honestly, how much money can you bleed from your "customers"?

I disagree.
DBPro and Bmax are programming languages.
You can write your own AI, Physics, multiplayer etc or you can pay somebody else to do it for you.

You are paying for the time people put into the packs, which means you don't have to. It's really a case of is it worth it to you ? (do they save you $200 of time)

If they had all those features to start with, it would probably cost that extra $200 with no choice if you didn't want them. Then people would moan about having to pay for all this stuff they didn't need.

The only difference between the communities is that TGC sell packs ( modules ) for the developers and here the developers sell their own modules. I've spent a lot more than $200 on Blitz products which someone could no doubt argue "should have been in it from the start" simply because I thought they were close enough to how they would have been if I'd written them myself and were worth the money in saved time. I don't value my time cheaply, so when a module/pack is only $20-50 it really isn't many hours work before that becomes cheaper than doing it myself.

Exactly, if you bought my framework you'd be paying me 0.12p per hour to make it :-) The language is a vehicle for all the other possible things you could make yourself or buy in to save tons of time.

People tend to want things for free if possible, and right now! There's not really that much in between.

They way they advertise these "packs" makes it appear that unless you buy the multiplayer pack, that there's no native multiplayer commands. The average consumer would interpret it as...ok I just bought DBPro, but if I want multiplayer then I have to buy the multiplayer pack? It's very misleading and just poor business practice IMHO.

Also the packs aren't just a compilation of functions and .dlls like the "packs" that blitzers sell. They actually add new commands to the language internally. Which lends one to believe that they left them out on purpose in order to capitalize on it. That may not be the case in every instance but it sure appears like it.

What the....

But Blitz Max doesn't have a Physics or AI mod out of the box. If you want these you have to get them from somewhere else.

LOL, that's pretty funny.