Noob Seeks Demo Code

Hi all:-) I'm new to these forums and new to Blitz. I've browsed and searched and found some useful stuff - thanks to everyone for sharing their expertise. I now want to put together my first game - a 2D sidescrolling shooter for now (I'll get around to 3D sometime but want to try something 2D first and something I can finish in a reasonable amount of time).
I'm looking for more or less finished simple games or tech demos that are well commented and relevant to the sort of features I will need for such a game: moving animated sprites, collisions, bullets, simple AI, etc.
Anything I create will, if worth releasing, be freeware.
Thanks in advance.

Questions:

1. Do you own B3D or BlitzPlus?
2. Have you any B3D coding exp?
3. Do you have a 2D sprite generator like Photoshop or other?
4. Is this just for fun, or are you going to be serious an dev something for the community?

Anyway, I found some cool stuff in the BlitPlus demo/samples.
So, download the BP-Demo and have fun.

I have made a sidescrolling game in B3D, flattened the cam render so it looks 2D, and it can flip from 3D to 2D on the fly.

Be advised though, I have heard from others on the forums that B3D will take a huge performance hit with too much 2D use, as it is a "3D" engine.

erm, thats all i guess :)

Well there's always going to be a huge performance hit with "too much" 2D use... if you're not seeing a related performance hit then, by definition, you haven't used too much!

B3D, like Blitz BASIC, is crap (read slow) at reading and writing individual pixels, but for the kind of thing you're going to be doing in a 2D shooter (slapping backgound tiles and spritey images onscreen) it's plenty fast. Which isn't to say that ya might not be better off taking the ol' 3D-as-2D route all the same, just that B3D will cope with 2D.

This is probably an obvious point but 2d commands like 'drawimage' are faster if you call the 'graphics' command as opposed to the 'graphics3d' command - and as Sledge says b3d is fine for 2d games as well as 3d games.

A lot of what you are asking for is mentioned, I think, in the thread a few threads up from this - the Space Invaders thread which is sticky at the top.

Thanks for the responses. I own B3D (and yes I bought it all legal and above board before anyone asks:-)
I haven't done any B3D coding other than playing around with the examples although I have done a fair amount of coding in BASIC though mostly database apps. I wouldn't say I was toooo serious - I just want to play around for a while and assess Blitz and my own aptitudes re game development. As I said, if I produce anything that is worth releasing then it will be freeware (and open source).
Why buy a 3D engine then if I want to do 2D? Well I bought it a little while ago and now that I've finally got around to getting into it I decided I want to take it slowly and figured a 2D game would allow me to get a grasp on the basics of game dev without drowning in complexity.
Thanks for the tip on the B+ demo - hadn't thought of that for 2D examples (doh!)
Basically I expect to me working mainly with animated sprites so I'm glad to hear that should be fast enough in B3D. I had thought that B3D was a superset of B+ but perhaps I am wrong there?
BTW CodeOrc - what did you mean by referring to Photoshop as a 'sprite generator'? Is there an easy way to output a 'filmstrip' in PS that I'm unaware of?
Thanks again all and any further tips or examples welcome.

I was refering to Photoshop as a global tool to use. Pretty much all proggy's like PS will do Filmstrip exporting.

And yes, I was basically saying "use a 2D image creation tool".

Of course my above comments was based on NOT knowing your experience/knowledge level in this regard. It seems you do understand the tools needed.

Check this for reference;

Disclaimer: this is not my sprite sheet, nor is it intended to be pirated, just used for reference.

How ya' like that? lol

very very complete sprite sheet...