B3D, best time ever or what?

Lately I've been updating Aerial Antics big time. I've got a whole slew of nice changes and additions (the biggest one being multiplayer, which is a blast). The one thing that's truly great though is that AA now runs on so many more systems out there ... and nicely to boot. I can throw this puppy on anyone's system these days! The whole thing has me pretty excited because 3-4 years ago when I initially developed it, the game was pushing it a bit as far as casual games goes but today it seems poised to bring some of those casual gamers in a little deeper. Well, honestly that's wishful thinking ;)

The point is B3D is really in its prime right now as far as developing 3D games that run on a large number of systems. I've really been pleased with it lately and although I'm excited about a number of other tools out there, I can't help but get a bit giddy when I do something cool with B3D. Sure it's not new and shiny ... but as far as coding goes is there anything that feels more poetic? Is there anything that walks the line between high level and low level access so well?

Well said, B3D is the daddy. Add well done too, I remember your game well.

Jeremy,

Yes I agree totally - its not what you got - it's what you do with it that counts.

B3D is a great tool and very flexible.

IPete2.

B3D is a king boyz...with such additions like andreymans library, sprite/particle candy, Easy tok..its really cool...I love it...

HAHA! you got the "30fps but double the forces" working then! It was fun playing, but you kicked my arse.

Indeed. B3D is ALMOST as addictive as DiGiorno Pizza.

They should do something about the size of exe's though. Why is every command tagged onto the file even if not used in the game?

I'm guessing that way-back-when, it was just simpler/more stable that way?

I'm not trying to have a go at you Steve (or anyone else that's asked that question in the last 6 years or so), but with UPX (for example), a typical Blitz .exe comes in at under 500k or thereabouts - around the 1 MB mark without. Surely these days that's dwarfed by the enormous amount of media (and the size thereof) of any non-trivial game?

When Blitz first hit the scene, I understood: 1 MB out of the 5MB you were looking to hit to make it 'download friendly' for the 56kers was a huge chunk to lose. But with the size these days of demos, games and even patches to games, I just don't get why it's such a big deal anymore.

And Blitz is still the best computer-related money I've ever spent. No competition.

Absolutely - best value from ANY product I have ever bought - not just IT related.

Saying how brilliant b3d is, should be banned. Its very bad for the mental health of us Bmax users.

My fave is Max but still agree totally with the positive comments about B3D. Gotta love it.

max is still beta, b3d is rock solid. period.

LineOf7s, I had to add something negative - as H&K said:


;-)

i hope max3d offers the same value for money.

i think we know it will :O)

I hope Max3d offers ease of use.

>I can't help but get a bit giddy when I do something cool >with B3D

I completely agree! The strength and curse of BASIC, seat of the pants coding and there's noone to hold your hand.

Andy

Are you tired of Torque ? -:)
If I remember it was your favourite
Personally I think that Blit3d is the best entry level tool but it is getting old

Erm, AFAIK max is not beta anymore.

BlitzMax is really starting to to get into it's stride and is gaining momentum. Hopefully the 3d module doesn't appear until a solid foundation is established - which is not far off it seems.

B3D is getting on in years but it is still a great tool for new people to programming in general and people with older computers

for casual game developers, B3D is must have tool...

I'd wager it will, but you'd be hard pressed attacking the 'casual' market with it I'd say... maybe in 5 years or so... assuming it doesn't stay up to date.

I must admit that I find PB as a languge to be better than B3d. Obviously for 3d games b3d has the edge, but not my as much as one would think.
Mind they are both better then BDpro

I love B3D where it is. In my past. It's something I can look back on with fond memories, and - as we tend to do - forget about it's problems, gloss over it's weaknesses. I wouldn't enjoy using it now. As much as OOP still causes me problems ( because I'm a beginner ) it saves me many more problems. The versatility of non-OOP language features such as slices, lists, maps, pointers, passing by reference adds so much too. So yeah, many fond memories, but I like them best as memories.

I'm kind of with Gabriel, Blitzmax is a big step forward and I'd find it very hard to go back, whether its coding, which I'm relatively new to, and particularly as an artist, even if you do 3D there are already some really good addon modules that surpass B3D by some considerable margin.

I have fond memories of Blitz3D but think its time to press on with newer technology.

Amen.

Using Blitz3D, from when I first started using it (late beta) through to writing my first proper game in it (Juno) was so exciting! Learning so much and actually being able to make games was the best thing ever.

I'm using Blitz3D now for a contract and it's the most horrible coding experience I've ever had. Back when I was using Blitz3D years ago, I didn't know any better, but now I've written many tens of thousands of lines of BlitzMax (and some lisp/lots of C#) there are features I simply cannot do without. Knowing that the problems you're having wouldn't exist or would be trivial to solve in a more powerful language is downright painful.

After this, I'm never going to touch it again, not for any amount of money - life is too short! But I am ever thankful that it was made, and fondly remember hacking up my first real games in it. I don't think I could have had the same experience with BlitzMax, which is much more complex for the beginner (a necessary evil when making a powerful language).

Yes, yes I use Torque and think it's a better tool for certain projects but that doesn't mean I don't spend time with Blitz, I do and I think it's amazingly fun to use.

To everyone that mentioned BMax ... sure it's a better language but let's be honest it doesn't really offer the same seat of your pants experience of B3D just yet ... mainly because there's no 3D module created by Mark.

Sure there are other modules but they don't offer anywhere near the elegance of Mark's system. Additionally, most of those will not run on a lot of hardware. Moving on with technology means leaving a lot of people out of your game. With B3D you can now finally create a 3D game and still include everyone whereas 4-5 years ago this wasn't the case. New technology is exciting and all, but if you're actually in it for games it simply doesn't matter.

I guess I'm looking at this as I used to look at older consoles. The best games always came out at the end of a consoles lifecycle but usually people were already eyeing the newer consoles and not really taking notice of the older stuff ... no matter how good it was. Well, the hardcore people weren't paying attention to the older stuff ;) I think a lot of those software titles on the tailend usually ended up selling quite well because ... drumroll ... the system had the largest user base by that time ;) That's all I was really getting at. I wasn't trying to compare B3D to the newer stuff or other engines, I was just saying that it's really in its own little sweet spot at the moment.

I completely agree.

I think Blitz3D's sweetspot was around this time last year. There's just too much going on right now, and a lot more capable tools than there used to be.

For casual games I still think B3D is hard to beat, but I'm not really interested in those much myself. Even if there is a huge market for it, I don't find any satisfaction working on them.

See I figured last year surely was a rough spot for B3D considering the racer and the lack of decent video cards as well as the lack of texture compression. Surely, the fact that you stopped development after spending so much time on it is a sign that last year was not the sweet spot. This year it would be a very doable game on a lot of systems.

this year makes no difference really, Blitz3d lacks some basic fixed function material features to really catch up with a modern engine, and thats without shaders.

At the end of the day the problems with the racer were surface counts and lack of scene optimization, poor culling and using an out dated physics lib. It would have required a rewrite to get the game to the state we would have been happy with on the engine front, even if the graphics stayed the same.

After spending so long on it, it seemed better to take a break and start over when we were more motivated and had a better engine.

As far as the render engine goes, texture compression is one small thing amongst many problems that we encountered that required inefficient dirty work arounds to overcome. I won't be using B3D for any more games unless the multitexturing (mostly alpha related) and dynamic shadows improves by some considerable margin.

The racer was really a project I spent about 3-4 years on in total, starting from its first incarnation even longer.

More was done to it over last year when working with Evak than ever before it. I beleive it shines and proves that LAST year was a GOOD spot for B3D. if I had taken the time to finish converting the code to JV-ODE perhaps the surface count would have been less of a problem and we would have seen more than just the tech demo we got out of it.

Sure, we could go over it now with DDS, or we could move onto Ogre and MAX, and some form of physics engine, making it cross platform, faster, nicer looking etc.

IMO B3D has been struggling for a year or so now, the DDS support will breathe fresh life into it, especially for those who were struggling to keep the VRAM down and used low-res textures to do it. I can't wait to see what comes, but we are settled now.

A new engine is required to stay afloat if you will. I've stayed with BRL for a long, long time, but I'm actually finding coders who were once learning from me are now off making their own engines in C++/C# and so on. For these people B3D simply isn't enough.

Its a great bit of software. I still play with it on occasion when figuring some stuff out and prototyping ideas, because its quicker than anything else :)

Anyway, I went off topic. B3D is a good tool, I think the best year was likely the last one, this year will see new life from DDS though.

I think you two are focused on personal achievement and not actual game achievement. I'm sure you feel you are growing more by using newer tools. However, using what you are using cuts your game back to about the same number of users B3D could reach 3 - 5 years ago.

I definitely think you're looking past gameplayers with your development and thinking more along the lines of your personal gratification. So yes perhaps the 'sweet spot' with what you thought you could achieve technically was last year (although I didn't see many differences between last year and the year before). If that's the case then we're talking about two different things. I'd imagine that many of the people you're attempting to keep up with still haven't published a game and are simply in it for the technical challenge. Using C++ has its benefits as everyone knows I've pushed those on these very forums. Those benefits have nothing to do with my claim of B3D's current sweet spot.

If you excuse me now I'll have to get back to taking advantage of that sweet spot ;)

I'm not really trying to keep up with anyone as such, more just stay somewhere where we can still compete- with what We want to do.

If you're creating Racers, Blitz can't handle the quality you need to put into the game and compete. (LFS for example) Yes, creating a cick-ass racer in Blitz felt good but by the end of our demo we found ourselves heavily limited and cutting huge corners.

Ogre may cut back on customers, but it may take us a long while to finish a project, during which time the userbase will have become larger, and dx9 will likely become standard, min spec machines. (and the quality of the racers elsewhere would have improved. *shrug* perhaps you're right there ;) )

J, with simple games like AA you can now get much more detail into it, Work on the gameplay like you have been and you will breathe more life into it, I don't doubt.

I agree Jeremy, without B3d my game would be in Dev for another 2 years, lucky though, because of Blitz, it gets to launch at the end of this month!

Btw, did you use a library for AA's new multiplayer or custom code one?

I whipped it up initially using DirectPlay and now have converted over to BlitzPlayPro version 2.15. The game now has a jet pack soccer mode which works pretty well. It's not optimized but it's fun ;)

If I got into a personal slagging match with Mark Silby. If I was send to Aussie by a judge and kicked from there to New Zealand and forced to eat his pet's doo doo, if Mark photoshopped naked pictures of me and put them on the Blitz Research web site, I would still not regret purchasing Blitz3D.

I'd still slap him though.

Lol!!!


Where would he get those naked pics of you from !:P

[edit]

Ah, photoshop, :)

LOL

I would also like to add my personal adoration of Blitz 3d. I can have an idea, and then have a working prototype in a couple of hours.

Beautiful Blitz.

I agree with the versatility of Blitz3D programming, and am still enjoying it even now.