BlitzMax interests me...

Hi everyone.
Several of you have told me that Max's features are much better than B3D's. I am considering buying Max and getting a 3D wrapper for it. What is the best wrapper that could allow me to do as much as Blitz3D allows (and more).

miniB3D
miniB3D klepto2
ColdSteel
ggIrr
ggIrrB3D

Afaik all of them are also cross plattform compatible.

Thanks KudosCry.
Is there one that stands out from the others though?

In order of ( personal ) preference and nothing else

TrueVision3D
Irrlicht
Dreamotion
3Impact
Ogre

Dreamotion?

Why and how have I not heard of this before? I must investigate. :)

@Gabriel
(No wonder you like TrueVision3D the most:) )

Okay, I'll check them out.

Lots of them seem to have passed away.

I suggest you check out MiniB3D, and there is also GMan's excellent work listed above :)
Also TrueVision and ColdSteel, also already mentioned.

Thierry-Myke is working on the successor to Eliza 3D, and he appears to be making good progress:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=5277&log=1432

@Picklesworth
Yes, Dreamotion does look interesting. GMan's work looks very good too.

Still working on checking out the others :)

Well the fact that I wrote it and can make changes and know the underlying structure of the wrapper is certainly a help, but essentially it worked in reverse. I wrote the wrapper because I thought it was the best engine out there. If I'd have thought something else was better, I'd have written a wrapper for that instead. Or saved myself a lot of work and used someone else's.

GMan's wrappers are very well written and well supported. If I wasn't using TV ( for two projects as of yesterday ) I'm fairly sure I'd be using one or the other of his wrappers.

Does BlitzMax come with tutorials?
[Edit] Never mind (I installed the demo)

@Gabriel
Will I need to learn how to use your TrueVision3D or does it come with tutorials?

My wrapper apes almost identically the syntax of TV3D, so I just provide a few samples to get started. Beyond that everything that's written in C#, VB, Delphi, etc for TrueVision should work exactly the same in BlitzMax.

But bear in mind that TV costs $150 ( 6.2 is free, but cannot be interfaced with BMax as far as I can see ) and does not come with any true documentation yet. So mostly it's reading the forums and reading the headers, and also most of the syntax is very similar or identical to 6.2, so the docs for that are very useful.

It's a lot easier than I expected, offering me no more of a learning curve that B3D did when I started with it, but I'm a learn by doing person. If you don't want to pick it up, and just get stuck in and fiddling with things, it's probably not the engine you want.

Oh, and TV3D is organized entirely by types and methods, so if you're completely anti-OOP, you might not like that either. The engine itself is not very object-oriented ( although it's set up so that you can make it object-oriented easily if you wish ) but if you're one of the dedicated to prodcedural people, again, you might not like TV.

In that situation, you might find Dreamotion ( dunno what the docs are like ) or MiniB3D more suitable. Of course, MiniB3D and Dreamotion are ( I think? ) completely free anyway, so if you buy BlitzMax you can grab them and not bother considering TV3D or something of that nature unless you need more power or flexibility than you have with those.

Sadly, TV3D 6.5 is still technically in beta, so I'm not really supposed to be posting videos and stuff of the things I'm doing in TV. I've just started a short contract project using TV and perhaps I'll be allowed to post some goodies from that soon. It's very different from my personal project and should be done a good deal sooner. If only because I'm not being paid enough for it to take me 2 years :P

Alright. Thanks for all of the info and tips. I might end up with miniB3D or with TV3D, but the first step is to buy Max. (Which will probably be in a month or something when I have money [if I do buy it]) Thanks again Mr. Gab.

minib3d is excellent. it is dead-easy, stable, fast, free and open.

Yes, it looks quite promising. I don't like the name though. It should be something like: 3-Dimensional Max Extreme or 3DME for short (that has a nice ring to it).

Heh, for the past 4 years...

Is there an good and well supported OGRE module for BlitzMax that is cross platform compatible? TV3D, Dreamotion3D and 3impact are not for Mac and thus not interesting =)

It hasn't even been in development for that long. If you want a commercial grade engine without paying a commercial grade price, the only way you're going to get it is from people who aren't doing it full time or from very small teams. They could, of course, have released it a year ago, and it would still have been better, faster and less buggy than most of the competition, but they chose to wait until they're truly happy instead of releasing something which doesn't work as well as it should.

were making a Ogre module for blitzmax, but are primarily using it for a commercial project and so a community release is a few months away, when were better able to support it.

It uses ogre Eihort (latest ogre version)in a Bmax window with full Maxgui support too, so pretty cool really :)

We will release it when we have proper docs, at the moment we just have straight ogre API port, A SOW emulation layer that we used temporarily to port to our new engine when SOW dropped out of the scene. And plan on a B3D like basic version that is simplified to be more friendly to blitz users with fewer commands.

Tell me if you need an Mac betatester because OGRE really is nice, I just can't stand coding C/C++ anymore. C# is very much out due to the fact that Mono is just not as advanced as .net and so I'll stay a BlitzMax user.
I guess your OGRE version won't be free but I don't mind paying for a decent 3D engine I can use. minib3d works for me right now and with the future upgrade (a.k.a. Newton physics addition) it'll be the best solution for 3D on BlitzMax SO FAR. I'm very excited about all engines that are in development at this time (and that can be used on Mac OS as well ^^).

I'm also interested to purchase Bmax regarding use of 3D engine extensions for it, available right now..my question is, if i purchase Bmax, I will receive Bmax for use on all supported OS'es, or i have to buy license for specific OS, separately?

@Naughty - you get them all.

Actually, it has been. I've recalled signing up to get the 6.5 beta back in early 2003 because a public release was "due to be release any day now". A couple years later it turned out to be only released to registered users and a public release was still "due any day now". Heh, I think it even beat out Max3d for the longest delay ever.

@KudosCry
No, I don't need it (I'm not a Mac user).