BRL on vacation?

As the topic says, is Mark on vacation?
No new post from him for a week..
Looks like Skid's busy too, no posts for a week, except for one yesterday and one the day before..

They're finalizing the coming BlitzMax's GxLib and new IDE from the last post, they're doing these:
1.Tiding up the Blitz3D update
2.Preparing the next version BlitzMax

As it's known BRL are always busy with the products...

Lars: They do what programmers should do: Program, not post around in boards.
thats what community managers etc are for :)

A Blitz3d update? Do you mean the SDK? Are there any details relating to this update Or is this just a guess on your part? ;-)

> A Blitz3d update? Do you mean the SDK? Are there any details relating to this update

They had some bugs and features to be added to the SDK, which they noted they are working on. They also mentioned adding the improvements of the SDK to B3D proper.

Mark is finishing up Max3D I think.

/duck

But which improvements??

> But which improvements??

Can't remember exactly what it was, but there was a performance improvement, vertex buffer sorting, something like that.

blitz3d update WWWWOOOOOOO!!!!!

Well, skid did promised to release the Blitz3D 1.99 update to fix existing bugs, and the update might come with B3DSDK, that's not a guess but it seems the date will slip.

As what Mark is doing, just check his worklog.

They're trapped in my basement - you'll never see them again! Muwahahahahah!

Just to add to the Mark's (and/or Simonh) to do list (for my needs at the moment) - if and when they have time:
1. ogg-streaming (I'm using the Vertex's solution but I would prefer a standard solution for any supported platform Win, Mac and Linux)
2. MaxGUI: are there any updates planned? Grid-gadget for example...

i hope mark isn't wearing a gimp mask flameduck :-)

1. ogg-streaming

100% agree....what BMax really need.,
and probably integrate MaxMod with module capability...

I didn't promise anything of the sort.

LOL

Why do you guys want ogg streaming so bad.. you plan on running games off streamed sounds ??

REDi's MaxMod can be used for streaming audio including MP3, OGG and a couple of others.

Nope, but it would be nice to be able to play music without waiting for it to all load into memory.
MaxMod is very good but I would think BRL could add this (and then support it) quite easily. It seemed an odd decision for Mark to dismiss it so completely.

What would be wrong with running games with dtreamed oggs? CPU use?

Well, I would try to minimize all network traffic which is somehow possible to minimize. The oggs could be downloaded via the stream, and then played locally (so there would be no seperate "patching client" mode). As well as all other files which need to be dynamically updated to the client (character models, textures, etc..).

If you plan to have more than lets say 200 players, it starts to get quite a lot of network traffic, alone the TCP/IP overhead is quite big, and usually you disable the overhead, lower the network update frequency and use cubic splines or bezier curves to smoothen the movement of players, or use UDP (but then you have the next problem with error correction).

It takes CPU whether time-shared streaming or streaming in another thread (unless there are multi-cpu).
I haven't seen anybody use another process for music e.g. CreateProcess with a B3D program (Win only of course) running as a music server/player.

I'll stick to bloating the memory with massive uncompressed oggs then.

Simon Armstrong and Mark Sibly promised me they would:

- fix AA in blitz sdk
- fix MakeGame()
- drink less beer

Actually I think the last item is probably the straw that breaks the camel's back. I'd like the first one though. Wishful thinking.

Lies! All lies!

IMO MakeGame() should have as parameters MMORPG, FPS, RTS, and at least INVENT_NEW_CONCEPT.

Actually MakeGame() should really just be a wrapper function for LastNinja2.Clone().

I so thought 1.99 was already out. Silly me.