Leaving Blitz3D :(

Hi Guys, after 3 years working with Blitz3D, I think what now is time to leave this engine, and, I'm looking for another engine, if you know some really good Indie Engine, please, post here to me (I own this engines: NeoAxis, Torque, DarkBasicPRO).

The main motive what I'm leaving Blitz3D is because the engine doesn't have updates to new technologies... I'm owner of a serious company of game development, and, I really need better graphics to survive in the market...

If you know some good Indie Engine, for "Rapid Development", and, uses DirectX 9 or OpenGL, please, contact me =D...

I'm Really sad about leaving Blitz3D, is the better engine I have worked, Really fast and easy to develop a game, my unique problem is about the graphics, shaders and etc, :(...

Best Regards,

BlitzMax.

Personally I feel that Blitz3D has many years of life left - it's all about your vision, and the capability of your artists.

If that's not enough, I'd suggest either C#+XNA, or Blitzmax+TV3D, or C#+TV3D.

These sort of threads crop up a lot.

Personally I'd love to see a DX10+ version of Blitz3D.

Cobra3D:
http://www.cobrabytes.com/

Stop acting like dropping an inferior product from use is such a dramatic change in your life.

For suggestions, I would recommend Truevision 3D and C#.

I wonder what % of hardware/OS/driver setups that Blitz3D fails on. I'd imagine that these days, Blitz3D games/apps can run on 99% of machines. Regardless of the %, a higher availability is very important for sales.

I can't possibly speculate, but I'd guess that a Blitz3D app/game has more of a chance working (and hence selling) than a C#+TV3D app/game.

Nothing will selling witout teh shaderz!!!!1

JME or Unity3D..both rocks and light easy to use...

EmerGki, I think you can upgrade your models, textures, animation, and a lot of other things which already would improve your game ideas a lot before moving to another engine. Also, there is always the promise of a Direct X 9 Engine, which you can hold to. Two serious DX9 engines are in the works, well one is on hold but will be back on track later. There are many libraries fully adapted to Blitz3D for revitalizing the featureset of this solid language.

I think you're gonna waste your time.

Look at 3D Rad 6.

I agree with _33. Your game graphics look terrible, even for DX7. You could go a long way to improving your graphics in a DX7 environment. Plus, you wouldn't lose out on selling to the casual market who don't all have the ability to run DX9.

Shaders aren't some magic wand. Look at World of Warcraft. No shaders. Looks amazing. You can make great looking games in DX7. What it comes down to is how good your artist is.

Sure, shaders would let you do MORE, like, more easily make nice looking terrain, but you're not even using what you've got now to its full extent.

You could have the nicest looking grass and water in the world, but if you're going to populate the world with castles and soldiers that look like they were created by a kid who's still learning how to model and texture, what's the point? It would actually look worse because the graphics wouldn't be consistent.

I'm going to copy what you've written there and post it all over the place, sswift ;) Nicely said.

You already own products dealing with DX9.0.

I have to disagree about Wolrd of Warcraft graphics being amazing, Wow looked good when it was released but now it looks dated and simplistic and without good AA the GFX always looked horrible. Wow also uses very low poly models which also look blocky and ugly now.

Not that Blizzard doesn't do it's best, paritcularly the texture and effects artists do work hard to make everything look as nice as they can.

However it's no surprise the incoming WoW upgrade will contain a new graphics engine, which will I'm certain bring in support for shaders, DX10 and all the bells and whistles they've been missing.

Darkheart

Unity3D is a great engine at a very fair and competitive price. Only restriction is that you must have OSX to use the editors (deployment to web is OSX and Windows, standalone OSX if you have the pro version OSX and Windows). Beside the visual aspects Standard and Pro are more or less equal

I'm waiting for Nuclear Basic. World of Warcraft type graphics don't go well for every game type. Why not benefit shaders and other goodies?

BlitzMax and Minib3d or C++ and OpenGL :)

Nicely put Shawn. You're my new best friend. Every once in a while someone with talent comes along and does great things with Blitz3D.

"Better graphics" does not equal better games.

"serious company of game development" does not equal Indie Engine either.

"Why not benefit shaders and other goodies?"

Because most guys can't produce the assets to take advantage of them, and even if they can, they generally don't know how to balance things so their game works on a wide range of systems, or produce something that looks decent.

For people who are happy to muck around with no intention of selling what they make... sure, why not ;)

the biggest problem is there are few artist friendly shader tools and shaders are very specialized. What with light settings being controlled on a per material basis rather than from the light itself.

But even a 1.1 shader can work a simple bump and specular map with per pixel lighting shader. Even on 6 year old GPU's. Thats good enough for descriping most surfaces well.

Shaders are much nicer than fixed function, and closer to what artists are used to using with their 3D apps native pre rendered material system. In many ways its easier than old fashioned materials that require the artist to create all the highlights and shadows in the textures.

The hard bit is often getting a free shader thats in the public domain to work how they want when they cant code shaders themselves.