So what IS happening with Max3D?

Any new info on Max3D, Mark?

Are you adding DX Support or are you keeping things just GL for the time being?

Feel free to shoot me for starting another Max3D thread.

:)

Shot.

Fingers in the ears time.

How are the editors coming along, Mark?

Any screenshots, beta exe's or anything?

Hey John Galt. I just went to your site and went to your forum and it seems you've been overun by spam bots posting really bad stuff. I would either remove the forum or find a way not to allow spam accounts to be registered. Trust me there's some totally wrong stuff on your forum.

Amon, please also ask him when we get multithreading. ;-)

So 'Amon' is our portal to Mark now? Ask him when were getting forum updates also.

I wanna know his favourite colour.

Thanks for the heads-up, Amon. I will sort it. *Gone*

I agree that some sort of insight into what's going on in BRL's development is much needed. Mark has a worklog, and it's awsome when he updates it, because we can sort of see how the products are coming along. But alas he doesn't update it much.. (I think at least once every 2-3 weeks is a good goal).

But there is a flip side to this: If he's not posting much it could mean hes coding strong and getting alot done, but again we don't know because he doesn't update his log much.

Also, I read:

2005-05-16
"* 3D module for Win32/MacOS/Linux - ETA: 6 months"

But it seems it lost it's direction, as stated in a different post... So it seems like Mark revamped it. But then the worklog updates on the subject pretty much stop after that.

Eh, I don't care much, I mean it'll be nice when it's out, but for now, we have so many 3d engines that have been wrapped, in one form or another, into modules. So my 3d needs are satisfied.

its like when you were a kid and you mum ordered a six million dollar man space action figure from the catalogue and you wait for weeks/months for it to arrive.

When it finally arrives , its too late as the series has finished and instead you want a 'tomorrow people' teleport belt.

I've given up on Max3D - Mark himself even stated it's probably never coming out (at least as what we were expecting it to be). If you need more than what you have, either move on to something better as I have, or wait endlessly for disappointment.

Correct me if I'm wrong, you pretty much gave up on BlitzMax in favor of Ogre and C++.

Correct, and the reason I left BlitzMax was because Max3D which was promised never came. I had a choice - I could wait for Max3D or some other engine wrapper, or go straight to C++ and use whatever engine I wanted without having to bother with wrappers. I didn't give up on BlitzMax just because C++ has more features, I game up on BlitzMax because I was at a dead end, and I wasn't going to hang around a dead end for long. I prefer being productive (and yes, I am productive in C++, FlameDuck :) ).

Why were you at a dead end? It doesn't look like you've made anything that couldn't be done with Max.

Seems to me Mark is mostly focussing on a game editor environment where the code would be almost second place to wysiwyg tools, and it would have 3d features so I would think that an add-on library for the existing BlitzMax would not be likely, unless he's shooting for total compatibility. Otherwise we'd be looking at BlitzMax2 or Pro or something.

The dead end was that there were no 3D modules for BlitzMax (at the time), and I wasn't going to waste time making my own.

And now that you mention it, I really doubt the things I'm currently working on could be done in BlitzMax - things like this and this and this and this. Well, they could, but not anywhere near the same frame rates.

With Truevision or Leadwerks I'm sure you could ;)

Based on your earlier works though, you could have just waited for MiniB3D. Or (not having been here that long) did that take a fair while to arrive on the scene?

MiniB3D came after I got tired of waiting and switched. But even if it did, I didn't buy BlitzMax so I could make stuff equal or a little better than Blitz3D's capabilities - I bought it because I had faith that Mark would come out with Max3D as promised, and that it would be as powerful as I hoped, and I would be able to make games with much better graphics than I could in Blitz3D.


Well I do manual vertex / index buffer creation with direct memory access, so I doubt something less flexible than Ogre and slower than C++ would beat what I've got now :). Not that there's anything wrong with Truevision / Leadwerks, it's just that being able to write your own scene management at a very low level is so extremely useful to me now, I don't know if I could stand to use an engine without that capability :). For example not many engines can handle 10,000 trees effeciently (100 FPS+), let alone 200,000+ like my engine.

But this is starting to get off-topic. I'm an unusual case - not many people enjoy programming and designing low-level rendering optimizations and techniques like I do. Most people are game programmers - I'm more of an engine programmer.

I don't really have a serious need for 3D yet, but I would love Max3D to be an option when I'm ready.

Fair enough... but I don't get the thousands of trees comment. What are the thousands of trees? If they're sprites then 20,000 isn't that hard to imagine. If they're 40k poly objects, then your engine is truly impressive.

Anyhow, it sounds like even if Max3D were out, you wouldn't be using it anyway. So, saying "The dead end was that there were no 3D modules for BlitzMax" isn't entirely correct.

Well each tree is only about 300 polygons I think. Of course hardware accelerated sprites are used in the distance, but that's all managed by the engine completely transparently.


Well, if Max3D came out on schedule, I can't say whether or not I'd still be using it, but I certain can say I'd have used Blitz a lot longer than I have now if it did come out.

I don't see really a need for Max3D anymore, there are soon Flow and Leadwerks engine, which should do the same and much more than Max3D would.

Assuming both Leadwerks and Flow are stable across a variety of systems, sure. At the moment (I believe) they're quite untested... while Blitz stuff does tend to be pretty stable.

Ogre3D, which Flow is using, is very stable on all platforms. There seems to be some activity trying to port Leadwerks to Mac, and that would be almost the same as Linux, as Mac is just using some hacked UNIX V.

Right!




btw: I'm also curious as to where Mark currently stands on the Max3D issue..
The last worklog update was almost half a year ago, which doesn't exactly scream "progress".. :(

I just assumed that BlitzMax and its periphery products were no longer actively being worked on. We're certainly not seeing any new developments/features (and it's not as if people aren't asking for them).

I lost interest after Mark showed us numerous screens of Max3D in action, only to annouce that it wasn't (realistically) going to see the light of day. I kinda get the feeling that Mark just got bored with it all. The frequency of his worklog entries says it all...

..well..I like B3D (nice thingy), I like this community, and thats all for me and my expectations from BRL...as for 3D, im riding Unity3D and S2...both cuties :)

I dont care about a 3d engine anymore, there are many now for max (& i am liking irrlicht anyway)

Im more annoyed about the lack of a decent cross platform development environment.
For now im using Codeblocks & C++ until it starts to get friendly & organised again.

It'll come - Blitzmax sales will double over night.

I like B3D also - it's been well supported and does exactly what I expected it to do when I bought it.

BMax on the other hand has been a waste of money - I bought it when it was released expecting the 3d module at some point, but it seems to have been strung out and then forgotten.

I don't think I'll buy another product here unless it's released with all the features, not another "in the future you will get..." type promise.

The entire BlitzMax project is a dead end, imho.... too much ambitions, multi-platform, does everything (gui, oop, 3d, net, ...) and only one or two developers are working on it: this is way too much work for only 2 developers.

Result: BlitzMax does "almost" everything but the GUI part is far from .net, the 3D part uses third parties not well tested/maintained...

Marc should focus on much more targeted languages like Blitz3D is/was.

my 2 cents

I think nowadays something like Blitz3DC++ would be the best, which uses the Ogre3D framework, and provides the original Blitz3D Entity commands to program games. Then it runs automatically on Windows, Mac, Linux, and since it's just a C++ frontend, it would create the fastest code on the planet.

Well, it exists, it works, it is expandable via modules.
The last update came with Reflections. So I think Bmax is not so-dead...

About 3d: i dont' see the problem on Max3d.
You need a 'basic' 3d engine: Minib3d
You need a 'high-end' 3d engine: Leadwerks (or Flow when it comes).
At this point Mark can focus better on Bmax if he - really - wants (and I start to think that another 3d engine is not in his priority list...)

Byez

More important in my opinion would be to get Blitz to compile for online multimedia - like Unity can. I'm not majorly interested in 3D features (at least not at the moment), but to develop online multimedia like you can in Flash, but from a real programming language would have a lot of appeal to industry professionals.

I see Ogre3D/Flow more as a mass market solution, since it runs basically on every machine, as the user can switch between DirectX/OpenGL. Even MiniB3D has problems with some cards since it's only OpenGL.

Leadwerks is a high-end engine, which finally gives game developers the possibility to use never before seen eye candy and technology of high-end graphics cards, but it runs also on a bit older cards (2-3 year old cards).

Mark seems to be focusing on some sort of hobby editor or something that sounds similar to Unity.

Blitz3d, much like qbasic, is still usable for a lot of stuff. Most have grown past it now.

Blitmax is no where near what it was envisioned as. Too many feature creep turns and the lack of a design document to begin with to keep it on track.

It would be wise to completely forget that Max3D had ever been uttered. Bin your copy of Blitzmax (unless of course you find it useful in it's current state) and move on to bigger and better.

I have taken a trip through C# to XNA, stopped a few experiments in other engines and have finally stopped in Unity. Although it doesn't have the raw power that C#/C++ has, it has more than what I need, which is 100x more than Blitzmax and about 50x more than Blitz3D.

MaxGUI may be far from .net but Brucey's WX Widgets implementation is excellent. Very full-featured - and as always with Brucey - extremely well supported. As for the 3d part being not well tested/maintained, I can vouch that the TV3D module is well tested, although it wouldn't be my place to judge how well maintained it is. Certainly Simon Harrison seems to be doing an excellent job of both testing and maintaining MiniB3D, so I don't think it's entirely fair to say that there aren't well tested and maintained options out there.

Well certainly compared to working with Max3D, I'll give you that. :o>

Neither do I, mostly because my current employer owns all immaterial rights to anything I create, so there isn't much incentive for me to care anymore.

Well the double of nothing is still nothing.

I disagree. The BlitzMAX language is fairly well thought out, and offers quite a few unique features. It's main weakness is the lack of tools (including, but not limited to a decent editor) and I applaud Mark for taking time to focus on that aspect of BlitzMAX. Unfortunately I'm not entirely convinced we have the same opinion on what constitutes useful tools, and overall progress appears to be negligible at the best of times.

That's just pointless. If you want to use C++ and Ogre, just use C++ and Ogre. It'll be much quicker to just learn Ogre than to write all that boilerplate code. Besides Blitz3D and Ogre don't use the same metaphors, so a lot of the Ogre functionality will be hard/impossible to expose using a Blitz3Desque command set.

I think it's fair....
With authors falling off the face of the earth 6mo - 2yrs after they release product X, vaporware is becoming a common product. It's even more of a trend with Blitz products as Blitz's own Author seems to be loosing steam.

Even Yavin still can't be found to support BlitzPlay, and it was already hard enough to get a hold of him 3 months after he released pro (but he still takes paypal payments for the product, the link is still there)....

3rd party is what is holding Linux back from becoming mainstream and it holds the same relevance in any market place. Sure Team A or Author B can create something nice, and appear to have good motivations to continue support after charging you Y. But everyone knows that there is nothing stopping them from washing their hands of it whenever they feel like it. They already have their money, all they have to do is stop... It's even worse for free stuff as you know as soon as they had enough of the headache of maintaining a product (free is usually more popular, and thus has more demanding of a userbase yelling "can you fix this or add that") they will just stop visiting their own site and stop answering emails...

And this whole "where is Max3D" is the very REASON why people stick with M$ and the like when it comes to development solutions. You know M$ isn't just going to shut their doors one day, they will always answer (at least if you have enough people complaining) ......

So, getting back to Amon's original post... would Mark (or anyone else at BlitzHQ) care to comment? Come on guys... give us something ;)

They haven't so far, despite a post exactly like this popping up ever so often. What makes you think this one is difference? Experience always trumps hope.

They're not identical, but I don't think it would be too hard writing a Blitz3D-like commandset very similar to Blitz3D from Ogre. In fact I'm tempted to make one myself, but I'm sure Flow will be much better.


Exactly.

LarsG:
Nice catch :)


What I meant was that for BlitzMax, I didn't want to build a 3D renderer from ground up using OpenGL calls. Even though I enjoy writing my own terrain renderers, etc. for efficiency, I'd prefer to have at least a base of general 3D features to build on so it doesn't take forever. Writing a 3D engine from scratch is a big job, and can take a huge amount of effort just to avoid driver bugs, etc. between multiple graphics cards. If I did want to write a 3D engine from scratch, however, I'd probably use C++ because BlitzMax just doesn't support the low-level memory access features that are important for performance 3D engines.

Last I heard Mark was making a custom GUI, wonder how that is coming along.
For the record, the Blitzmax language itself is awesome.

From what I hear, you really don't need uber super-duper cutting edge performance from a 3D engine. Unless you're pushing the very extreme bleeding edge, a decent level of performance will do. And, since no one I've seen around here is aiming to take on Farcry 2, I don't think it's worth worrying about.



Hey, why not? ;)

:D. I guess I was right when I said I'm an unusual case :).

That's true. For example the Leadwerks Engine does everything on the GPU. The speed of the CPU does not matter much, or the programming language you use with it. With a good GPU it's totally possible to write games in BlitzMax, Visual Basic or even Blitz3D, which look better and have higher FPS than Crysis or FarCry 2, as those games are still using old technology and don't utilize the GPU fully (how could they, they are just lame DirectX games :P).

John J, your examples don't look even close to bleeding edge. They look like a cutdown version of Just Cause's Avalanche engine from 2003.

I think Mark stopped developing Max3D, and now currently resides in his country abode making love to shoes. <--- said with tongue in cheek! ;P

Lumooja: What you say about the GPU is correct, unless your game world is too large to fit in memory at once. In this case you'll have to load things dynamically, and it's important that this is very fast to avoid lag.

Reactor: I never said I've achieved bleeding edge, just that I'm crazy enough to keep trying :). More accurately though, I'm not truly aiming for "bleeding edge" graphics, it's just that my requirements for rendering technology is usually different than most people (most people don't need a full LOD planet renderer, for example), and therefore I usually make my own. Keep in mind though that most of the screenshots I posted are old.

Sure, they'll answer the phone, but beyond that you're still on your own. They are the absolute kings of vaporware, announcing major enhancements years in advance, yet they never seem to materialize. Think for example about WinFS, a databased filesystem that was touted as one of Vista's Major features, that never made it to the release version. (Not to mention the various prior incarnations and announcements, going al the way back to the NT4 days).
and just because a big company like MS is behind it, doesn't mean that you are 'safe' -- think about all those people who bought into their 'playsforsure' DRM format, for which they announced a week or so ago that they were going to terminate the activation servers, leaving all their loyal customers who literally bought into it with a nice chunk of bits that they 'purchased' but won't be able to play back anymore.
And what about other show-stopping limitations such as IE not following the specifications and not allowing transparant PNG's? That's a show-stopping design flaw that persisted for ~8 years or so, despite massive outcry from web developers.
Not to mention thousands of crippling bugs in windows that have persisted for many, MANY years now.

Just because they'll answer the phone when you call in doesn't mean that that phonecall will make an ounce of difference.

/rant

I would love to know about Max3d but thats been planned for years, the release date slipped more times than a oiled penguin in the arctic. Basically its 'Max3d Forever' in a Duke Nukem forever sort of way, at least they post some shots of that too.

Elite Multiplayer is going to be my last major product in Blitz to me the lack of information from the developer about the direction of the language is the main reason. A worklog every three months (takes five minutes to type and silences everyone). What about it mark?

Whats happening with BMax with regards to subversion? Is it constantly updated or has that aspect slowed too?

Jason.

I'm sticking with BlitzMax. I have occasionally thought that maybe it would just be easier and faster to create stuff if I had higher-level tools, something like Unity3D or whatever, but at the same time that does mean usually giving up a degree of creative decision-making and often generalizes in ways that are undesirable. And since my focus isn't on 3D so much I am happy to use BlitzMax and make my own 2D graphics engine.

I am perfectly happy to use OpenGL for all graphics and the BlitzMax language is plenty simple to understand and use. I think it is quite capable of being a medium through which very good games are created, but whether a game is good or poor doesn't entirely depend on the engine or language, it depends on who is using it.

I think that because BlitzMax was originally released without a high-level 3d engine (although GL is 3D), everyone took this as its `identity` and that therefore there is need and market for third party 3D, which many people have tried their hand at. I think that will continue unless Mark releases some kind of super 3d engine that outshines them all. And even if he does release an engine, some people will still create their own.

I do tend to agree with the one comment about BlitzMax lacking in some areas - at the very least it should have started out with a great 2d engine, but Max2D is quite poor unless you're used to previous blitzes. But hey, if Mark had done everything right and had provided all our needs in one perfect solution, there would be less opportunity for us to be creative ourselves or to come up with our own projects.

So essentially you're saying it's fair to say that all third party solutions are poorly supported because some are. Of course, some first person solutions aren't very special either, so I guess it's fair to say that everything ever written is poorly supported. So you'd better not use anything, and just complain about it. Which certainly seems to be the motto of plenty around here.


Well I guess we're going to disagree again about what's fair, but I don't really think it's fair to expect Yavin to support BlitzPlay, considering he didn't write it, sell it or profit from it in any way, to the best of my knowledge. ;)

As Gabriel just said: in fairness to Yavin, BlitzPlay was produced and sold by John "SurreaL" Arnold.

EdzUp, that was one funny post. I love Max3d Forever ;)

YAM3DP

I cannot believe that we have yet another "MAX3D" post. Is it not obvious by now to most people that development at BRL has "ALMOST" dried up. Not many releases and TOTALLY NO communication from the BRL developers and the few releases that do happen are almost "MINOR" and a non event. I like the community and Blitz3d will always be something special, but really for most it should be a time to move onto something else as it seems like BRL have and forgotten to tell their users.

If there was a max3d we should/would have heard about it now, with maybe progress updates etc. Just use one of the other engines and please stop hanging onto products that aren't ever going to be released and asking the same question.

ps maybe something will rear it's head one day but just grin and bear it until then and move on.

Yeah, my appologies.... I comlpetely forgot who the author was. I loved Yavin's work though!

I do own a copy of BPPro. Was very impressive, and at the time very useful. Shame to see the product fall like that however SurreaL did have lots of other stuff going on in his life if I remember.


Looking back on how you quoted me... I didn't imply any of that, you just took a quote, make your own context out of it, and then exaggerated on it by generalizing.

I am not saying all 3rd part solutions are poorly supported. I am saying that it is becoming a common trend that authors abandon products in the 3rd party market.

@xlsior
I am in no way a M$ supporter however I am stuck with Windows regrettably. Abandoning features of software isn't vaporware as most game designers do the same thing. It all depends on what you have to chop from the list to make your deadline (every Indie knows this, at least those who have made money in the business). I hate M$'s hold on everything just like the next guy however I know that MSVC isn't going to be abandoned any time soon. I know that XNA will be around for quite some time.

Blitzmax on the other hand?!? Well it lost quite a bit of steam didn't it? What do you think attributed to that? Was it the lack of decent documentation? Was it the lack of direction? Lack of time on the developers part?

Funny thing is I used to (and still do) hate the Darkbasic team with a passion (long story) however in the same respect everyone always compared the Blitz and DB products closely. I think it is very apparent that TheGameCreators (Bamber's crew) has sure passed Mark up by leaps and bounds. Inferior language or not, I see regular work logs there, updates, correspondence with the community, and so on. With all that, and the "lets drag our heels" attitude that seems to be plaguing Blitzmax I don't doubt that the 4 users who currently use, and swear by, Blitzmax will eventually find it on that same list of vaporware.

"It does what I need of it right now, so I will continue to use it"
Sure, works now.... But down the road, when you finally decide your 'little baby' is worth releasing, and you do such, to find it stricken with a HUGE bug that is rooted in the core of Blitzmax. You will send email, upon email, upon email to BRL awaiting that response as your publisher is now pissed because people are asking for their money back. No response...... No news on the forums.... It would seem that Mr. Sibley, the sole developer, has taking a lengthy vacation (perhaps never to return to his pc again)... And the project that you spent the last 3 years on with the product that (meets my needs for now) left an easter egg on the back end seems to be stuck, then you might see where investing (time or money) into an unstably supported product gets you.

It certainly would be nice to hear something from Mark or BRL about just what is going on with BMax and future products.

I remember when B3D was first released there was constant communication about features, updates , feedback , bugs etc... The current deafening silence seems odd.

It has gone a bit quiet, but the people who are shouting 'there will be no Max3D' are over-reacting. Mark's christmas worklog sounded quite promising and reports some good progress on the 3D engine/game-maker over the last year.

No, you generalized when you said it was fair to say there were "no well maintained and tested options out there" on the basis that some people had stopped supporting their stuff, and it was becoming a trend. You're right that you didn't imply it though, you were quite explicit.

Welcome to the world of middleware. That could happen to any individual developer, or any company. Ideally you want the kind of thing the Truevision guys offer (the company goes bust, the code gets given away) but most guys won't offer that upfront, so you just deal with things as they come. Blitz haven't stopped the support altogether, so I think you're over-dramatising the situation.

Side question: where is Mark's worklog?

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Account/showuser.php?id=1

http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=1&log=1043

Thanks :)

EDIT: Actually, after reading that worklog, Mark makes it pretty clear what the future of Blitz is going to look like...

hmmm, after skimming back, yeah, I did didn't I. Well, putting the Trend as a mask filter, I would have to say that yeah, it would still be fair to say (fair being better side of 50%) :-)

It's all a matter of perspective really.


yup, perspective....

its been promised for years; have a looky here http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=48612#540630

Its a Super Alpha for Max3d :( dated 29-06-2005 was supposed to be with us early 2006.

And here http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=56459#629674

TBH those waiting for Max3d should really take up OpenGL programming and write your own, you can rest assured that as soon as you get good enough to write your own engine it still wont be out. Hell Leadwerks(halo) has coded a decent looking engine in half the time.

Mark said:I have seen no demos and no 'beta test'. And he said that 2 years ago!

Heh Bmax must be almost as old as Blitz3D was when Bmax came out now, and still no 3D module.

and this one should sort out the quibbled with Max3d
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=65387#730044

Plus, this from Simon (after a quick email to Blitz Support)...



Summing up: Mark is cooking up something, and in the meantime there are things we can all use and enjoy. Yay.

EdzUp


'Bout as long as we've been waiting for Elite Multiplayer? ;)

It's fair to question the validity of your comment, seeing as you don't work at BRL!!

Not trying to be offensive, but a more official statement would be nice.

I don't think Simon's statement was meant to be that official. I emailed and suggested someone at BRL say something on the forum about Blitz's future, and he replied with that. I asked if I could put it on the forum, and he said okay. Take it or leave it I guess :)

A big neon lit statement from Mark would be good, but if he is hard at work on something and would rather just focus on getting the job done, I can live with that.

What a great way to treat your users. It would not take more than ten minutes every month for BRL to give a little "PROGRESS" report. Instead they PREFER the STUPID "WHERE IS MAX3D" questions on the forum. How bizarre.

My guess is that this "new" game engine is not a full time project for BRL and is being developed in spare time and that is the reason they dont annouce their progress.
(hopefully for the sake of the users, I am totally wrong and mark is hard at work as was quoted in a previous thread)

I still believe that Max3D will see the light some day, but given the info we have lately, it is a matter of faith...

Good point. Please consider the topic closed until further notice.