Hello - what's going on with Blitz?

I'm out of touch. What's going on with Blitx3D and BMax these days? Had a quick look around, but no signs of a BlitzMax3D yet - or is there?

Max3D? You've missed it. It's been and gone. Sorry.

How rude of you!

Max3D is seemingly not so far off.. I wouldn't keep your hopes up though.

Shhhh! ;)

Yes - Max3d was a great success.

But now we're over it ;-)

You're best bet to get an overview on things is to check out the site owner's worklog at: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Account/showuser.php?id=1

Max3D never existed, it was all part of a government cover up, there's no physical evidence, and all knowledge of it will be shortly removed from your mind after this thread is deleted.

;) ;) :O

Darkheart

Except that these days, you can usually find those on laptops for sale on eBay :-p

2d is where its at. we are all making match 3 games with different but very close tile graphics. all original ideas have gone. its all about the casual gamers these days so, we all have to make games that last about 3 - 5 mins and are really simple. To keep said game easy for the user the game should be almost identical to a already released title. The user should not have to at any time think!

of coarse im joking?

Pete

I'm going to dig a vegetable patch for next year... And maybe a herb garden too.

Leadwerks Engine 2.+ is out though:
http://leadwerks.com/

Some see it as a Max3D as it is very Blitz-esque.
http://leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Read the last seven entries in Mark's Worklog.

whoa, thanks for those links puki!
Deferred lighting, nice!
leadwerks looks really good now-a-days

Oh yeh, LE2 is big-boy stuff.

We are waiting for max 4D it's next great thing to wait for, Mark will have to enter 4:th dimension of time to be able to deliver it in Zero time :P

Unfortunately it also requires a big-boy computer with a big-boy video card to run on...

Even then its not guaranteed to work!

Not really. Vista has been out for a while now and requires a DX9 compatible video card with SM2 support just for the new GUI. Any Vista system should handle LE2 with no problems.

Of course you could gripe that LE2 doesn't support CGA graphics, but for a 3D engine to be competitive it has to be cutting edge and not rely on grossly outdated APIs and hardware. LE2 is for making 3D games, not the click crap that permeates the portals.

Um... No, it doesn't, not by a long shot.

I run vista x64 with Aero on my PC with an ATI X1650XT without any problems. vista's Experience Index ranks my video card a 5.7 IIR, which is pretty respectable.

Yet none of LE samples I've seem come by run on my PC -- All I get is a whole lot of nothing. Add to that the whole thing is designed to use the 8800 series card as a *baseline*, and then consider that the vast majority of the computers out there have a video card significantly slower than that, and you're not exactly looking at great overall compatibility.
Don't get me wrong -- Le2 looks *very* nice, it's an impressive piece of software, and I'm sure it's great... but it's also one of those 'bleeding edge' style engines.

There's a market for things like that, just like there's hoards of people rushing out to upgrade their computers when a big game franchise releases a major title... but you'll find little audience for your creations outside that subsection of the market.

LE is like steroids that kill you unless you follow the strict rules it sets.

The announcement of the evaluation kit specifically said there is an AMD driver bug that won't be fixed until they release Catalist 8.10. I had some time today and wrote some workarounds, and the engine is running almost the same on my Radeon 3870 as my NVidia test hardware, but there is still one fix I need that AMD told me they would include in 8.10. I'll test on my Radeon X1550 card as well before releasing a patch.

The engine requires an SM 3.0 card, but you're not going to get very good performance with a Radeon X1650. Those have 12 processor pipelines, while the latest cards have 240. That means your card is 20 times slower than the fastest cards on the market.

The samples released, especially the island demo, are designed to push a high-end card when the settings are turned all the way up. The island demo renders something like 1.7 million polys per frame with the settings on high.

LE2 is really nice set of tools, but to me after my 8800GT struggling badly on samples I try so far, is not way to go..I did update drivers and got 2-3 frames up...thats all..i hope this will evolve in to something more scalable...then it will be No1 in my book...

The X1650XT has 24 pipelines, but point taken.