Catch me up?

Its been over a year since I have even thought about game development and trying to figure out what has happened on the Max front?

- Is Max growing or shrinking?
- Are there more or less Max uses?
- Were there any notable things released for max?
- What great new features were added to max?

Thanks

- Hyperthreading WIP
- WxMax, a monster of GUI
- CEGUI, WIP. A GUI for OpengL. Looks very interesting.
- BRL.Reflection. Very nice for saving and loading objects.
- MiniB3D is working fine.

DX9.
Max3D (check Mark's worklog).

About the same. There seemed to be a few people who have had enough and gone to find another language but the ins and outs seem equal.


Well, tricky to read that question. It's either the same as the first e.g. more Users or your asking if Bmax has more uses. It has the same uses as always : Games and apps.

These might be the same question as well.
If you're asking what has been released USING Max then GA's Fairway Solitaire is probably the biggy. There's a list on the front page.

Additons to the other responses on features...
Move from syncmods to SVN?
New Maxgui
New audio drivers

Sorry, fixed some of the questions...lol SVN?

... not really!

Code size or user base?
User base is about the same. Code size is about the same.
Game and apps. Not quite sure what else there is.

as before.

Yep, SVN.

This hasn't been added officially but there is a 3rd party mod that seems to work.

Well he didn't ask what was official and what wasn't.

SVN is just sub-version integration?
WxMax; is this a MaxGui extension (or does it run without MaxGui)?
Grey, does you framework support DX9?
What is the IDE of choose? Blide?

Bmax SVN

Some use the default maxide, some use CE Maxide, some use BLIDE, some use Project Studio and, probably, others use others. It depends what you're looking for.

If you're looking for an IDE that has intellisense, is easy to use and isn't crawling with bugs and spelling mistakes that should've been fixed 18 months ago, get Project Studio.

It runs without MaxGUI. It's a portation of WxWidgets.

Good point.

I made it work with 2 lines of code after I installed the DX9 module we are talking about. I haven't officially added it to my framework but can tell you how to get it working if you like.

Not really integration at this point, but BRL has been running an SVN repository where you can sync up and get the latest and greatest work-in-progress updates, a bit like SyncMods used to do. (Syncmods itself has been discontinued)
You'll need to get a 3rd party SVN client to be able to download them, but there's a number of freebies available.
(I myself use Tortoise-SVN for the GUI integration, as well as SlikSVN for a command-line utulities, so I can just double-click a batch file that updates everything)

Since they just spread the source over SVN and not the precompiled binaries for all platforms, you'll also need to have MinGW installed to be able to use it.

There are also some nice other SVN repositories out there, such as Brucey's wxMax and his other millions of mods.



The prouct itself is getting more and more capable as time goes on thanks to the ongoing development of new features such as the all-important threading module, plus the ever increasing number of 3rd party modules.
Posting-wise the forums definitely appear to be leaning towards BlitzMax instead of the old B3D.

if you're looking for a Windows IDE with basically all the features and is still in active development and support, I recommend BLIde. It works awesome for me.

wxMax is completely separate from BRL. It is a third party wrapper for wxWidgets by Brucey, which works exactly the same, with tons of features, on all three platforms.

The important thing to remember is, <transmission ends>

Hmmmm... unlike you not to finish something you've started Ant :-) .

I am looking at starting up development again.

Just need to decide on an IDE.

BLide or Project Studio.

What functionality do you need?

I want an IDE that can handle projects, working intellisense at a minimum, extra features are sure welcome.

They can both do that. My impression is that Project Studio IDE is cleaner and less cluttered while BLIDE has more features. BLIDE is very actively developed and supported while Project Studio IDE seems to have lost some focus. I could be wrong.

Well, Matt (PS author) is busy with family/real life stuff but development is still ongoing. I've been using PS Pro (beta) for over a year now and wouldn't use anything else.

I looked at BLIde again recently and was back with PS within days. I found a handful of bugs in BLIde straight away, I loathed its project management system - nothing about it made a jot of sense, and there were spelling mistakes everywhere that bothered me probably a lot more than they should've done. I know Ziggy is Spanish but after being in development for so long, problems like that should be well behind it.

How did you get hold of the beta?

I don't know what is the user-base of Project Studio, but BLIde is used by more than 700 BLIde Free Edition users a day (judgind from the updates check the website is getting) and about 250 BLIde Plus users. So it is very used, incluing this project management with nothing that makes a jot of sense. If you're used to Visual Studio, the project management of BLIde is just a direct port of the Visual Basic project management.

As long as there is a free version of BLIde, and the current available express version of PS is also free, give both a try and decide for yourself!

He just asked me to test it out cos I was getting into Blitzmax at the time.

There's a free 'Express' version, though. I'm not sure what the differences are since I've only used the Pro version.