Any news of Max3D?

Hi all,

Any news of Max3D?

Thanks in advance

I can't believe this has come up again! lol

I think the standard answer is "It'll be ready when it's ready".

I agree with Power Mousey! :)

Hi again Sammy, you might as well just read the thread from 2 months ago, nothing has changed since then:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=79829#898490

Darkheart

yep but only us guys who have access to the beta get it and can't disclose it.

A few days ago i was asking myself the same question. I came to the conclusion that it's a good sign not hearing something because it hopefully indicates "busy at work". A worklog update at this point on the other side would more target into the "won't be done within the next two months" direction, which might as well happen for the first option, well just a feeling...

Things have changed - they have!

In my dreams Mark Silby has shed his plastic carrier bags full of panties and has sprouted real wings instead. He glides through my window like a silken angel now. The fact he has 10 saggy boobies swinging from each kneecap flusters me somewhat to tell the truth, but to me this translates as: Come ye to me and grovel at my feet - lots of milky Max3D goodness for all - it's a good thing. He tells me to tell you all to be strong and to have faith. He then introduces me to his friend 'The Stuffer' and nods knowingly at him. They then take turns punching me and I wake up.

This will all make perfect sense when Max3D arrives I just know it. Boy will I look smart!

Sorry to ask this again. :(


Are you serious? You got Max3D beta for testing?

...

He wishes! :)

hmm... I'm gonna go out on a limb here - which I know I shouldn't do at my age but hey...

I know tu (Sinu) and if he says he has the beta - then I believe him. What a tease!

IPete2.

Ah, but I have the beta for BlitzMax4D! ;p

ah well that scuppers my previous post then!

IPete2.

Maybe a worklog update is in order, Mark ? ;-)

No IPete2 i was just messing cos im sick of these threads, i don't have any beta and don't ever expect to be put on the beta as i haven't put myself forward.

puki owns everything, including Max3d, so: ask him!

Think this post is quite well timed : No worklog, nobody else asked for a while, Mark has gone quiet on the forums, and 6 weeks 'til Xmas.

I expect max3d to be released a couple of months after duke nukem forever.

Duke Nukem Forever is being written *in* Max3D.

I heard that Duke Nukem Forever was written in Max3D...

Someday never comes.

Notepad3D? ;)

You guys have it all wrong. Max3D is being written by Duke Nukem.


Mark came on the forums the other day to say that you suck.

..i do have beta..

Shhh...

I reckon no work is getting done on Max3d and thatis why nothing has been said. It is suppose to be out for this Xmas and you can bet your bottom dollar that it wont make it (once again). Hope I'm wrong ;) but I doubt it.

> It is suppose to be out for this Xmas

To be technical, here is what Mark actually said.

> I'm aiming for a Christmasy release date

Notice, he did not mention which "Christmasy"...

..i got it..its..beautiful..its..mmm..its..tasty..its...hardcore..its...beta..

> I'm aiming for a Christmasy release date

I still say it wont make any difference what Mark said. It will most probably not make it for this Xmas and possibly next Xmas as well. (LOL)

I doubt it would make a difference if it was released today. Anybody who wants to do 3D is already doing it.

> Anybody who wants to do 3D is already doing it.

I'm still waiting on it.

i'm still waiting too

We get news on everybody else's 3D engines, but not Max3D.

Think about that one for a second.. If 'everyone else' is keeping you informed whats making you wait for Max3D? Is it the mystery of Max3D? Or is it just because you know (from the news) that 'everyone else's' engines suck?

I personally like the silence, makes me think Mark is super busy (but that could back fire, maybe hes not even interested in Blitz anymore!)

I think this whole 'silence must mean he must be very busy' excuse is lame. It's not like he couldn't take 2minutes out of his day to post but either way good luck to him if he is working hard on it. Secrecy is just the perfect way to lose peoples faith though.

Only reason im interested in this is because blitz3d was so DAMN good and blitzmax is a great language so adding 1 + 1 = 10 hopefully where mr sibly is concerned.

Also i don't think he would get bored of making it, mark is a little genius and seems to love doing this thing, maybe he gets a little sidetracked doing other stuff (he has too many ideas) but who doesn't?

Right, but see I don't really know what type of a person Mark is, has he been quiet about projects in the past?

QFT!

I'd be happy if he got side-tracked adding some of my patches for the BRL modules... :-p

Mark, give brucey some core access to blitz already! =p

Oooh my kind of thread. :) So will it be released for xmas?

hohoho

@D4NM4N: Please read this post! (I also have some other questions for you about SpriteForge)

That reaffirms my point.

From my vantage point here in Hamilton, smoke can often be seen rising from the north.

The sound of distant hammering accompanies a whiff of sulphur on the wind - we live in hope of a development...

Yes.

Plus many of the major additions to BlitzMax (DirectX support, Threading) came completely out of nowhere.

I'm sure Mark (and his pet ferret Errol) knew they were coming... :-p

2008 December 1...

No, it's not going to be released today.

My current game is about 75% finished, because I've been actually working on it instead of waiting for Max3D.

Its been the case since Blitz first appeared on PC eight years ago, that people are always waiting for something else - something magical and wonderous that will somehow give them the capacity to write a game. When some people (note I'm not naming names) get Max3D, there'll be some other critical tool that they simply can't work without.

I think if you haven't managed to do something with Blitzbasic, or Blitz3D, or Blitzplus, or Blitzmax, or Blitz3DSDK or MiniB3D, then you're still going to be floundering with Max3D as well.

My point? Use what you've got and stop worrying/nagging for Max3D. It'll happen when it happens.

So maybe tomorrow?

I'm with Gfk. I do look forward to trying Max3D but you have to make the most of what you have. The grass always seems greener the other side of the hype.

..agreed with mr. GfK, but still..I would like to know where is Max3D..thats kind excitement, and i think there is nothing wrong to ask about it..

I'm not waiting either, because I'm going to write my own after I finish on my 2D DX9 thingy! :P

Dabz

Dabz: You would probably have a lot of customers :)

I think one of the biggest hurdles for M3D is, there is quite alot of mature solutions available right now. Perhaps the 3D indie development scene was not quite as robust as it is now when the idea of a M3D was seriously started. Now, the longer M3D takes to materialize, the more there will be to compete with, the more everyone will expect from M3D, etc, etc. The benchmark for 3D development tools is pretty high right now.

It's been released already. Where the hell have you been?

Oh - I thought you were talking about the PS3 emulator for Xbox..and I have an annoying Welsh aardvark here gnawing my elbows. I reely dint malke any senze any moor...

What are some of those mature solutions?

3D Engines list

That's what I feared. I'd imagine Max3D to be slightly better than Irrlicht.

Can you extrapolate on that?

Nothing wrong with irrlicht. I have used it in the past and it did what it should and it's easy to pick up and use in a project. Even got shaders for those who crave them.

Nothing wrong with Irrlicht as such, I have used it myself as well. Still I sure hope Max3D is going to be both easier to use and more powerful. I would be surprised if it wasn't.

"I'm aiming for a Christmasy release date, and given the amount of 3d code I've got lying around due to my on-again/off-again efforts over the last several years, I think this is entirely feasable!"



Mark should be making an announcement soon. (lets just hope its not another "several years")

arctic fox, take a look at this: leadwerks (solves all your problems :))

I literally just looked into Leadwerks yesterday, and boy does it look nice. Think I'll be making a post-christmas purchase. The fact that it mostly has a B3D-style command set is the icing on the cake. The only downside is that for animated meshes, I'm gonna have to make my item in Lightwave, export as .X, import into Ultimate Unwrap, and then export again as GMF.

I think the reason for GMF was that there was no game-optimized 3D model format in the world which would support everything. .dae and .x are meant as transport formats, thus being text files. Of course .x has also a binary version, but it's also very cryptic to read. B3D is also nice, but had also some features lacking.

On the other hand, a game engine is not supposed to be a 3D model format converter, that's why there is UU3D to do that. It makes the engine much faster and smaller, when it can focus only one one core format. That's what C4 does too.

Unfortunately, there is no binary file format that handles skinned animated meshes and stores binormal/tangent arrays (for bumpmapping). Using the Doom 3 format and piggybacking on their exporters would have been the only other option. An FBX to GMF converter is in production right now, so that will be a big improvement to the pipeline. I also released a GMF SDK for people who want to write exporters and converters. It will let you construct and save a GMF file using simple commands, so you don't even have to understand the file format. There are now converters for OBJ, MD3, X (no animation), 3DS, and B3D (animated), and of course FBX will be the main one when it is ready.

Why do people keep pimping the Leadwerks Engine?

I've used it a lot and it has extensive speed issues and jitter problems. The whole thing is just one big hype bag.

Leadwerks Engine beats Crysis Engine my ass.

It's not all bad though. It has some good points but honeslty there are way better Engines to use.

Hope this is not seen as offensive to lumooja but dude, you've got to stop with your blatant lies about Leadwerks Engine and your imaginary high FPS counts compared to other stuff. You seem to pop up everywhere when some discusses and 3d engine and you just so happen to have tested leadwerks and find higher FPS's and more stability than anything other engine. Joker!

That's all I'll say....

..hey Amon..U are a live :) hehe.. i have no experience with Leadwerks engine but samples, and demos I had chance to download during 'give it a try and post results' campaign..so on all of my rigs(best one i have is with 8800GT) things are slow enough that I will not play game on that speed..but i guess when 9xxx become normal thing it will be handy engine...

Hey, yeah I'm still alive. :)

As for Leadwerks being more useable with 9xxx cards, well don't know really. My 7950 GX2 died and I'm using a 9500GT at the moment. I tried Leadwerks on it and TV3D with similar scenes and TV3D just blows leadwerks out the window.

And yeah I was also working with a few people on something when I was using Leadwerks Engine and all them had issue with it on their PC's. Leadwerks seems to blame ATI and NVidia for it though. I don't see any other Engine I use having the same problems.

@Amon: Shocking, isn't it? :P

It is said that Leadwerks Engine is not programmed in C++. Really? If true, what language was it written?

It's written in BlitzMax.

I'm going to put out another demo with lower polycounts. People don't seem to understand that the island demo was a stress test. I was originally aiming for 30 FPS on a GEForce 8800 with all effects turned up, but I could only get it down to about 50 on my machine. The reason for this is I wanted something that would be a challenge for the engine to manage, not just a little demo that was easy to run.

Lower polycount fixes the issues with ATI cards?
Funny.

@Amon: I don't know what you have read that I wrote, but I can't remember to have lied about anything.

IIRC, in his blog, didn't Mark admit BlitzMax is too slow to use for a real world 3D engine which is part of the reason he switched back to C++ for Max3D?

That really depends what kind of 3D engine you make. If you indeed make any bigger loops in BlitzMax, it will be too slow. But if you only use BlitzMax to send commands to the GPU and let the GPU handle all calculations and loops, then BlitzMax can be fast enough.

Blimey, all I said was that it looks nice. No one else has to agree.

Good to know. Half the fun, of course, is figuring out how good Lightwave's exporters are. It has an FBX exporter now, but who knows if it exports animation? I have a decent .X exporter, I guess that'll tide me over for now.

And i always thought the real fun starts once a system is running and you can actually create something with it, instead of wasting your time with stuff like exporter issues.

I was referring to fun in a sarcastic sense. I hate messing around with exporters. The whole lottery of "how much of this model will be left by the time it reaches the game engine?"

I've just got of the phone with Mark and news is that it's comming for christmas....

@Glenny-boy
I'm sorry but on this forum you never know. :O)

Christmas 2024 eh? Awesome!

@taumel: Too right!

So any news yet?

How about now?

.....

annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd noW?

(sorry, I couldn't resist)

Assume it is never coming out. That's what I did.

This thread isn't locked yet? strange

I just read about iMiniB3D. It must be faster than MiniB3D because it's written in C++. And it's also more cross-platform.

Any links so we can read about it too?
Nevermind found it. I just saw it compiles to iPhone, no more details given.

Well, the details so far are:
1) It's a port of MiniB3D to C++
2) It uses OpenGL ES on iPhone
3) It's not for sale on the Blitz Research Products page yet
4) MiniB3D is considered as finished, no more features will be added, but only stability and performance improvements
5) There's 2 movies out which shows it on a iPhone: http://www.blitzmax.com/Community/posts.php?topic=81796

Now my speculations:
6) Since it uses OpenGL ES, it should also work with standard OpenGL on all platforms (not only Linux, Mac, Win)
7) Since some dev said that BlitzMax is too slow to create Max3D, I think the iMiniB3D source is used for Max3D also, as it's written in C++. That means Max3D will be a DLL which can be used from BlitzMax or any other language (and .so, .DyLib, etc... on other platforms)
8) Since iMiniB3D has the "i" at the beginning of the name, it's probably a bit specialized for the iPhone, but can be easily made general C++ code too for all platforms
9) Since it runs on a iPhone, it must be quite compatible with older hardware too, so this would be the main reason why I would buy it, since I need a simple 3D engine which runs on all platforms (for industrial visualization)
10) iMiniB3D (and possibly WinMiniB3D, MacMiniB3D, etc...) will aim a different audience than Max3D. xMiniB3D is aimed for full compatibility with old hardware and cross-platformability, while Max3D is aimed for mid-end to high-end hardware (since it has also shaders, shadows and physics)

@Glenny-boy
You know what i mean?! :O)

pffffsssshhh, I'd still rather use Unity

Uh...it has been 8 hours and there is still no response. Mark, Max3d? Wow! It's like this guy has a life or something - unbelievable.

I'm just going to sit here and wait...

And please don't lock this topic...it's like hanging up the phone after putting me on hold!

Mark is bound to tell us something this month.

Yes, because he lives in a cupboard, has no family and no life and won't be bothering with Christmas this year.

This thread is precisely why Mark doesn't like setting deadlines. I bet he's kicking himself for letting this one slip out.

I'm sure Mark won't mind me mentioning that he said he planned to write a new worklog entry soon. Until then....