I haven't posted for ages, been very busy, but have got back on track with the whole indy scene, however, I was just about to start my latest project and a friend of mine convinced me to look at blitz3d, as nativley I'm a DX, C++ programmer etc.

I must say, some of the demo's and games I have seen are quite amazing, so I think I should go forth in using it, but before I do, are there any users of it on here who know on any cons with it ? with things like machine limitations so it will only work on recent pc's etc, is there multi platform scope for it ? and is anyone using gile[s] with there work and if so would you consider it as a necesary requirement ?

Sorry for rambling, but all answers will be much apreciated.

Regards,

N!k

Blitz is an excellent game development tool. It's limited to Windows and DirectX 7, but if you're content with that, you can have a good time using it.

There are some OpenGL rendering alternatives in the pipeline, but they aren't quite ready yet - and realistically speaking, probably won't be fully online for a while. You know how community driven projects are...

As for machine limitations, Blitz is designed to run on very low end machines ... hence, the DirectX 7 limitation.

Heya,

Yep, I'm also an avid Blitzer. As with any development language/engine/platform, it has it's drawbacks, but I've recently completed my second game, Bowling Babes, and have all but decided to go ahead and use it for my next game as well.

It spoils you really, since it makes the vast majority of what you want to do, very easy, and the community is very large, well-established and there is a huge amount of source code floating around to do almost anything Blitz doesn't do natively.

It's not cross platform yet, but I understand that BlitzMax will be released in the next month or two, and it will released on Mac first, then Windows and Linux to follow. It won't initially have a 3d engine, just a 2d-in-3d OpenGL engine, though it seems likely that there will be a number of people developing 3d engines for use with it.

I'm not really the kind of person to rely on waiting for the next big thing, and I'm happy to remain with Blitz3d for the foreseeable future and make any changes necessary to get my projects working in BlitzMax for cross-platform support at some point if it's viable.

Like EpicBoy said, you can't go below DX7, but that's not likely to cause many problems any more. It's been written by a very cautious developer, so things tend to be very compatible and fail silently if you're attempting to do something the hardware doesn't support.

The downsides? Well there's limited support for OOP, which might be a problem for some people. You get objects, but you have to use workarounds to get methods, inheritance, etc. Low level support is quite limited, but again can be worked around if you're willing. The sound support is also quite limited, but you also don't have to pay for a separate FMod license, so there is an upside too.

I used Gile[s] for Bowling Babes, though I'm really not showing Gile[s] off anything like as well as it deserves, since Bowling Babes is a bright colourful game for the most part and that's not a particularly good way to show off a lightmapper. It's not essential in that there are free lightmapping tools around, and they're perfectly adequate if you're short on cash. Realistically though, Gile[s] is probably the best piece of software I own and I will be using it extensively in my next project, because it's a perfect combination of power, feature, ease of use and flexibility. If I were to consider using another language or engine than Blitz, it would be an absolute requirement for me that it could read one of the formats Gile[s] exports to. I couldn't go without Gile[s] now unless I came across a really, really good alternative, and so far, i haven't.

Thanks for the feedback guys, I guess it's safe to say I will be using it very shirtley then :) the only downside I could probably see is that I will forget how to code being as most of it is already done for you. :D, right then, better get my skates on and get my final design on paper then code the fellow up...


Thanks again guys.

I used Blitz for a quick project a while back and it did the job perfectly. The only issue I had was that there is no support for culling a straight mesh. We had our world supplied as one big mesh and there isn't any support for oct-trees or anything like that. I figure you could probably write one given the time but as I said our project was a one week thing so we just threw the mesh at it and it had a good stab at it.

Joking, blitz 3d is quite an amazing piece of software.
HOWEVER, you may want to hear the cons, since everyone talks well about it... :)
I used it for my soccer management game. At first was enthusiast, then as my project size went bigger, I started to cry :)

Real cons:
- poor debugger compared to VC ones (it is really frustrating)
- no edit and continue capability (a REAL turndown for bigger games)
- basic language, that has some great limitations compared to C flexibility
- publisher can refuse your game or give less money because is written in blitz (they see it as a "cheap" product), that happened to some friends of mine, but if you want only to sell it as shareware...

Hope Mark won't start to hate me :P

Good points from Jack.

And you will definately want to get yourself a different IDE. I plumped for protean as it has Visual C type project supports and it's well worth the money

ah yes, forgot about the IDE too :) the one who comes with blitz is really awful, but as already said the protean Ide is quite good (even if I didn't used it because I finished my game before it was out).

btw another pro is that the blitz community is very active, was able to find code examples for lot of things like pathfinding, alpha sort, etc.

Sorry Jack, couldn't help but respond to a couple of your points :D

- basic language, that has some great limitations compared to C flexibilityBlitz is actually very close the the C language - it misses out a few things like pointers, but not much else.

- publisher can refuse your game or give less money because is written in blitz (they see it as a "cheap" product), that happened to some friends of mine, but if you want only to sell it as shareware...To be fair, as long as you change the exe icon there should be no way of a knowing whether a game was written in Blitz3D or not.

I've been using Blitz3D to write Super Hamster Ball for the past two years, and it's been a pleasure to use. Gile[s] is a great program for lightmapping, but if you don't need lightmapping in your game then you don't need it.

Blitz is actually very close the the C language - it misses out a few things like pointers, but not much else.
uhm well it may be, but for me is much better using C, now that I have some knowledge of it :p

To be fair, as long as you change the exe icon there should be no way of a knowing whether a game was written in Blitz3D or not.
you can just look at the little black window that opens when the program starts ;)
well of course you can tell them a lie and say that you wrote the game in C++ and hope they never make the proposal "we will give you 7500$ for the whole source code" (that happened for real to a friend of mine!).

Anyway as said before, you can make a good (or bad!) game in whatever language :)

Well it would be for shareware only so I guess most of the problems that could occur with main stream publishers shouldn't exist. I'll look into the IDE ass well, cheers.

I'm sure Jack's right, but the situation is definitely improving. Publishers are definitely starting to realise that Blitz3d is not an amateur's toy.

Take "Future Tactics" as an example :

http://www.cravegames.com/games/futuretactics/futuretactics.html

That game was prototyped entirely in Blitz3d and then converted by hand into C.

That game [Future Tactics] was prototyped entirely in Blitz3d and then converted by hand into C.
Misleading. Future Tactics was prototyped with plain Blitz in 2D isometric. Only the production version, written in C with Renderware was 3D.

The released version of Future Tactics bore no resemblance (cosmetically) to the initial prototype. I wish I had screenshots to show the difference. The Blitz 2D prototype did serve its purpose of demonstrating the gameplay which got the project a publisher.

I'm sorry if you thought it was misleading. The point was one of publishers taking it seriously, not it's graphical prowess.

you can tell them a lie and say that you wrote the game in C++ and hope they never make the proposal "we will give you 7500$ for the whole source code"


Sure. I'd hate to have to tell them $7500 isn't enough. Actually, I laugh at the idea of a publisher turning down a game 'cause it's written in Blitz. Game probably wasn't all that good, or I'm sure they wouldn't have minded.

A publisher just wants to make money. I'm guessing they thought they could get away with offering $7500 for the source as it's an 'amateur' studio - no offense meant to your friend Jack. I don't think they would have tried to offer that to a 'proper' (urgh) development studio.

Be careful of being taken for a ride by a publisher. Blitz or no Blitz.

Yeah, I really can't see them turning down a game based on which language it was written in.

I guess the only way I could imagine that happening is if the game wasn't finished yet and they saw the language you were using as a hinderence to development.

And I must concede that the Blitz debugger is indeed terrible. 99.9% of the time, my debugging is done by sending text to the log file.

But the flipside of that coin is that since Blitz is so powerful and hides most of the scary code from me, I generally don't have major bugs that require a great debugger to find. It's almost always me using an object instance that is null, a resource that isn't loaded yet, or an off-by-1 loop error. And the first two are always immediately obvious because Blitz crashes out and sets the IDE to the offending file/line.

Another IDE worth checking out is Visual Blitz (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eddy.dev/VisualBlitz/). I don't know how it compares to Protean, but it is obviously far better than the default IDE. I've used it for about a year and have had no problems with it and like it quite alot.