which blitz product is right for me?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/which blitz product is right for me?
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| I bought ALL of the main blitz programs, blitz3d, blitzplus and blitzmax.. Im trying to learn to program.. but.. i dont know which of these i should begin my adventure in.. 14 years ago, i was a pro with Basica, but, its been a while :) WHat are the pros and cons, of each of the 3 products? which one should i begin learning, and taking to heart? I've been told there are gigantic differences in the programs.. please.. which would be the right one for me, and why? |
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| It depends on what you want to achieve. Blitz3D is stable, has 3D and 2D support via Directx7, comes with a fully featured game engine (no built-in physics and no shader support due to dx7) It also has dll support which means you can expand the abilities of blitz3d, there are various libraries including physics. BlitzMax is the most powerful and fast. It's the latest one that released also it has better object oriented programming support which is very important. It comes with a full featured 2D engine and there is minib3d engine written in opengl which mimics the original blitz3d. BlitzPlus which I haven't experienced look nice with win32 support but nothing you can't achieve using other blitz versions. But as I said I am not the person who should talk about bPlus. Cheers. |
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| If you already have Blitz3D, I'd recommend downloading the demo version of the following for a good example of how quick you can produce Blitz3D apps:- http://jv-ode.devcode.co.uk/ I also have BMax, and have used it in conjunction with Grey Alien's Framework to produce some nice apps.... I think it is an adventure you are trying to develop ? 2D or 3D ? I'd presume 3d..... the jv-ode is also available for BMax, have not tried that flavour but the B3D is very easy to get to grips with. I've recently been using B3D and can see how much hard work can be taken out of coding through a physics wrapper such as http://jv-ode.devcode.co.uk/ Good luck! |
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| Blitz3D can do 3D games very well. It's based on DirectX7, latest generation FX are hard to impossible to achieve, eg. good realtime shadows. BlitzPlus can do 2D only, but unlike Blitz3D it contains access to the windows GUI, o it's more targeted to Appliactions with windows, menus, lists etc. (Although there are some useful "homegrown" GUI substitutes for Blitz3D). It also has some extra 2D commands such as CopyPixel that allows a bit faster Pixel manipulations. BlitzMAX is harder to learn, the programming concept is harder to understand. The synthax is only partial compatible with the original BlitzBasic. Object-Oriented Programming is the goal, and the compiler works completely modular (so a simple "hello world" programm is only a few kilobytes, where Blitz3D appends the entire runtime.lib to a compiled EXE, wich is NOT modular). There are several 3D engines for BMAX, but as far as I know none is as stabile as Blitz3D. BMAX is also a crossplatform compiler, there are versions for the Mac and for Linux, but AFAIK none of the 3D engines for BMAX supports more than one platform at this time. Noless, it allows to develop 2D Games on multiple systems with only one sourcecode. |
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