Blitz3D only feature challenge
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Blitz3D only feature challenge
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| I get tired of all the Blitz suckz/Blitz roolz "debates" that fly around on these forums all the time. Generally they involve some specific feature with people arguing that Blitz doesn't have it so it sucks and other people responding that feature isn't important. What I've not seen, and what I am trying to get at here, is what features Blitz has that no other game dev system supports. To get the ball rolling here's one cool thing Blitz can do which I don't think any other game dev system can do. Because of the very powerful and flexible texturing control in Blitz you can change textures on any wall within your game independent of the lightmap. I'm doing this in my latest project. In most other game dev systems you can't change level textures at all at run-time (because they are "baked" into the BSP, etc.) let alone do it while preserving the pretty lightmaps. Can you think of any other game dev systems where this is possible? I've never looked into the run-time texture capabilites of DarkBasic so that might be one. I'm pretty certain tools like Torque and 3DGS cannot do this. |
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| Hey there, Joe! What's new. I haven't been on these forums in about a year. Been too busy working. Switched to Blitz eh? You still perusing the 3DGS forums? Anyway, on topic... how about speed? The engine has always been faste than competitors. |
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| How about Pivots and actually being able to attach a camera to a pivot. Try doing that in DBPro (caugh caugh!) |
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| how about trying to do much of anything in DBP :P believe me DBP doesn't have much on blitz there joe. oh wait, it has INC and DEC. whooo. |
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| Extreme stability. Mark doesn't release a new feature unless he thinks it's running well. Even if said feature doesn't even destabilise anything per se and 51% of forum users want it -now-. He won't release it until it's 100%. Kudos to him. Grr =] |
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| I've gotta go with speed. While I *love* Basic-based languages (and have since the early 80s), they tend to be slow. A couple of years ago when I was debating whether to go with BlitzBasic, DarkBasic, Visual C++, or stick with VisualBasic which I already owned, I ran an integer and float speed test. VC++ did the best, of course (but I can't *stand* C-based languages for high-level uses: they're fine for writing mouse drivers and the like, but *suck* for high level uses like games). Visual Basic ran at 1/20 that speed. Dark Basic ran at 1/5 the speed of VB - 1/100 the speed of VC++. However, Blitz ran 10x faster than VB: it ran at 1/2 the speed of VC++; 10x the speed of VB; 50x the speed of DarkBasic: *that* was what sold me on Blitz! (for math: obviously graphic operations are much more dependent on the hardware installed than on the language.) Since then, I've sort of followed the competition while coding in Blitz. Blitz3D does have its limits on cutting-edge special effects, but they're more than made up for by the horrible code contortions that other languages *require* to do the simplest things (like create and show a 3D scene). I've seen other "3D game languages," and they force you to follow their limited selection of setups. Blitz provides much more flexibility. Notwithstanding future language extensions, Blitz as it is now provides a fantastic framework for game designers to easily express their ideas, at high speed, and those future language extensions will only let it go further... |
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| Yes Blitz3d is fast, And its Poly throuput on a decent card is quite impressive. I have most of the cheaper engine/game targeted languages. I just want to use the best tool for the project at hand, doesnt matter which it is to me. I did a test a few days ago. all tests ran in 1024x768x32 on a radeon8500 pro 128meg athlon xp 1600+ test 1: 24,000 poly + about 7 megs of textures. *blitz3d*:290+ fps about 8 million tris per sec(not enough keep the caches full) (no need to merge surfaces..as blitz seems to do it for you) *Dbpro patch4.1* : straight loaded model 45 fps(expected more) (After converting the level to a single entity therefore merging all same surfaces) it managed to get 170 fps(not great..but not horrible) 3drad: 34 fps (unmerged) and 63(merged)...slowing its age and lack of updates. quest3d 2.0: 75fps(unmerged) and 275(merged) (it was running in the editor...so it would have probably been as fast as blitz3d fullscreen) test2: (discharge_04.bsp converted to wrl and then to .X these tests were preformed only on the .X files) (this is suposedly one of the biggest quake3 levels ever created,140,000+ polys when converted 140,000+ polys + about 23 meg of textures Blitz3d: 110 fps (now we are pushing the vertex caches...thats pretty close to 16 million tris per second) 3drad: 8fps(unmerged) 11(merged) fps, hey least it loaded it.(coughed up blood and grinded the harddrive) quest3d 35fps(unmerged) 90fps(merged) (again was in the editor and not fullscreen as i was to lazy to publish just to check fullscreen) but i suspect similar speeds to blitz...if not a little more becasue of dx8.1 true hardware t&l. Dbpro: well dbpro crashed repeatedly , and never got the level loaded.(I gave up after about 10 trys) test3: just for fun. only blitz3d and quest3d tested when you convert a bsp to Wrl using q3bsp.exe it generates 2 models 1 normal and 1 lightmaped both are loaded now 281,504 polys averaged 57 fps in blitz3d...broke 16 million tris per sec. droping to 640x480 got me up to 63 about 17.5 million tris I suspect it was hitting the fillrate limit of my radeon. Similar results as before in Quest3d 45fps and 57fps respectivly.(even in the editor) ill have to try it full screen some time...it may have won this last test. So there you have it, Had Dbpro loaded the models I dont think it would have been horrible on the second test. probably still above 60fps Course these tests are rather useless, just throwing around a ton of polys does not a game make or push the language itself..but it shows a high level of detail is posible. Zmatrix |
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| Stability is wonderful. Speed is great. But I'd have to go with flexibility. It's a bit vague, and probably not as specific as the topic was intending, but it's the reason I still pick Blitz over Quest3d. I think the speed, feature set and image quality of Quest3d is astonishing, the stability seems excellent, and it's very reasonably priced too. But what's the point if your hands are tied almost as much as if you're working with 3dRad or 3dGamestudio? With Blitz, I can jump in and get my hands dirty with textures and vertices at any time, with created or loaded meshes. I think DBPro allows you to manipulate meshes directly now (?) but it's always been one of my favourite features. I remember being loathe to do it at first, and sticking to loading meshes, but it's amazing how much more flexibile everything gets when you first start dabbling with real time mesh deformation. ( If you're new and haven't done it, go and give it a try. It's great. ) |
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| "Hey there, Joe! What's new. I haven't been on these forums in about a year. Been too busy working. Switched to Blitz eh? You still perusing the 3DGS forums?" Oh, I have bad memories of you. But let's have a fresh start over, yes? Let's pretend you're a different Miraj and I'm a different jhocking from those forums. I'm no longer perusing the 3DGS forums (except when referred to specific threads/posts; a couple of the clients I am working with are still using 3DGS, like Ken/Nardulus with his fishing game.) I've been using Blitz for several months (3/4 of a year by now) and have preferred it to other tools I've found along the way. ******* Most of these posts have been kind of off-topic. Not to criticize anyone but my original post was specifically to avoid this sort of vague "Blitz is good" stuff and try to tease out specific features Blitz has that competitors do not. I agree with you all that the stability, speed, and flexibility are huge advantages but apparently a lot of people are only interested in features, hence the DarkBASIC userbase. As I pointed out however there are things Blitz can do which no other game dev system can so let's compile a list of unique features. |
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