Advise on Blitzmax
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Advise on Blitzmax
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| Just like to say hello to everyone here :) I had the original Blitzbasic for the PC years ago,and used that quite alot at the time. I now have rekindled my interest in hobby programming,and notice that Blitzbasic has been surpassed by Blitzplus ? I downloaded Blitzplus,and it looks pretty identical to Blitzbasic to me. But I have also just downloaded the trial version of BlitzMax,which looks alot different to Blitzbasic & Blitzplus. BlitzMax reminds me a bit of C\C++,the way that you have to include libraries at the beginning of your code. Anyway,i'm mostly a 2D programmer,so my question is,should I be using Blitzplus or BlitzMax ? I personally think I should be using Blitzmax,because its more upto date and a more competent language ? |
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| Blitzmax. For a hundred million reasons which i can't be bothered to list. (Or Monkey, if you want to do mobile stuff). |
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| blitzplus is almost identical to BlitzBasic. the biggest differences are some bugfixes (blitzbasic programs may have problems on modern PC's for various reasons that were addressed in Blitzplus. It also adds access to the native windows GUI, and allows you to interact with DLL's) Blitzmax can do the same, but much more in addition to that: 1) You can still write procedural code very similar to the old Blitzbasic / Blitzplus style, but it will also support basic object-oriented programming 2) Blitzplus is 2D, everything is done by pushing pixels to the screen. Blitzmax is 2D-in-3D, which means that you get hardware accelerated 3D effects such as zooming, rotating, blending, alpha-transparancy, etc. which can make games look *much* more polished 3) Blitzmax is modular by design, you can download hundreds of (mostly free) 3rd party add-one modules that extend the functionality: 3D engines, database engines, graphic effects, movie playback, and much more. It also means that compiled programs are potentially smaller since you can choose not to include unused modules unlike Blitzplus where the entire command library is included in every program. 4) Blitzmax is cross-platform: Buy one, and you can run blitzmax on windows, Mac and Linux, and compile the same program on all three with little to no changes 5) Blitzmax has some other more advanced capabilities like Multi-threading, where your program can use multiple CPU cores if necessary. (Does require a extra work and careful planning to implement, though) Between the two, there's really no contest: Blitzmax all around. Blitzplus really only has one thing going for it: for a limited time, it's free: http://blitzbasic.com/Products/_index_.php Or, as Gfk mentioned, there's Monkey. Command-set wise it's more limited than Blitzmax, but it has the benefit of being able to create flash, HTML5, GFLW, XNA, android and apple iOS applications. There's probably additional platform targets out by now as well. The programming style is pretty different though, so it may take a bit longer to learn. |
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| May have a look at Monkey later on,but for now BlitzMax will do me fine. Thanks guys,for confirming a few details for me. |
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| I downloaded Blitzplus,and it looks pretty identical to Blitzbasic to me. Key differences between BlitzBasic and BlitzPlus...~ For BlitzPlus, the compiler was rewritten and at pure logic, BlitzPlus is faster. ~ BlitzPlus allows for limited 2D-in-3D and you can use 3D hardware acceleration by using the OpenGL driver. ~ BlitzPlus allows for event-driven programming and plays nicer with Windows. ~ BlitzPlus allows for GUI based apps to easily be written. ~ BlitzPlus has a native graphics driver, DirectX 1 driver and OpenGL driver and will run on almost anything. This is only useful for targeting older systems. ~ BlitzPlus has the ability to use DLLs and directly access many non-COM Windows APIs. As others have said, BlitzMax would be my suggestion of what to use. It is a superior product. |
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