New user
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/New user
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| Hello! I am a new BlitzMax user, just beginning to learn this great programming language. I am not a professional programmer, nor plan to live out of this, nor make any money. My only wish is having fun in my spare time (not much, to tell the truth...), and maybe posting here (when I find how!) or elsewhere something interesting... if I manage to do it! Enough!. Now, to write my "Hello world!"!! jsc |
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| Hi Jsc, Welcome to the community. ;-) (And good luck with your first BlitzMax program...) :-P |
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| Welcome jsc! |
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| hello :) |
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| Hi, Just a few pointers for beginners: Remember to use the search function on the forums (or Google [site:www.blitzbasic.com hello world!]). For posting code, images, links etc please see: http://www.blitzbasic.com/faq/faq_entry.php?id=2 The beginners forum is a decent place to get your grips as well. |
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| That's indeed a good choice. BlitzMax will bring you lots of fun in casual programming, and it can be used for professional results too. There are also 3D engines (free and commercial) which can be used with BlitzMax, for me the real fun at programming starts with 3D programming. MiniB3D would be your first station, it's very easy and powerful, but if you want to look for more advanced 3D engines which have also realtime shadows and physics, you could try Leadwerks Engine ( www.leadwerks.com ). There will be also a 3D Engine with physics and shadows called Flow ( www.flow3d.org ) which works with older hardware, but thus doesn't utilize the newest hardware to their full extend. I personally think both are needed, as you can't put everything into one engine (high-end + compatibility), or if you did then the whole engine would suffer from useless checks and have lower performance. |
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| Thank you all for your welcome and advice! jsc |
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| How does having a fallback mechanism relate to not use the graphics hardware to its full extend? There is a massive hole in that logic I fear. to my knowledge, UT3 for example runs on old hardware while using even newest hardware extremely well. Just because some programmers are not capable of writting fully modular engines with rendering drivers (pure shader, FFP with shader, pure FFP) this does not mean that they use the GPU better, just to point that out as well. This only means that they are incapable of replicate the effect with less demanding attempts. |
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| Yes, theoretically it is possible to have a high-end and low-end engine in one, but in practice that means that the way the both "modes" work, are totally different engines. For example the low-end engine needs baked shadows, while the high-end engine can do everything with dynamic lights and dynamic shadows on the GPU. Both modes would still have common parts, but it would be much more effective then to have the 2 modes as seperate engines under one frontend. It would create 2 seperate .exe files. When Flow and Leadwerks are ready, I could write that kind of front end which uses the same assets and the same source code to create a low-end and a high-end version of the game. I would also create a game launcher, where the user can select from the menu: High Quality / Normal Quality. |
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| High end != new technology! Even if you use DX10 level hardware as min requirement, you still need baked shadows etc unless you plan to restrict your users to HD 2900XT, 3870(X2) and 800 series cards of NVIDIA. Because 8400, 8500 and 8600 won't be able to handle all the intense additional maps + shadow maps in realtime within a real and not tech demo environment. Just because hardware supports SM3 this does not mean that you can become lazy in scaling your dynamic and static contents towards the target machine or you won't have many costumers. Entry, Low-end and mid end hardware won't be able to keep that arrogance on a usefull FPS level for the next few years. |
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| Hi jsc, So what would you like to do with BlitzMax? Regards and Welcome |
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| Hi Merx, What I like most are graphics. I've been slowly developing a paint program I call µPaint. I started it with Metal. Then I switched to RealBasic. RB is great for many things, but has a very annoying thing: once you have your program hapily running, the next version of RB breaks it. Then, if you are subscribed to RB, you feel somehow cheated. I want to explore BlitzMax. BlitzMax is less expensive and multiplatform, and has some interesting features RB lacks, like blending modes. Though, of course RB is, at least theoretically, superior to BM in many aspects. I would like to make also some simple games. Thank you |
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