MonkeyX user numbers compared to BlitzMax users?

he talks about a possible 3d module for MX2.

We always said we would pay for a 3D Engine Module for Max!

Myself I wish he'd stuck with BlitzMax, made it cross-platform, 64 bit and sold a 3d module with it.

BlitzMax was his best work tbh.

Now he's talking about a crowdfunded 3d module for MX but I'd guess most of us still hanging around this site won't have a lot of interest

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

And wisdom to know the difference.

C++ ...so verbose.

I think Mark should focus on publishing games. If you haven't played a Mark Sibly game get a C64 or Amiga emulator and try them.

like Unity/Unreal when they up their version

users here still can't get over Blitzmax

You have to do what's right for you at that time that you make the decision to do whatever it is that you want to do

But that's essentially the same product, with upgrades. It's not like they create a new language and toss all the old stuff out of the window with each new version.

The really strange part, to me, was the decision to create a completely separate site and maintain that instead of upgrading this one and keeping everything under the same brand.

BRL should just have a site called BlitzResearch.com and everything goes off that.

/monkey2/src/bb2cc

In summary, BRL missed a beat by not delivering Max3D. There's nothing wrong with Monkey but what if Max3D was a success?

I guess since the discussion is wavering to the historical decisions of BRL and BlitzMax vs Monkey, I guess I'll continue the trend. Some people have already said some honest and truthful things which I agree with and which I feel sort of go unheard or at least unaddressed.

It seems that over time there have been two things happening. One is the market forces, trends, what's currently popular, new platforms and opportunities - the shifting market. The second thing is BRL's response to these changes.

When platforms and 3D and mobile and such were not a 'thing', BRL I think went from strength to strength progressing from Blitz to Blitz3D to BlitzMax and then the next obvious leap - BlitzMax3D. BlitzMax was a revolution and evolution and the addition of custom modules, pointers, types and stuff like that really made it wonderful. It still lis great for 2D games, software, apps, tools, data processing, etc. But while it was emerging into these new frontiers, the rest of the world was exploding into 3D and moving away from 2D. So then there was this tension. And the BRL response was to start working on a 3D module, which would have absolutely rocked I'm sure. But this apparently didn't get that far. BlitzMax3D would've been an awesome product with probably an even bigger audience than Blitz3D.

But then there was also market pressure in the form of editors and tools for game development which were moving much more aware from 'pure programming' and more towards visual development. The likes of Torque2D, later 3D, GameMaker, and newcomers like Unity etc. This is where the tidal wave of game developers were flowing. BRL was going to bring out Max3D to at least tap the 3D potential better, but also wasn't addressing the elephant in the room - that people wanted higher and higher level tools with more automation and less effort. Fact is that making complicated stuff in BlitzMax gets... complicated. And time consuming. Compared to having some tool to do it. It's a significant handicap. I think Max3D was part way along with progress which would've been good, but for example the BRL website did not evolve hardly at all (and still hasn't). Max was already I think very under-marketed and poorly represented. It could've enjoyed far more sales. And then Max3D would've called for a significant site upgrade.

Anyway. Then there started to be all this diversification of platforms - mobile, Apple, Android, html5, flash, etc. More and more developers wanting to make stuff for these platforms. Seemed cutting edge. I think Max3D got dumped because of the intense pressure of this market change and the fear of being left behind that it caused (or declining sales? I don't know). That's a big problem, because Max was windows/mac specific and needed a custom compiler, and making more compilers for more platforms (plus other gubbins that apps need) must have been extremely daunting or next-to impossible for BRL to do alone. Not much choice there. It was definitely wise to try to open up to more platforms (ala Monkey), but the method for going about it - while very elegant and clever - somewhat alienated the 'natives' on Windows and Mac. Monkey was a downgrade, almost like a starting-over on a whole new footing. If it would've been a foundation that was built on and brought back up to where Max is at and then wen past Max, that would be awesome, but I don't see that happening. The main problem is the architecture, i.e. to be cross-platform it has to use a language-converter and third-party compilers instead of its own, and that means things like a) no modules or ability to use external libraries, b) no pointers, c) handicapped graphics capabilities, d) slower performance etc. So Blitz on desktop took a big hit and everyone's been sitting waiting for years to see if Monkey would 'become' Max2 and it still isn't there. So Monkey is obviously the successor to Max and 'no turning back ever'.

Now monkey is getting sort of to the stage Max was at years ago when it needed to address 3D, and so now we have news of 'Monkey 3D' coming down the wire. Supposedly a good move if you ignore the pre-monkey history. But all the people who were Blitz-loyal have been largely alienated by the lack of attention to what they LOST from Max. We're all still waiting to get that stuff back so that we can consider Monkey an *actual* improvement on Max, from a user's perspective. Monkey needs to reclaim what it lost from BlitzMax (plus support 64-bit). And then add 3D. And... oh yeah, the rest of the world is moving on from 'languages' and more toward a 'scripting' backend for 'when you need it', wrapped up in a nice intuitive WYSIWYG editor. Blitz 'editors' have always been ultra minimalist and really not very helpful at all. The constant focus on language stuff is missing a huge elephant. Take Unity3D for example, or Torque3D, or Unreal engine or whatever else... people need, expect, and want, a much higher-level development experience. No amount of adding on a 3D module for a partly-featured language is going to make up for the huge amount of time and effort it takes when you don't have suitable editing tools.

I made a partial shift to Unity a few years ago to check it out. Didn't like it at first, wasn't very intuitive for 2D like BlitzMax.. *yearned* for BlitzMax to come up to speed in what the visual editing offered - I would've come back to Blitz in a heartbeat. Way better/easier language than using C# or Javascript. But Unity has some major functionality that Blitz has never touched on. When I come back to Blitz and I see what things people are spending their time working on, it's very typically quite low-level stuff. Trying to code some 'engine', trying to put together even a basic particle system, trying to write a very basic 3D engine - the results of which are *extremely* far behind the times. Trying to hack together anything to do with shaders is tricky. Using special GL features like render-textures, etc... yet alone anything more modern. You go into something like Unity and you can throw together objects and assemble levels and strap on 3rd party assets and use 3rd party tools to help with your workflow. And sometimes you can go into code when it's needed. And then you come back out, and you're more artistically playing with color and design and layout in a visual way. And it's doing all this stuff for you. Physics is seamlessly integrated, collision detection and response, very advanced shader support, all kinds of visual editors and add-ons, whole libraries of 3rd party assets. I mean... you use that for a while, and get used to how relatively easy that is to develop something, and then you try coming back to Blitz and you're like. ... oh, I guess I would have to spend 6 months programming an engine first, or I would have to hack around with some half working buggy 3D plugin, or try to hack together some low-level shader support that I pass in with a string, and stuff like that... and you appreciate all the pain and work that Unity has taken OUT of having to develop games 'the hard way'. And it really makes Blitz looks like a very very old, slow-to-develop-with, difficult to be artistic with engine that is still struggling to even support the basics in a helpful way.

Back when Blitz was just a language (well, still is), and being just a language was 'normal' and commonplace, it was fantastic. To be able to 'write' a game in game-like lingo etc. But development moved way on past that. It's not just about mobile and other platforms anymore. It's about having high-level tools that save you a ton of time and effort. There are people now on Unity/Unreal etc banging out games that are even basic/ameteurish games, in less time, and with more advanced features and tools, than almost anyone making stuff in Blitz. That's just the reality of it. Nobody's sitting there in the Unity audience thinking, hmm.. I wonder how I'm going to get my texture to upload to the gpu.... they just open an image and slap it on the screen. No-one's sitting there trying to figure out how to do advanced physics, they're twiddling with user interfaces and sliders and adjustments with realtime feedback. This is what Blitz is MISSING. It's a gaping big hole in the fact that development isn't about writing code anymore. It's painful, longwinded and laborious. And unfortunately BRL's strategy hasn't addressed this, ever. It's been about expanding the language and adding more language and making the language work on more platforms, and not necessarily about making development fundamentally easier and faster. Don't get me wrong I don't mind BMax at all, it's brilliant, I love it... but... it's painful now compared to what else is available. Blitz is now a ... very elegant way of spending a lot of time not making much progress. That's just the reality of the situation now. That's where the market is at and where it's moved onto. I would not be able to convince a single person using Unity or Unreal etc to drop the entire experience and go back to Monkey or doing all the 3D programming and physics and advanced graphics features on your own. The workflow just isn't there, the pipeline isn't there.

The other big biter for BRL which I think most people agree with is the lack of marketing. And I'm sorry but when Mark said he'd improved the website recently and it was better... well... TINY improvement, realistically. The website is ancient. The monkey site is 'better', more modern, but a bit basic. And neither is really pushing the sales of the product very well. BRL simple does not know how to market their product in the modern world. You need to find or hire someone that does. An entirely new website would be a start, plus as someone said having Monkey and other BRL products under the same website. There are so many things that could be done to improve it. I ask myself why I'm still looking at the same basic website that I was looking at 10 years ago? The problem isn't that Blitz isn't being represented well, it's that there is a huge amount of SALES that are being missed out on which could quite adequately fund BRL etc IF the product were presented properly. As you know in marketing its not just about what the product does but the spin you put on it. It could be selling 2, 3, 4, 5 times as many units if it were given a public facelift. This was pretty much never addressed and apparently still will not be. Banging out a few videos is not going to cut it at all! So then this creates a sense of animosity in the community where the people feel that BRL are letting down the product that they feel passionate about and are not giving it its due credit and presentation, which also ties into the feeling of how Monkey was a slap in every BMax user's face pretty much.

If it were me, I'd stop all projects and work on the USER-centered reality of the Blitz products, which would include a) marketing, b) website, c) community involvement/projects/games etc, d) a helpful, time-saving, easy-to-use visual editor. I think this would help BRL more than anything. Blitz should be presented more like GameMaker, GameSalad and the like... that's the more direct competition right now and Blitz is being left in the dust without a visual editor. I think if BRL doesn't 'want' to stop identifying itself as a 'language company', it's going to suffer. Times have moved on, businesses have to adapt. And I think the idea of making a game to 'advertise' Monkey.. .. nope... you should be getting the public to make that game and you should then be featuring it in some kind of partnership deal... spend your valuable time doing things that users CAN'T do on their own such as making a better game development experience, giving the BRL products a more modern public appeal etc.

In my opinion BRL didn't see or recognize the real 'shift' that's going on in development and it's not just towards multi-platform, it's towards easier higher-level development and WYSIWYG editing with a scripting backend for when the extremely time-saving tools can't do what you want. If BRL had ever addressed that in any way it would be a far more accessible tool to far more people. All the people now that expect higher-level easy tools to make games with wouldn't even think twice to go back to 'language only' development. The big picture has been totally missed. Making the language better is not the answer, the language itself is the problem. Languages are dying and they need to die and they will die for all but the most advanced developers. Good tools are supposed to 'get out of the way' i.e. you should ideally need to deal with the tool LESS in order to be doing better, instead of focusing on 'the tool' being the center of attention which I feel is what's happening with this progression of Monkey, Monkey2, Monkey 3D, whatever. More transparency in the game development process is what is needed. Less steps. Less details. Less pain. Less time. Less typing.

I love Blitz to bits. Mark is a genius. But PLEEEEEEEEASE get with the times and listen to what people really want and need.