Future of Blitz

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Socoder -> Off Topic -> Future of Blitz
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 04:50
realtime	Future of Blitz What made Blitz Basic so great in its heyday? What core values and principles did it embody? Can we preserve those values for future generations in a modern format? Is it possible to create something equally impactful today? Has anyone started working on a modern revival or spiritual successor? Please share -=-=- me blog: fork-garden
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 06:22
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Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 09:12
Kuron	What made Blitz Basic so great in its heyday? What made BB so great was just how bad DarkBASIC was at that time. DX-Creator was out before DB and even though it compiled to P-Code, it was blistering fast (as fast as Blitz Basic would later be) and was also available as a DLL and could be used with other languages. It was 2D only (and IIRC was based on DX5). Unfortunately, piracy killed it and as it was dying DB came out. I have honestly never seen a product get killed by piracy so quickly, but virtually everybody in the community had found a keygen and never paid for the product. Most completely missed DX-Creator's run, it was so short. DXC came out in April 1999, DB came out in early 2000 (I forget the exact month) and Blitz for PC came out in October of 2000. DB's 3D was great for its time, but 2D was horribly slow, but 3D was taking off as 3D standards across graphics cards were finally starting to sort itself out, so DB did great for those dipping their feet into 3D as the 3D market was developing. As DB was around version 1.05/1.06/1.07 (IIRC) (DB updates were mostly monthly back then), Blitz Basic was taking shape. DB's IRC channel was simply the best promotion for Blitz and DB itself was the best promotion Blitz could have asked for. 2D was hugely popular, and Blitz was a quasi-compiled language and extremely fast compared to DB. It was actively being developed, and had one of the best communities ever, because it largely drew from the talent pool of Blitz's Amiga roots which allowed many of the Amiga developers to transition to Windows development. Although this older userbase was new to Windows, they were extremely experienced with Blitz (and 2D) from the Amiga days and were able to help show what BlitzBasic was truly capable of and were a huge help to those of us who only came to Blitz when it hit the PC world. Had DB not been so poor in the 2D side of things back then, Blitz would not have been as popular, as quickly as it was. Not knocking Lee Bamber, just DB came at a time when DirectX and graphics card standards were just starting to settle into some kind of order. When DB first came out Glide was still a thing on 3dFX Voodoo cards. When Blitz hit the PC, Glide was mostly gone and DirectDraw & DirectX were actually becoming very usable. Mark was used to developing for the Amiga which had proper hardware support for 2D, and was able to capitalize on it once he moved to Windows and DirectX. To his credit, George Bray played a part in making Blitz so great, because you had a publisher that dealt with Blitz created games. These were games that were on store shelves in the UK/EU. This brought exposure to Blitz, but also gave Blitz users an outlet to market their games. Blitz itself was also on store shelves. Modern stuff? PureBasic. Still going strong and has its roots in the Amiga days and started as an add on of some sort for Blitz. Very capable language, especially for 2D and is cross-platform and Fred does an excellent job of keeping it updated and compatible. I think I first bought it in January of 2004. 22 years of using it, and still impressed with it and what Fred continues to give us. For webbased stuff? Spider Basic is really good and a derivative of PB. Next to SB, I would look at JSE, as it excels for retro games. Unfortunately, some of what I need does not fit in the retro category, which is why I bought SB and I am familiar with PB's syntax. All of the combinations that made Blitz so great in the day, was largely the right place at the right time for Mark and having the right product for that time. Mark was able to benefit from DB's shortcomings. Now, there are so many game development languages, libraries, tools, etc, and each have their fanbase and more indie games are being made than ever. None of these products, with the exception of PB, are as easy to use as Blitz was. Part of why I continued to use Blitz Plus for so long was it simply worked and the syntax was so easy to deal with. Mark's life may have been cut short, but he made one hell of an impact on the game development community.
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 09:45
Jayenkai	Moving from Amiga to PC, I always considered DarkBasic to be an Amos style language compared to Blitz being .. well, Blitz!! The main difference (to me) being that Blitz would load items (images, sounds, etc) into memory then pass you the handle, whilst DB (as far as I was aware at the time) loaded them into a slot allocated by the variable you used, so you had to carry on using that variable... .. Is that right, or is my mind playing tricks on me? Either way, I came from being a lover of Amos on the Amiga, and so DB was my first modern PC language. (I say modern.. We're talking 20+ years ago, here!!) The one thing.. Literally the one single thing.. That made me switch from DB to Blitz..? The bloody editor used a full screen resolution, instead of being Windowed, and every time it switched, Windows being as frustrating as it was back then, would move all my desktop icons around. Honestly, that was literally it. That was what made me go "OK, this is annoying, what else is out there?" And that's when I discovered a version of Blitz2D on the cover of a PC Plus magazine. So, um.. Yeah, I vote for "Anything that doesn't move my desktop icons around". -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 10:14
Kuron	Lee, from the beginning, always said DB was inspired by AMOS. The IDE literally killed a brand new $500 19" CRT monitor within a month and a half. Monitors did not have digital switching yet for resolution changes and still used a mechanical relay. Fried the relay as it was being used so much and it could not be fixed. With the prominence of WarpyCode™ on the forums back then, I was easily in and out of the IDE testing things 150-200 times per day. Poor relay probably got 5-7 years of normal use in a month and a half. Also never figured out the BOB name, even though I knew what it stood for, but it was cool in a way as it was different. DB syntax... It has been so long, my mind is a bit blank, but IIRC, didn't we have like numbers we would load a BOB to? Psuedo code: Load kickassBOB, 1 ' bank 1 something like that? I seem to remember always doing something like this for each image after loading the images into banks psuedo code: Platdue = 1 and then when whatever BOB was loaded to bank 1, instead of using the "1", I would always use the "Platdude" to refer to it instead of "1" Am sure you know what I am trying to say (killer migraine today and all last night, so my previous post being so thorough is surprising the brain is even working today). If it wasn't DB, it was another language, but I am pretty sure in DB we couldn't simply do: Platdude = load image "platsprite.png" But, I would get around it like I am badly trying to explain and know I had to do that for a couple of languages back in the day. The desktop being scrambled is why I quit putting anything on my desktop and kept it empty and hidden.
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 10:23
Jayenkai	Blitter Objects : See Blitter, consider also "Blitz" : http://6502.org/users/andre/csa/blitter/works.html -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 10:35
Pixel_Outlaw	I started using it in about 2006. At that point we were firmly in DLL hell. I liked that it built all included binaries with the click of a button and provided GUI options via the MaxGUI module. I can't say that the language is great. I feel that the environment around the language and ease of just putting something on the screen is great. Not having to link a bunch of dlls or .so files is great. I feel the next logical step in the language's growth would be to support templated functions and also first class functions so I could make entirely new control flow constructs and shrink my code quite a bit more. I wish more languages came with guaranteed multimedia and GUI support but the bloated browser as a catch all for GUI has ruined that notion culturally. BlitzMax NG is the successor to BlitzMax - it's not dead but I think it's been half a year or so since we've gotten an update last time I checked. Cerberus X is the successor to Monkey X. I think the biggest thing we can take away from Blitz is that you don't need an engine to make a game in a few weeks. I think a lot of people run off to learn unity and then they never end up actually making their game. And I think that's another cultural difference from today - we used to set out to make games because we wanted to see something we had in our head work. I can't speak for abroad but in the US I feel that startup culture has kind of killed the hobbyist scene. To some extent making a game is an item on some programming project checklist to prove proficiency. I've never been that way but I do see it among a lot of 20-somethings right now. BlitzMax is a nostalgic touch stone from my very early programming days. But I've learned so many languages deeply since then that it feels very limited and constricting to me now. Had it not been for Blitz I may have stopped programming after learning C++98 prior.
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 10:47
Kuron	To some extent making a game is an item on some programming project checklist to prove proficiency. I've never been that way but I do see it among a lot of 20-somethings right now. We were starting to see this even back in 2001. Pie's GCS for Windows was used by a guy for a college project called House of Cathalon, which is probably the best thing ever turned out in the Windows version.
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 11:41
angros47	I started programming on a Commodore 128, then moved to pc, with gw-basic and QBasic. I never liked Visual Basic, because it forced to work with pre-built pieces (the same difference that I percieved with a generic Lego box, that could allow you to build anything, or a lego box with specific pieces to build a castle, a spaceship and so: better result... but only if you did exactly what you were supposed to do) After QBasic I experimented with other versions of Basic, and the one I liked most was RapidQ (that was more free than Visual Basic, closer to QBasic, but featured windows widgets, and some 3d). Unfortunately it got discontinued. When I first saw Blitz3D I felt the same freedom I had with QBasic, but with the power to use 3d. I liked several things about Blitz3D: for example, it just worked, you could start immediately, and learn the theory after. In most 3D engines you have to familiarize with "nodes" and scene hierarchy before you could learn how to draw even a simple cube. With Blitz3D, instead, you could use CreateCamera and CreateCube, not caring about scene management and hierarchy, and only after you could learn about parent entities and so on. It was much more beginner friendly. Another thing I liked was that there were several primitives that allowed to create geometry and texture on the fly: for me, it was important, because I never liked the languages that required always to rely on external media files: what if I want to customize a texture on the fly? Blitz3D made it possible I was pretty disappointed when Blitz3D was pushed aside, to focus on BlitzMax. Also, the experience I had with RapidQ made me look for something open source, because it was less likely to be abandoned. So I focused a lot on FreeBasic... and when MiniB3D was made, I tried to port it to FreeBasic. It was not possible, at the time (FreeBasic missed too many OOP features, although now it has them), but I found a c++ version of minib3d (iMinib3d), and I managed to make a library usable from FreeBasic. I made some changes (I wanted to make a space simulation, so I needed quaternion based rotations like Blitz3D, I wasn't happy with Euler's rotations of minib3d), so I modified it, porting the changes made by Warner to C++. It worked... but since it was different from minib3d, I renamed it to OpenB3D. Then, in the years, I kept working on it, adding many of the addons available for minib3d (terrains, shadows, shaders, postfx, CSG) and some addons created by me (planets, blobs). MarkCWM noticed my work and made a wrapper to port it back to BlitzMax, but for me the main target had always been FreeBasic, although lately I tried to expand to new targets, mainly JavaScript and Python. So, for me, the heir of Blitz is OpenB3D. My hope is to involve others to help it grow.
Sat, 07 Jun 2025, 13:15
Kuron	For me, as much as I love Fred & PB, I do not like the 3D side of it -- too complex for me. DB & B3D were perfect for my mediocre 3D needs and simple enough I could wrap my head around them.