Bloniacs – new videos!
Scritto da degac in BlitzMax, Games, Indie software il 28 luglio 2010
After some time I decided to make some new videos of the Bloniacs game.
Nothing special, some video about the game concept & logic.
More info about the game at www.graphioware.com
MaxGUI is free! Or BlitzMax shipped with MaxGUI now!
Skid has finally decided to move to open-source his own MaxGUI module.
Here the official announcement.
What does it mean?
First, BlitzMax has a new arrow to its own bow, so it will be a more ‘complete’ product. Or – in other terms – BlitzMax+MaxGUI now only for USD 80,00! You gain 25,00 30,00 USD, this means about 24% 27% of discount! Not bad!!!
Second, MaxGUI will have a push to add new features and gadgets (I really hope for the support for a GRID GADGET).
More info soon!
Goodbye Godaddy!
After 4 years hosting my game-site www.graphioware.com at Godaddy I decided to make some changes.
I choosed (time ago) Godaddy because I need:
- faster download for my demo-game files (guaranteed)
- bandwidth (guaranteed)
- faster website navigation
- some statistic tools
Things have ever worked as promised, the costs (at the time) wasnt’ high in absolute terms, but as time flies, things changes.
So before renewing the domain I looked around for other opportunities and – of course – what I really need!
I discovered my dreams of glory are very far from what I hoped at the time, so the bandwidth is ‘wasted’. The amount of web space (4GB) is 200 times what I really need to host my website and my files (less than 20Mb…) – so another thing I was paying for nothing.
Downloading speed? Now every hoster can offer the same service for my purposes (download a demo file over 200Kbs).
Moreover PHP on Godaddy was slow compared to other sites I own… and finally the cost element: the USD / EUR ratio is worsed over the last years.
So I decided to go with NetSons, an italian hoster that seems very good (just tested the download speed and is damned fast! and the website pages are at least 10x times faster).
At the moment the site is the ’same’ – I just migrated the content from one hoster to the other. But I’m planning to change it a little…
Stay tuned
BMX2 ?
Mark Sibly in his blog has posted his new plan.
Some months ago he posted about the idea to port BlitzMax on ‘lots of platforms’. Great idea, for sure!
Now we have some more little details about the ‘plan’ to reach lots of platforms.
First is not ‘BlitzMax to lots of platforms’. Mark has decided to create a ‘new language’ – a subset of BlitzMax, lighter and with less modules – mainly focused on developing 2d game.
Second as the new language is a subset (and it seems to be ‘easy’ than BlitzMax itself) there will be new paradigm/syntax to understand, common to other platforms.
Third. To reach the lots of platforms instead of creating a ‘new compiler’ to each one, Mark decided to create a sort of ‘universal translator’. You write in Bmx2 than the ‘output’ (not the program…) will be translated to the platform to run on (or to be compiled / played on).
A simple but genius idea indeed!
At the moment the translator renders for this languages:
- C++
- C#
- Java
- JavaScript
- ActionScript
And there are already ‘out-of-the-box’ modules ready to run for Win32, MacOS, Linux, HTML5, Flash, XNA, Android.
What does this mean?
Simple you can write a game and you – technically – can render it for internet (Flash, HTML5) for mobile device (Android, Java, HTML5) for a console (Xbox – XNA) and of course for the ‘classic’ pc (Win32, MacOS and Linux).
As Mark said the new language ‘will be targeted at simple 2D game creation’. This is not bad at all – I’m still programming in 2d!!! and there are plenty of game to create!
But I think this is the major limit compared to BlitzMax: the multi-platform design make difficult to maintain the expandability of BlitzMax, this is why BMX2 will be a subset of it.
Of course this doesn’t mean that in future (as already said) some things will be considered standard on all the platforms, for example 3d on HTML is in WIP now, but in 5 years? Only God knows.
For these reasons I think Mark should choose a proper name for his new creature: calling it BMX2 generates only confusion as it’s something different. I like the idea of BlitzLiquid or BlitzMagic… but who knows!
So I LIKE the plan.
I see POTENTIAL for this new language.
I see a MARKET for it.
I see a new FUTURE for BlitzMax itself, not relegated to ‘game platform’ – and free to grow up thanks to its module-design.
What I dont’ like? At the moment its only a plan… 
Leadwerks Engine Help Creator v.1.25
After a very long time I decided to update my Leadwerks Engine Help Creator, a program that creates local documentation for MaxIDE (and for other IDE).
This version ‘reads’ the wiki page that reports ALL THE COMMAND, so is just a simple ‘Download commands list‘ from a menu to have up-to-date the command set (of course if the wiki is up-to-date too…)
As you can notice I’ve update the layout of the HTML page…
Here the link (windows32)
First experiment on Ipad – Gerball!
Scritto da degac in General, Indie software il 6 aprile 2010
To this link you can see more informations and screenshots about a game re-written for Apple Ipad© by SI DESIGN (aka Simon Harrison – developer of BRL, creator of MaxGUI (the first version), and of MiniB3d – a porting of the B3d engine in OpenGL to be used with BlitzMax!)
Gerball is also available for MacOS X (thanks to MiniB3d!) and will be soon available for Ipod/Iphone.
To make this game Simon had created a new port of Blitz3d-Minib3d called – - iminib3d…it’s written in C++ and here you can find more information about it!
More information here http://www.supergerball.com/
BlitzMax & LLVM
Scritto da degac in BlitzMax, Indie software il 3 aprile 2010
Reading on the BlitzMax’s forum I found someone speaking of LLVM
I’m not an expert of assembler compiler & virtual machines, but after reading some thing, I started to get more interested in it!
Basically LLVM is a Low Level Virtual Machine, a set of technics to allow faster and easier compilation on a determinated platform/language. It is a virtual machine that produces codes more efficiently than the GCC (used by BlitzMax too).
Technically speaking LLVM could be considered as a compilation strategy, a virtual instruction set and a compiler infrastructure: for more information look at the main forum!
Why BlitzMax and LLVM?
Because BRL/Mark seems to have decided to support ‘other platforms‘ (whatever this means) – and a quite-final solution could be the support to LLVM: you write one compiler compatible with LLVM and you have – already - an entire world of CPU/system supported (from other high level language to entire platform).
In any case, even if other platforms will be no supported, LLVM should be used now because generates more efficient compiled code (MacOS X Snow Leopard integrates LLVM-GCC 4.2, a sort of bridge between past and future – the LLVM only solution – while LLVM from MacOS X 10.5 was used only for OpenGL to grant some solution not hardware supported).
LLVM is open-source license and I just found this plugin called DRAGONEGG that allow to re-direct the compiler process from GCC 4.5 to LLVM! So thing should be quite easy (I really dont’ know nothing about GCC/Compiler & co… 
)
Sure it’s something to take in consideration…
BlitzMax on LOTS of platforms!
Scritto da degac in BlitzMax, Indie software il 30 marzo 2010
This day will be remembered!
Here Mark Sibly, the author of Blitz products (Blitz3d, BlitzPlus and BlitzMax) has decided to implement the support for other platforms for his last creatures BlitzMax.
Of course everything is in development stage – probabily nothing is working as expected – but at least we have a plan to port BlitzMax to the mobile market!
Good luck!
Leadwerks Engine 2.3 – Arrived!
As I said in my previos post Leadwerks Engine ‘cheap update’ lasts til the end of march.
So – I bought it – and after a very loooooong (8300 seconds are 138 minutes, or more than 2 hours!!!) downloading and installing process… NOW I have on my computer the engine, the editor (great!) and some content (meshes, textures and so on…very good pieces!)
What I re-discovered is that this engine requires a new hardware: I still have a Nvidia GeForce 6600…but its the ‘bottom of the pit’…if you want to run and enjoy the full experience of this engine you need to have a ‘modern graphics card’.
So the next step on my spending way this month is looking for a new graphic cards (and a new motherboard and new CPU too! I’m still running with a AMD Athlon64 3500 – year 2003!!!)
Mario’s wrong day…
Following this suggestion I made this
