Blitz3d Games

[Jonathan Garcia]

Woahthere are updates to Blitz3D? In 2024? And here I was about to tell myself to move on to another language. I mean, I echo the sentiments that it'd be one of my fondest dreams for Blitz3D to be fully modernized and with a few of the features you had in Monkey and such (like passable functions and references and whatnot) and IDE QoL updates, but the realistic part of me would be satisfied just from it being brought back to a functional state (putting a dagger in FMOD is a good chunk of the way there, but there's the dead network functions--yes, I used them--, some issues with the window not refreshing after it leaves the foreground until graphics are reset, and some weird performance issues with the IDE, though admittedly it's been a while since I checked for those and they might be addressed already). I wouldn't be surprised if there were huge improvements just from the recompile. I'll have to take it for a test drive.

I look forward to seeing what new life you can breathe into it with LibSGD. I think part of its success will depend on keeping things simple and in-line with basic language tradition, and having integrated documentation with examples like you did with Blitz3D. I'm sure it'd help non-programmers like myself if it was integrated into Blitz3D instead of having to deal with adding libraries and such; the nail-in-the-coffin on a number of my hobby projects has been that I couldn't get Blitz3D reconfigured correctly after a hard drive died. It's great to just be able to reinstall Blitz3D and have everything working again so vanilla is kinda my default these days, but maybe the zip download will change all that since I could just carry my favorite configuration around on a flash drive.

I know Blitz3D was made for games, and I did a bunch of that as a hobby, but it's also my go-to language for quickly pushing out little tools just to help me and my co-workers with repetitive tasks at the office. I'm not a programmer professionally, but Blitz3D is definitely part of my professional success. Opening Blitz3D is a dopamine rush, it's like getting my drug fix.

Wow! Amazing to hear Blitz3D is back!

One thing that I would really love is a very simple serial comms built directly into Blitz3D. With an interest in using Arduinos and python cards to control 3D environments such as movement and rotations my 3D projects, I had to resort to external programs get the initial serial data and then send that data to Blitz3D using text files! Would be great if serial comms was supported like in other basic languages, e.g. open comms, read incoming bytes, done! See my 3D scanner, 3D digitizer and 3D VR headset linked below that all use Blitz3D for the 3D visualisations!

I tried a few different B3D serial comms userlibs over the years always hoping to get one working, but to no avail. I don't know why they didn't work, but they were always blocked in some way! Other languages I use such as VB6, LibertyBasic, Just Basic, Free Basic, Python, Processing usually get me started, Their serial comms libraries don't get blocked, but I always want to use Blitz3D for the great 3D stuff! Creating intermediate serial comms 'drivers', that suck in the serial data from Adruinos, and output the data to files in RAM disks, to be read back into Blitz3D is a real pain and very slow! How I wish serial comms was built into B3D to help with this. I really feel that would help open up your userbase to others wanting that hardware capability too!

Hey Mark, great to see you working on this again! I used Blitz3D for years, and it basically provided the bridge into the programming world for me. Much of my current knowledge of programming is still based around the Basic concepts I learned back then.

I've been working on an LLVM based compiler for Blitz2D, Blitz3D and BlitzPlus for about two months now (in total), and it's finally reached the point where it can turn most BlitzBasic code into an Abstract Syntax Tree, and even can now provide exact positions for warnings and errors.

It's great to see you again Mark!

Thank you for providing us with one of the best 3D programming tools like Blitz3D, with which many of us have started in the world of programming and obtained really satisfactory results.

Hi i want to share my games using this game engine. First cube game 9x -game-9x its a multiplayer game. Section -wasteland a prototype of a single player game. And last -wasteland/devlog/736608/we-have-a-wolf-ai our demo of wolf AI. All games are for free for the retro community we like blitz3d as the engine runs on win 95 to 11!

I had a look at it on the Virus Total website, which does report some of the exes and dlls contained in the zip to be suspicious, but only by a small number of virus checkers (it' s a 'meta' checker) and all weird ones I'd never header of, none of the 'big name' ones.

So I went and rebuilt the entire Blitz3D packge from scratch using slightly different compiler flags to see if that made a difference and checked it again, and it did! I got a totally different results with fewer false positives (still not 0 though). So it's almost tempting to 're-release' this version as a fix, but I wont be doing that as I don't want to have to be effectively 'randomizing' compiler settings for each release to suppress virus checkers, that's just nuts for a whole lotta reasons.

I guess there's a chance that my machine has been infected by something that infects exes I build using MSVC, but short of reinstalling the whole OS (and I'm not even sure that's enough any more) I don't know if there's anything I can do about that. My machine is regularly checked by MS Windows Defender and I recently checked everything with Bitkeeper for variety which did quarantine a few things I'd never heard of (and similarly have no way of knowing if they were 'real' problems or not) but otherwise said my machine was healthy.

Hi

I've been getting reports of my tools written in B3D running extremely slowly on some win11 devices(Around the 8fps mark) Any ideas on what that could be. They run fine on all win10s and most win11s

No idea sorry, maybe see if you can narrow down what the machines in question have in common - graphics card, virus checker etc?

You'd think by know I'd have a checklist of these sort of variables, but alas I don't...

Nah its all good. Its a rare occurrence. I was just being hopeful :P

Any chance of getting access to Controller triggers?(The L2/R2 slider keys)

Ive not been able to get any response from them and nobody else I know that uses Blitz knows a way

The best tool/language for programming 3D games that I have ever tried -- and I've tried many, many tools. Blitz3D beats Unity, Unreal, Leadwerks, S2, Tombstone/C4, and more that I can't even remember in one key area for me: productivity. I can just write some very simple commands out and get really great results very quickly.

Those other tools/frameworks are great for what they are able to do as well of course but right now my focus is on getting stuff to actually show on the screen as quickly as possible -- and Blitz3D lets me get whats in my head out on the screen the fastest of all of these.

It was so easy to build, basically no steps were required other than 1) check it out 2) press build solution. You end up with Blitz3D.exe in a _release subfolder, ready to go. It's possible I already had any dependencies installed but if so they can't be very hard to find. Give it a try if you're remotely able to work with C/C++!

IIRC, the multiplayer networking functions were removed when Blitz3D was open sourced as the underlying DirectPlay API was not supported by MSVC2017 (Blitz3D was originally built using 'classic' MSVC 6). Plus, I think running a Blitz3D app that was built with DirectPlay support (ie *all* Blitz3D app's pre-open sourcing) caused an annoying 'do you want to install DirectPlay' popup on recent-er versions of Windows.

I've just checked and the source files are still in there so it may still be possible to build Blitz3D with multiplayer support again if you can get hold of the appropriate SDK files (static libs, headers etc) and they're compatible with the Windows SDK stuff used by MSVC.

But, to be honest, it's probably not worth trying as multiplayer in Blitz3D was never that great or even very well tested. I certainly don't remember any multiplayer Bltitz3D apps being released - please let me know if I'm wrong anyone!

I'm still very inexperienced with Blitz3D, but I'm trying to recreate an old multiplayer shooter game that I used to enjoy playing. It was definitely good enough for that and I don't remember any problems.

Hello guys! Thanks for the amazing program. It's what got me into game development and software engineering back in 2004-2005. Many years later I found myself struggling with unity's slow and heavy development cycle. Then I decided to return back to Blitz3D and I am glad I did so. I have been advancing this amazing piece of software to quite modern standards. But right now I am facing a problem with texture flags. Can anyone help me? I need some sort of a combined- or a special flag. Somebody mentioned a flag 49 for my case, but then the mesh disappears completely.. Let me explain. I want to create a low resolution cubemap, but it causes seam issues. I remember there was a edge seam fixup solution somewhere, but I don't remember if it was in Blitz3D or Unity. Anyhow, how to approach this problem? Do I have to modify the cubemap texture at runtime, or whats the complete set of texture flags? Thanks. And many thanks to you Mark, without your amazing program, my life would be completely different.

Note: my first project involved Tokamak physics and I have been working with physics ever since. I am mostly focused on realistic vehicle simulations. And I am once again playing around with tokamak and physx. Then I decided to upgrade the visuals to pbr standards, and this is where I got the edge seam problem.

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