ENIGMA Forums

General fluff => Off-Topic => Topic started by: Goombert on October 10, 2014, 02:12:13 am

Title: BlitzBasic Gone Free and Open Source!
Post by: Goombert on October 10, 2014, 02:12:13 am
I've always been a big fan of the BlitzBasic engine and products, though never really having used them that much, I liked the environment much better over GM. It made it very easy to manage objects and everything from code and for novices to learn without having to create excessive GUI infrastructures. Well anyway since Mark Sibly is focused on Monkey X now, they've put Blitz Plus and Blitz 3D up for free. Blitz Max and the programming manual are still being commercially sold.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Products/_index_.php

You can read the official announcements on the home page and the forum threads.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Home/_index_.php
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=102907
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=102473

(http://www.blitzbasic.com/Products/blitz3dshot.jpg)

Anybody not already aware, Monkey X is an open source cross-platform game engine with the BASIC programming language as well, sort of based on BlitzBasic. For $100 it can export to numerous modules including Android, Playstation, Xbox, and other platforms. The IDE is built, quite evidently, with the Qt Framework, and it's a very nice IDE.
http://www.monkey-x.com/

(http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/759/nc6x.jpg)
Title: Re: BlitzBasic Gone Free and Open Source!
Post by: time-killer-games on October 10, 2014, 02:37:14 pm
I saw that a while back. I hope they do the same with BlitzMax.
Title: Re: BlitzBasic Gone Free and Open Source!
Post by: Sslaxx on October 14, 2014, 08:42:10 am
I saw that a while back. I hope they do the same with BlitzMax.
Unlikely; Monkey X is basically a BlitzMax front end.
Title: Re: BlitzBasic Gone Free and Open Source!
Post by: time-killer-games on October 14, 2014, 12:06:05 pm
I saw that a while back. I hope they do the same with BlitzMax.
Unlikely; Monkey X is basically a BlitzMax front end.

It would make much more sense if Monkey was closed source, not blitzmax. But that's just me.
Title: Re: BlitzBasic Gone Free and Open Source!
Post by: edsquare on October 14, 2014, 06:18:20 pm
I saw that a while back. I hope they do the same with BlitzMax.
Unlikely; Monkey X is basically a BlitzMax front end.

It would make much more sense if Monkey was closed source, not blitzmax. But that's just me.

Actually no, at least not from a bussiness point of view, creating a frontend to a language/tool is relatively easy comparing to making the tool, For a known tool (ENIGMA) there cn be many Frontends (LGM, NaturalGM, RadialGM, and so on); even if said tool is closed source, since all you need is to know the api to interface with the tool, so if my engine is closed source and my ide is FOSS even if you don't like my ide and someone makes a better one you'd still need to buy my engine. The other way around if I make the engine FOSS and the IDE closed source then you can make your own ide and not buy shit from me.
Title: Re: BlitzBasic Gone Free and Open Source!
Post by: time-killer-games on October 14, 2014, 06:57:23 pm
That doesn't make sense to me Monkey and Blitzmax are two different products that stand apart from each other and the fucntions and how the two languages work and their capabilities are completely different. Blitzmax can make desktop games ONLY (not even counting Windows 8 store ready apps) that have source code completely incompatible with Monkey X and Monkey has like 10 more exports Max doesn't. The one thing they do have in common however is the slow-ass barebones syntax-highlighted crappy notepad of an IDE. But even then the IDE works pretty different for both engines.