This is an interesting product that we would seriously consider adding to our set of BRL tools. The price is nothing to quibble about. If the SDK is as good as Blitz3D it is a fair price considering it is a tested and well-designed library. Whether it is competitive is Blitz’s business.
I must admit that while I’m a Blitzhead, I do most of my programming in C++ and PHP. We own both Blitz3D and BlitzMax + MaxGUI, but so far only use them for game prototyping and tools. I think the primary sales point for BlitzMax is that it takes the pain out of cross-platform development. This is a point often missed by third-party developers. When BlitzMax has a 3D engine with solid MacOS X support I think it would be great for real game development, but until then I have a hard time convincing my teammates that it is anything but a great prototyping tool.
I think BlitzMax can be used for professional programming, but despite being a Blitzhead I acknowledge shortcomings that would have to be fixed. Like PHP4, the BlitzMax language lacks support for some important object-oriented (OOP) features that makes it hard to use design patterns and other OOP methods. With PHP that was fixed in PHP5. I think it is a sound design decision to drop a lot of the features found in C++, but still some could have been included without making it harder for beginners.
From the top of my head I would like to see:
* access specification (public, protected, private)
* import_once(), include_once() command (ability to include a file only once, which is PHPs way of avoiding an infinite loop as files include each other). BlitzMax makes it hard to keep each type (class) in a separate file.
* Reflection API, because unit testing is very hard without it and you really need unit testing to write professional code. I don’t mind if it only works in debug build.
* Ability to pass arguments to New() or a real constructor method.
* Blitz3D MacOS X (OpenGL) support (perhaps rolled into the SDK).
/Jonas
I must admit that while I’m a Blitzhead, I do most of my programming in C++ and PHP. We own both Blitz3D and BlitzMax + MaxGUI, but so far only use them for game prototyping and tools. I think the primary sales point for BlitzMax is that it takes the pain out of cross-platform development. This is a point often missed by third-party developers. When BlitzMax has a 3D engine with solid MacOS X support I think it would be great for real game development, but until then I have a hard time convincing my teammates that it is anything but a great prototyping tool.
I think BlitzMax can be used for professional programming, but despite being a Blitzhead I acknowledge shortcomings that would have to be fixed. Like PHP4, the BlitzMax language lacks support for some important object-oriented (OOP) features that makes it hard to use design patterns and other OOP methods. With PHP that was fixed in PHP5. I think it is a sound design decision to drop a lot of the features found in C++, but still some could have been included without making it harder for beginners.
From the top of my head I would like to see:
* access specification (public, protected, private)
* import_once(), include_once() command (ability to include a file only once, which is PHPs way of avoiding an infinite loop as files include each other). BlitzMax makes it hard to keep each type (class) in a separate file.
* Reflection API, because unit testing is very hard without it and you really need unit testing to write professional code. I don’t mind if it only works in debug build.
* Ability to pass arguments to New() or a real constructor method.
* Blitz3D MacOS X (OpenGL) support (perhaps rolled into the SDK).
/Jonas