I used it in a small project to try it out, I concluded that it is a bit slow.
Really? Huh. The reason I chose not to go with MiniB3D was that I felt the development lacked direction, coordination and a constructive way to collaborate. Slow was definitely not it. In fact my little test program was throwing around 1.6 million polys (Blitz3D unfortunately doesn't do surfaces with that many verts/polys, so I don't have a reference) at roughly 20 fps, on my sorry excuse for a PC. TrueVision - i've seen it in other games and never seen anything half as good as B3D games so I never really looked at it.
Well fair enough. Consider that these games where written in older versions of TV3D tho' and quite possibly in either VB or C++, both of which aren't really all that hot for programming games with (IMHO). As far as support in BlitzMAX goes, it's my understanding that the BlitzMAX wrapper basically just exposes the TV3D engines interface to the language, so you'll be able to get all the support you need off the TV3D boards instead. There are a few BlitzMAX users hanging out there, and the more momentum TV3D gets from the Blitz community, the more likely it is that someone will be able to help you in BlitzMAX.As for Irrlicht I've only really tried the Python version and it was rather good, for what it was, and performed surprisingly well. I'm sure the BlitzMAX version is absolutely awesome.
Regarding development time, i'm an 'advanced basic' user, meaning i'm good with basic.
See, this is the part I don't get. I'm not trying to be clever, mean or rude here, but BASIC is just a language, and not a very standardized one at that (thanks Microsoft, you useless cretinous morons).But here's the deal, you're a self-confessed procedural programmer (and maybe we interpret that term differently), but BASIC is traditionally a sequential programming language with no data structures (although over time it evolved into a functional, procedural and ultimately object oriented language). So you should be fairly at home in languages like C, Pascal and ALGOL as well, since they are also procedural languages, albeit with different syntax. So it seems obvious to me that you've moved somewhat upwards (in terms of abstraction) in your adoption of programming paradigms. Which is good, because it means that the Object Oriented Paradigm will eventually click.
For me the OOP didn't really click until I read Bruce Eckels's "Thinking in Java", which is available for free from his website and is pretty much a must-read for programmers who struggle with getting out of their procedural ways.