Hi Mark. Is it possible to improve Blitz3d: add support for directx 11 or 12, add a built-in physics simulation library with support for soft body simulation, add OOP support, and add some new features. I believe that you will be able to improve Blitz3d, just as you once created this wonderful engine.
Hi, I recently downloaded Blitz3D in an attempt to upgrade the version used by SCP:CB, but there are certain bin files that are supposed to be replaced that contain certain functions like bump mapping and are required if you intend to compile the game. I was wondering if it would be either possible to implement these functions directly into the newest versions of Blitz3d, whether it be in a new update or upgrading the mavless functions.
Hi used to use Blitz3D for 2D games many years ago. I'm looking to get back into coding 2D games and was wondering is Blitz2D still a good choice for this?
I would like to have some torches that light part of the game map in a 2D game, is this something that is possible using Blitz3D or can it not do something like this?
TBH, I would not recommend starting a new project in Blitz3D unless you wanting to support ancient versions of Windows, in which case you can use Blitz3DxWin95 to produce Windows95 compatible apps. Blitz3D is 20-ish years old by now and the development environment and underlying technology are very outdated.
I would personally recommend Raylib + your favoruite language if you enjoy programming everything by hand, or Godot if you're into GUIs.
This is probably a false positive (the Wacatac one esp. comes up a lot) and there is nothing I can do about these.
I have started posting hashcodes for all zip downloads at the bottom of the devlog release announcement posts. If you run certutil on the downloaded zip, eg:
cvertutil -hashfile blah.zip SHA256
...and it comes up with the same SHA256 number, then the file you have received is at least the file I sent, meaning at least it hasn't been interferred with en-route.
Past that, it's purely up to you whether you trust that I sent a 'clean' file in the first place or not.
You can also send the file to 'Virus Total' online but that does sometimes come back with a few false positives too - esp. through the 'AI' virus checkers.
Bye,
Mark
Amazing, still getting updates. Wish Mark Sibly came along and started some quality youtube tutorials on making proper stuff like FPS, 3rd person games with quality levels and HU etc...
Ok so after dropping unity because it almost oofed my pc, i moved to Blitz3D. And i downloaded V1.116, is it made for windows 11 or not? Because im experiencing constant issues.
Blitz3D isn't 'made for Windows 11' (not sure anything is yet?) but I haven't had any reports of it not working on Windows 11 yet either. What are the issues you are experiencing?
But Blitz3D is getting pretty old by now, and it's pretty likely it wont be a 'comfortable' choice for users who are used to more modern tools. It seems to be mostly popular with people writing retro games these days.
The longevity of support on this is mind-blowing. Thank you!
I'm having trouble understanding the LoadTexture flags 2 and 4. Specifically, despite loading a PNG or TGA 32ARGB texture with flag 1+2 I get a flag 1+4 behaviour of 32RGB texture with alpha channel being ignored completely. Does B3D even support alpha channel textures in the "modern" way we understand it?
EDIT: figured things out, the problem was unrelated to the texture handling.
Textures with alpha channel used to work just fine in Blitz3d. (Haven’t tried it with the 2024 versions.) Back then, a common problem was that one would use 16-bit graphics mode, where there isn’t a lot of bits left for alpha info. This would make gradients feel like masked; it could be solved by also adding mode 512.
The real problem is the lack of Z-ordering of surfaces with alpha. We are reviving an old gaming project which went open source and try to modernise the graphics to reach some new audience. We wanted to switch from masked to alpha textures and we have a tough decision to make now.
I find the omission of alpha Z-ordering rather puzzling as it had to be implemented analogously for opaque surfaces before alpha surfaces were even considered. It probably wouldn't be difficult to add a flag enabling alpha Z-ordering directly in the Blitz source, and certainly easier than doing it in the Blitz code, as the Z-order needs to be updated per-mesh relative to active camera, in each frame.
Thank you so much, Mark Sibly. I started learning programming with Blitz3D, and it sparked my interest in software development, ultimately leading to my career as a software developer. Now, two decades later, as a senior developer, revisiting Blitz3D brings back memories and makes me a bit emotional. I often wonder what I would be doing now if I hadn't discovered Blitz3D back then. I once had a large collection of programming books on various languages, including one titled Game Programming with Blitz3D. This is the only book I've kept, and I probably will never sell or throw it away.
Woah, there 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! https://sites.google.com/site/colinord
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.
I hope that I'll be able to use libSGD to fill in the gaps, as right now it doesn't provide anything that isn't just the Basic syntax itself.
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.
I hd a closer look at this today, and I'm 99.97% sure it's a false positive.
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 Apry24, I doubt your PC is infected as I have started getting the same warning from MS Defender for V1.112 too!
I have discovered through researching this that simply changing compiler settings or even just renaming functions are enough to cause positives where there were none before.
So I have just released Blitz3DV1.113 which is just V1.112 but rebuilt with the latest MSVC compilers and tools, and the final zip is not triggering MS Defender so please give this a try.
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
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
Wow. This messageboard is quite active. Blitz3D is a very good tool and is still popular. Good job. I hope that the user base of Blitz3D will be enlarged significantly. Good luck.
By the way, I have added the link to the following webpage.
Does anyone know why Blitz3d.exe is shown as a virus? not the setup, but the main executable. I know it's probably a false positive but I want to be safe
En muchas ocasiones tienden a mirar al Blitz3D como a un perro muerto. Toda la saga de un juego como Tom Rayder se hizo en Blitz. ¿Qué? ¿Ya agotaron todas uds. todas las posibilidades del Blitz...
← Return to tool
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
greeklish
Auti i apistefti alithini istoria epeksergazete to kimeno tou isou xristou san satanas gios tis bithleem. Prokite gia enan
tixodioxti pou efarmose tin lavi kamexamet san kalampoki k epnikse k pligose tous pantes. Auti i storia ksekina apo tote
pou i tourki isevalan sto nisi tis kyprou, dioti opos tha sas pw, eksistori mia ikogenia apo mia vromiki doulia, den epafse
na zi mesa stin distixia.
Gia mia ikogenia san tin diki mas irthan i tourki k prosvalan tin mitera mou sta psichologika tis problimata, me optasies
k tou theou martirio na megalosi ta duo tis pedia. Me enan diaolo sto xeri , ena pedi pou den emilan, to skotosan , piran
tis anamnisis tou k to kathisan sto sxolio k as min mathene tipota, menontas eki ospou tou kerasan k aftounou ta psichologika
problimata me akoustikes psevdesthisis k ena papagalo sto xeri. Den kani afto, gia na to katastrepsoun , to kaman na
erethizete xwris idietero logo, meta autonoita na epakolouthoun.
rest in peace, andreas
Rest In Peace
Rest in peace
Rest in peace
rest in peace
rest in peace
Sad news, Mark Sibly passed away. Rest in Peace! Always loved what you created....
Yes, way to early. RIP.
:sob:
i recieve a crash when using writepixelfast commands on a locked buffer
i gave it correct coordinates
is there a fix to it or is it just a bug?
Hi, I recently downloaded Blitz3D in an attempt to upgrade the version used by SCP:CB, but there are certain bin files that are supposed to be replaced that contain certain functions like bump mapping and are required if you intend to compile the game. I was wondering if it would be either possible to implement these functions directly into the newest versions of Blitz3d, whether it be in a new update or upgrading the mavless functions.
Hi, I don't know if you check the blitzcoder forum anymore but I asked some questions about blitz3d on there
Hi used to use Blitz3D for 2D games many years ago. I'm looking to get back into coding 2D games and was wondering is Blitz2D still a good choice for this?
I would like to have some torches that light part of the game map in a 2D game, is this something that is possible using Blitz3D or can it not do something like this?
TBH, I would not recommend starting a new project in Blitz3D unless you wanting to support ancient versions of Windows, in which case you can use Blitz3DxWin95 to produce Windows95 compatible apps. Blitz3D is 20-ish years old by now and the development environment and underlying technology are very outdated.
I would personally recommend Raylib + your favoruite language if you enjoy programming everything by hand, or Godot if you're into GUIs.
Bitdefender reports 1.118 as a virus and wont let me extract or download it?
This is probably a false positive (the Wacatac one esp. comes up a lot) and there is nothing I can do about these.
I have started posting hashcodes for all zip downloads at the bottom of the devlog release announcement posts. If you run certutil on the downloaded zip, eg:
cvertutil -hashfile blah.zip SHA256
...and it comes up with the same SHA256 number, then the file you have received is at least the file I sent, meaning at least it hasn't been interferred with en-route. Past that, it's purely up to you whether you trust that I sent a 'clean' file in the first place or not.
You can also send the file to 'Virus Total' online but that does sometimes come back with a few false positives too - esp. through the 'AI' virus checkers. Bye, Mark
Amazing, still getting updates. Wish Mark Sibly came along and started some quality youtube tutorials on making proper stuff like FPS, 3rd person games with quality levels and HU etc...
Hi, is it possible to bring back support for older DLLs like it was in 1.106, it'd be real nice to use some of the DLLs such as FastExt
Thanks, Mark, hope You're fine!
bets shit i had ever used!
easy, great and cool :)
i wish this framework the best :]
we playing scpcbdc with this one
Ok so after dropping unity because it almost oofed my pc, i moved to Blitz3D. And i downloaded V1.116, is it made for windows 11 or not? Because im experiencing constant issues.
Blitz3D isn't 'made for Windows 11' (not sure anything is yet?) but I haven't had any reports of it not working on Windows 11 yet either. What are the issues you are experiencing?
But Blitz3D is getting pretty old by now, and it's pretty likely it wont be a 'comfortable' choice for users who are used to more modern tools. It seems to be mostly popular with people writing retro games these days.
The longevity of support on this is mind-blowing. Thank you!
I'm having trouble understanding the LoadTexture flags 2 and 4. Specifically, despite loading a PNG or TGA 32ARGB texture with flag 1+2 I get a flag 1+4 behaviour of 32RGB texture with alpha channel being ignored completely. Does B3D even support alpha channel textures in the "modern" way we understand it?
EDIT: figured things out, the problem was unrelated to the texture handling.
Textures with alpha channel used to work just fine in Blitz3d. (Haven’t tried it with the 2024 versions.) Back then, a common problem was that one would use 16-bit graphics mode, where there isn’t a lot of bits left for alpha info. This would make gradients feel like masked; it could be solved by also adding mode 512.
The real problem is the lack of Z-ordering of surfaces with alpha. We are reviving an old gaming project which went open source and try to modernise the graphics to reach some new audience. We wanted to switch from masked to alpha textures and we have a tough decision to make now.
I find the omission of alpha Z-ordering rather puzzling as it had to be implemented analogously for opaque surfaces before alpha surfaces were even considered. It probably wouldn't be difficult to add a flag enabling alpha Z-ordering directly in the Blitz source, and certainly easier than doing it in the Blitz code, as the Z-order needs to be updated per-mesh relative to active camera, in each frame.
Thank you so much, Mark Sibly. I started learning programming with Blitz3D, and it sparked my interest in software development, ultimately leading to my career as a software developer. Now, two decades later, as a senior developer, revisiting Blitz3D brings back memories and makes me a bit emotional. I often wonder what I would be doing now if I hadn't discovered Blitz3D back then. I once had a large collection of programming books on various languages, including one titled Game Programming with Blitz3D. This is the only book I've kept, and I probably will never sell or throw it away.
I just wanted to thank you, Mr. Sibly! :)
Thank you Mark Silby! Everything seems to be operating corectly!
Woah, there 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.
Good to see you back, Mark!
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! https://sites.google.com/site/colinord
It should be possible to do this with a simple userlib. Here's a thread on the topic - 20 years old but it might be useful!
https://archive.blitzcoder.org/forums/b3d-programming/53540.html
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.
I hope that I'll be able to use libSGD to fill in the gaps, as right now it doesn't provide anything that isn't just the Basic syntax itself.
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.
Thanks!
Hi i want to share my games using this game engine. First cube game 9x https://dtkraccoon.itch.io/cube-game-9x its a multiplayer game. Section https://dtkraccoon.itch.io/the-wasteland a prototype of a single player game. And last https://dtkraccoon.itch.io/the-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!
These look fantastic - I will give them a try this weekend!
Damned ! The blitzbasic3d 1.112 contains a virus ! It cannot work .
Would you correct it ?
I am getting no report of a virus with MS window Defender here, and I believe this to be a false positive.
Either way, I have no way to 'correct' this.
I can arrange a refund for your recent purchase if you would like.
Bye,
Mark
Thank you for your answer and your offer .
Don't worry . I'll pick it freely some times .
I hd a closer look at this today, and I'm 99.97% sure it's a false positive.
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.
Hello Blitz Research, ( and Mark Silby ? ) ,
and thank you for all this research and clarifications.
My pc must also be infected.
Maybe it comes from me.
It is often a "shop-home" Trojan.
And this time it was also a Trojan horse,
with another name that I forgot to write down.
I'm going to try to download BB3D again,
Because your Basic is great, fun, and easy.
I am happy that there is still a follow-up.
I would just like a stricter and more precise debugger.
Have a good week. Good luck.
BB3D is unique!
Hi Apry24, I doubt your PC is infected as I have started getting the same warning from MS Defender for V1.112 too!
I have discovered through researching this that simply changing compiler settings or even just renaming functions are enough to cause positives where there were none before.
So I have just released Blitz3DV1.113 which is just V1.112 but rebuilt with the latest MSVC compilers and tools, and the final zip is not triggering MS Defender so please give this a try.
See my latest dev-log post about this...
Cool ! A new remasterised version ? Without any bug ?
Thanks a lot to the developers .
I have bought the 1108C version (2008) , which is really good .
I will try this new one .
Para mí es el mejor motor de videojuegos... aunque quisiera que tuviese una opción para exportar en .apk ... bueno, Blitz3D está SUPER!
Great game engine!
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
Nope, I use Glfw to do this in SGD, you could dig into that and find out how they do it.
how do i open .b3d files
hello you need a pluging to Open and modifed .b3d model in Blender here is the link
https://www.blitzcoder.org/forum/topic.php?id=116
Thx for keeping it alive. Love it for 20 years.
Hello,
Wow. This messageboard is quite active. Blitz3D is a very good tool and is still popular. Good job. I hope that the user base of Blitz3D will be enlarged significantly. Good luck.
By the way, I have added the link to the following webpage.
https://itch.io/jam/jam-for-all-basic-dialects-5
Does anyone know why Blitz3d.exe is shown as a virus? not the setup, but the main executable. I know it's probably a false positive but I want to be safe
It's a false positive. Windows has a history of false-flagging old software as viruses.
Yea, I added it to my McAfee realtime scanning exceptions list and it works now, thanks
Ya welcome!
A very cool program,but exist a forum? And,how i can get the x position of a entity?,thanks
Use Variable = EntityX([NameOfEntity]) to store the X location of an Entity in a variable
The forums are at https://www.blitzcoder.org/forum/
En muchas ocasiones tienden a mirar al Blitz3D como a un perro muerto. Toda la saga de un juego como Tom Rayder se hizo en Blitz. ¿Qué? ¿Ya agotaron todas uds. todas las posibilidades del Blitz...