A few months ago, the IndieGamer forums ran the '2006 2D sprite render contest', comparing the speeds at which many different graphic engines could draw 1000 or so textures to screen. At the time, I was working on optimising Astariel and arrogantly imagined that my custom DX7 engine would have outperformed most of the generic ones, since I built the engine around the game, and not vice versa.

To my chagrin, I turned out to be very wrong. For the record, the Astariel engine came in close to PTK - but what really impressed me (and where I'm heading here) was the performance of the Blitzmax engine in these tests. Check the tables included in the thread for more details here, but the outcome was that Blitzmax BASIC was easily beating my Direct X C++. It was this performance that prompted me to have a closer look at the Blitzmax package.

Blitzmax is a neat cross-platform 2D game creation package using a variation of compiled BASIC. It comes complete with its own IDE (development environment), including a decent debugger. This means that I can write the same code in the same programming environment on the PC, Mac and Linux. This is a very big selling point for me, since I have decided I can resist the ever so stylish iMacs no longer! Many very successful indie games have used Bltizmax, which is another big plus - indicating that the code base is stable over many platforms AND many hardware variations. 

Now for some reason there exists a form of programmer's arrogance (or whatever you would like to call it) that looks down up BASIC as a lesser language, particularly when compared to the 'C' coding family. Actually, I don't know if this feeling is universal but I admit to giving a little inner sneer when I read in the Blitzmax manual something along the lines of "stay away from pointers they lead to bugs!" Ah the many and varied forms of the ego... Digressions aside, I have to say that the more I experience of this programming environment, the more I like it. So much so that I bought the full package, and have begun my next project in Blitzmax. But that's not to say there aren't a few things that I'm really struggling with. In subsequent posts I'll discuss things I have been (and still am) pondering, such as:

• Can I really ditch 3d? After all, I really did like using lighting effects!
• Memory management. You mean you just write '= NULL' ?
• Object oriented programming in BASIC? Doesn't it all feel a bit tacked on?
• IDE's? What IDE's?
• A gaming language for a commerical business app? Am I mad?
• Error checking. What error checking?

I know this subject matter won't appeal to many of you. But I am guessing there's at least a few people out there thinking about getting into game writing and wondering about which direction to take. If that's you, then perhaps this little series will help clarify things a little.