Weirdness of TGC forums..

[JohnJ]

I used to use DarkBasic long ago, and I can say the forums years ago were pretty bad (in terms of fanboyism). In fact, just reading the forums long enough, I later found I absorbed a lot of bad information simply because respected people there say incorrect "fanboyish" things that everyone agrees is absolute truth, and unfortunately I assumed that it was true as well.

It wasn't until I committed what would have practically been considered "heresy" by forum members - viewing the website of a competing 3D engine (Blitz3D) - that I realized the sheer volume of lies and, (for lack of a better phrase) "fanboy-targeted propaganda" being circulated by the devs, mods, and as a result, the community as a whole. Of course, I never went back and posted what I found, because you would practically have to tell everyone (dev team, moderators, etc.) they're wrong and are circulating lies, and as scratchyrice showed, even undeniable evidence means nothing.

For example of how extreme things were, even to mention the word "Blitz3D" would cause intense flaming, and if you represent it (or any other engine really) in a remotely positive way (for example providing FPS, screenshots, etc.) you risked having your post deleted and/or you banned. Of course, I hope it's not quite this bad today, but it sounds similar from what I see people describing.

[jacmoe]

It's business. Pure, simple and mean business. They just want money, and they don't care if the product they're selling just doesn't cut it. (IMO) As long as people are buying it. They are spending more on advertising than on support and bug-fixing/programming. It's gross.

[Kojack]

Amos basic on the Amiga kicked ass. No, wait, I'm not completely off topic!

Dark Basic (by The Game Creators, formed by Lee Bamber and Rick Vanner) is similar to Amos (by François Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulos).
Amos comes as Amos - The Creator and Amos Professional. Dark Basic comes as Dark Basic and Dark Basic Professional.
Amos is the Amiga version of "STOS - The Game Creator" (on the Atari ST, same developers).
Amos's main competitor on the Amiga was Blitz Basic, which went on to become Blitz3D on the pc, Dark Basic's main competitor.



The complete source code to Amos (in 68000 assembly) is now available under a bsd style license by François Lionet's Clickteam company.


So, umm, Amiga rocks!

[nikki]

How about Ogre and C++?

[enligor]

Amos basic on the Amiga kicked ass.

Ummm... Amiga and Amos.. is there anything these days that beats them?

Amos's main competitor on the Amiga was Blitz Basic, which went on to become Blitz3D on the pc, Dark Basic's main competitor.

Hehe, I like your line of thinking Actually, as a side note, Blitz3D is not necessarily the main competitor. It is the one often discussed, yes, but there are also others. Such as 3Dgamestudio, which has taken away a large piece of DarkBasic's community (well, the most adequate part of it actually ).
But yeah, bottom line is - Amiga rocks!

They are spending more on advertising than on support and bug-fixing/programming.

Sadly, this approached is used by many companies in the industry...

How about Ogre and C++?

Nah, sorry, we tried porting it, but failed... The idea was to skip Amiga and go all the way back to programmable calculators (i.e. porting Ogre to them, adding a new RenderSystem, etc.). but it turned out to be somewhat complicated

Actually, there's something I just remembered about DarkBasic. While looking through some gaming mags (sometimes it can be very rewarding reading the press ), and in one them, under the game modding section, there was an article about DarkBasic. Now, condering, that normally they write about Ogre3D, Unreal Engine, CryEngine, etc., I was very surprised to see DarkBasic being discussed. So, what I am saying, this is marketing again - if people read that, and get the impression that DB is the holy grail of gaming engines, well, not much can be done to make them change their mind.
Err, so the idea is simple - fanboyism is a BAD thing

[Kojack]

How about Ogre and C++?

Well, unless Sinbad had a version of Ogre on the Amiga 15 years ago, it doesn't fit into my joke as well as Blitz Basic.

I still remember when Amos 3D came out, it could handle maybe 20 triangles at once! (Amiga's had amazing 2d abilities, but their 3d sucked due to planar graphics memory, where each bit of a pixel was stored in a separate region of memory. Setting one pixel on an AGA chipset Amiga required reading 8 bytes (each from different regions of ram), masking each with a bit mask, shifting the desired pixel value 8 times, masking the value 8 times, binary or'ing the result with one of the eight bytes each time, then writing the 8 bytes back to memory. Doing that for every pixel on the screen in a software renderer on a 7MHz computer means performance is damn tricky)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych7zPsRWE8

When I did Gameboy Advance coding, I had to dig out a lot of those old Amiga tricks. The other coders who had pure pc coding background didn't realise how powerful a hblank can be. Yay for copper lists!

Ok, I'll stop the amiga stuff. The similarity between TGC (both product and company name) and the amiga is just too good an opportunity to miss out on, and hopefully distracts from too much bashing of other forums.

[danharibo]

Going back to Linux, If you want to play those shiny new DirectX9 games, you could get a key for the windows 7 beta and install that (It's free until august!)

[_tommo_]

Going back to Linux, If you want to play those shiny new DirectX9 games, you could get a key for the windows 7 beta and install that (It's free until august!)

That isn't exactly a point for Linux

[danharibo]

Going back to Linux, If you want to play those shiny new DirectX9 games, you could get a key for the windows 7 beta and install that (It's free until august!)

That isn't exactly a point for Linux

well It'll work better until they get dx9 working fine. Plus windows 7 is really fast.