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Screw You, Defender of BASIC
I met a DEFENDER OF BASIC once — or thrice — hell, they're everywhere there's BASIC. After getting to know a few of them, I have to ask myself this fundamental question of their existence :
- What the hell is wrong with these people?
Hatemail: The Scottsman's Eggs
The Future of Games and BASIC : PlayBasic
Before I start this series of articles, there needs to be a bit of full disclosure about myself and Kevin Picone. Kevin Picone and I have a love-hate relationship. We both hate each other — but we both love PlayBasic. If you ever deal with K.P. on any level he's bound to piss you off in some way or another. He's a visionary who is developing what can only be described as the best game programming language in existence. If he pisses you off, just shrug it off. That's just Kevin. Now on to what's important : PlayBasic.
There's two things I wish I had more time to do : program more in 6502 and program more in PlayBasic. In the world of game programming languages, one language clearly shines as finally doing it (mostly) right : PlayBasic. It has six advantages over anything on the market today :
- It is compiled to a virtual machine, which is blazing fast.
- It has a bug-free, easy to use IDE. It's not an understatement to say that it's an honest pleasure to use the PlayBasic IDE.
- It has functions for almost everything commonly used in game programming.
- It's only 30 USD.
- It has a 120 day demo.
- It has Kevin Picone.
Blazing Fast Virtual Machine
If the guys at Sun Microsystems were to get ahold of a copy of PlayBasic, they'd be scratching their heads in wide-eyed wonder. The Java virtual machine is known to be slow in comparison to C++, yet in all honesty it's fast enough for everything a 2D game programmer needs. All virtual machines are slower than C++ — yet when you compare PlayBasic to Java, well, poor Java just doesn't cut it.
The best way to experience how blazingly fast (and I'm not just saying that) the PlayBasic virtual machine is, you just need to check out a few sprite demos Kevin has provided in the examples folder of PB. When the average person looks at these, they probably only see hundreds of spinning sprites. But don't be fooled. It's just a tech demo — I see a full-speed ultra-fast bullet hell shooter waiting to be made.
Special Note, because (I suspect) the way PlayBasic handles sprites is being changed this is not so fast anymore. I assume it will be improved. But — because Kevin hates me, I can't get a response out of him about it. Once again, don't worry about ol' KP, just buy PlayBasic. :) I recommend it.