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MoonBASIC: A modern BASIC for building 2D and 3D games
- monster_truck 3mo agoThis is neat! I know it's not really the point but I would like to see some shallow benchmarks, I'm curious what perf (if any) is lost building like this. My very first apps were written in LibertyBASIC, almost 30 years ago. I learned how to pirate things because the borland compiler required to share my creations with my friends was $299, which was a lot of money back then.
- wunderwuzzi23 3mo agoNice. A BASIC for game development takes me back to AMOS on the Commodore Amiga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)
- ColinEberhardt 3mo agoOh wow, I loved AMOS - it is what got me seriously into programming in the first place.
- lproven 3mo agoAnd the ST equivalent, STOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOS_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOS_BASIC There's a modernised build: https://atariscne.org/news/index.php/stos-basic-v5-5-alpha-the-1989-atari-st-language-rebuilt-for-modern-hardware https://atariscne.org/news/index.php/stos-basic-v5-5-alpha-t... And a modern descendant, AOZ Studio: https://www.aoz.studio/ https://www.aoz.studio/
- xgkickt 3mo agoDitto the ST equivalent STOS. Amiga owning friends preferred Blitz BASIC though. Unfortunately, due to one Dijkstra quote about it, people tend to be quite snobbish about BASIC.
- binaryturtle 3mo agoBlitzBasic(2) was also great. Hacked together bunch of games with it. Huge fun.
- frenzcan 3mo agoI kind of like the uppercase keywords of older programming languages, it makes the non-code parts standout more, probably even more important before syntax highlighting became common
- dabbz 3mo agoThis reminds me immensely of DARK Basic built by The Game Creators. It was how I got my start into programming back in the day.
- stuaxo 3mo agoNice, this might be good for my 9 year old. As a Python dev, there are a million things I can show her in Python and that huge amount of choice is an issue in itself sometimes.
- shakna 3mo agoI've been playing around with SmallBASIC [0], which also comes with raylib, but also nuklear. BASIC as a game design language does feel like some of the common game abstractions like the draw and tick loops, are really well suited to it. And offloading the math-heavy things like raycasting to C and importing does give you a nice abstraction layer. [0] https://smallbasic.github.io/ https://smallbasic.github.io/
- synqvest 3mo agoWhat happened to Blitz Basic and Blitz 3d?
- shakna 3mo agoMonkey. And the author. [0] [0] https://itch.io/post/1020410 https://itch.io/post/1020410
- msephton 3mo agoThe author, Mark Sibly, sadly passed away late-2024. But what a legacy he leaves behind.
- lproven 3mo agoA remote descendant seems to be here: https://www.cerberus-x.com/ https://www.cerberus-x.com/
- klik99 3mo agoVery cool - I made my first game in BASIC over 25 years ago and now I'm still making games - I've been looking for a good BASIC to help teach my kids programming because pygame, scratch, roblox lua, all have unique issues that make it either too overwhelming or smooth over the important bits too much to be really useful. Hopefully this will be it - if there are good examples or can port old BASIC games to it.
- captaincrunch 3mo agoI used to love posts like this. I even wrote my own basic runtime environment back in the day. But lately, because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff. I don't say that lightly. I've been coding since I was 11 and loved every minute of it. I'm 52 now, and once I fully gave in to using AI, I pretty much stopped writing code myself. Has anyone else felt like they've lost that spark?
- whateveracct 3mo ago1. Nobody is forcing you to use AI. You can build cool stuff slower by hand. There are benefits, even. You can just..stop 2. This is full of "co-authored with cursoragent" so this is ..not (1) lol so who cares
- prologic 3mo agoNot really. Like you I also started coding in BASIC at an early age, though I'm 10 years behind you in "age" but probably 10 years ahead of you, only because I grew up in a 3rd-world country where we ourselves were behind the rest of the 1st/2nd nations That being said however, no, i don't feel like I've lost the "spark" at all. Sure, I no longer care that much about the "writing of the code" itself, but you just end up shifting your focus to the creative side of thigns, content creating and driving. That's still interesting. AI can't (yet?) replace this.
- TonyAlicea10 3mo agoFor me the spark is reinvigorated. I can try ideas before I didn’t have the time for, prototype and test and only pursue what proves to be worth the time.
- ofrzeta 3mo agoI am torn because on one hand now I have the superpowers to actually implement more complex projects, say a Gameboy emulator, on the other hand I lost the desire to do so because what's the point? As a consumer of software and blogs it is similar because a new BASIC for games just no longer is that interesting when I could vibe code it up myself. It's a bit schizophrenic, I guess ... for instance when you see the clearly formatted README files that's supposed to be a good thing and it certainly is but it is also a bit of a turn-off.
- whateveracct 3mo agooh cool what an interesting proj--- > CharmingBlaze and cursoragent committed oh..
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]