The Daily Click

::. ::. ::.

Author:	Johnny Look	Submitted:	19th July, 2009	Favourites:	2
Genre:	Application	Downloads:	146
Rated:

Edited By Johnny Look on 7/20/2009

Edited By Johnny Look on 7/19/2009

site:
http://bluemoonhome.freehostia.com

bluemoon is a game development tool for Windows, comprising of a 2D display engine (MMF2), and a IDE and compiler for the bluemoon programming language which is based on Lua and perfect for beginners and experts alike.
It's easy to learn yet powerfull syntax and commands makes for a great way of starting off with programming and get ready to make great games, while at the same time providing the flexibility to create whatever you want, whether you are an expert or someone new to programming.

bluemoon's license allows everyone to release their creations the way they want, commercially or not.

It might have a few bugs but it's stable enough to start developing seriously with it.

It comes with a fully commented Breakout example, which is a pretty good starting point.

Feedback and bug reports are very very important, so don't be shy !

Review This Download

http://bluemoonhome.freehostia.com/downloads.php?cat_id=1 (2,79 mkb )

Posted by UrbanMonk

19th July, 2009

Rated :

Hmm, I wondering when someone would make something like this.

Good Job!

But I think you aught to make it add the appropriate libraries automatically whenever the compiler detects that a function from that library has been called.

EDIT: The collision detection doesn't always work. Sometimes the ball would pass right through the blocks destroying them without bouncing

EDIT2: nvrmnd about the collision bug, I see the incorrect bounces have to do with the way it's coded.
Comment edited by UrbanMonk on 7/19/2009

Posted by W3R3W00F

19th July, 2009

Rated :

This is Fudging amazing! It reminds me of another programming language called Lingo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)

Posted by Silveraura

19th July, 2009

You do realize that if you made this inside of MMF2 Standard, then others peoples creations are also under the Clickteam license agreement, since it's a creation from their creation and still runs under their engine.

In other words, your license is still under their license.

Posted by UrbanMonk

19th July, 2009

Rated :

I'll recompile it for you in mmf2 dev and poof the license is gone!

Posted by Johnny Look

19th July, 2009

Thanks everyone !

urbanmonk: Thanks for the suggestion, I'll see if it's possible.

werewolf: Thanks !

Never heard of Lingo, I'll have a look.

BrandonC: Thanks for the heads up, but I'm using MMF2 Dev.

btw urbanmonk, it won't be needed but thanks a lot, that was very nice of you

Posted by UrbanMonk

19th July, 2009

Rated :

Played around with it some more, this is just too cool!

Too bad it'll inherit all of mmf2's bugs (pause before midi music plays, ect.) And have double overhead, hopefully that will be counteracted by the speed of lua.

EDIT: This should be front paged
Comment edited by UrbanMonk on 7/19/2009

Posted by [EclektiK]

19th July, 2009

Rated :

"Amazing"

Posted by Johnny Look

20th July, 2009

Thanks a lot guies !

UrbanMonk: Actually those were my main fears when I started planning bluemoon. However I was suprised to find none of those fears were true. The small pause the game does while loading a midi is relatively easy to avoid, and is something I'll work on in the near future. About the double overhead, I was concerned about this too, however after I finished implementing the physics engine (ready for the next version

) I realized how fast Lua is.

Posted by Johnny Look

20th July, 2009

hum...I don't know how old your pc is, but it must be really old. In my laptop which is two years and was considered medium to low end at the time, the example runs very smoothly and only uses about 18 percent of the CPU and only 20Mb of RAM (and I'm using Vista), so unless you assume everyone's computers are a decade old I don't see why a game made using bluemoon can't be half decent.

Sure, a game made natively using C++ and SDL will run a lot faster than it would if it was made using bluemoon, but who cares ? People with 5 year old pcs are a small minority, nowadays almost any gamer's computer can run Crysis.

You haven't told me anything knew, I knew along what I was doing and for some reason I'm still at it and improving on what I have so far.

By the way, just to explain you a few thingss:

bluemoon communicates directly with MMF which serves mostly as a display engine. This communication is done via Lua which is very fast. The bluemoon runtimes doesn't lose much speed in relation with a mmf2 runtime simply because the bluemoon runtime IS a mmf2 runtime. The diference is, it behaves according to it's respective code.

This works pretty much like scripting in any other game, except it's in a much bigger scale.

And about getting the worse of two worlds, sorry but you're wrong. A lot of people (including me) prefer actual coding to clicking. The reasons are many, personally I hate using MMF2's events editor, you can't have nested conditions, and making a game using MMF2 just doesn't give me any satisfaction at all. The only thing I like about using MMF2 is the level editor which is something I'm working on for bluemoon.

And remember MMF2 isn't free, not everyone can afford to spend 100$ to make a few games and then lose interest, and while probably shorter than bluemoon's, MMF2 doesn't have a soft learning curve as the interface is quite diferent from any other game developing tool I know (except previous klik products and Construct of course).
Comment edited by Johnny Look on 7/20/2009

Posted by Johnny Look

20th July, 2009

yeah sure but I tested a example with way over 100 objects at once in the screen without any slowdown at all, so I believe bluemoon is ready for any game at all.

And the current version only uses MMF's standard runtime, as soon as clickteam releases a stable version of the incoming HWA runtime, I'll will use it instead.
Comment edited by Johnny Look on 7/20/2009

Posted by UrbanMonk

20th July, 2009

Rated :

I'd have to agree with sketchy on the speed and overhead issues, and no I don't think it can handle larger projects. It's still a start for those who want to learn programming. You gotta admit it is pretty impressive for mmf. It seems like people who have used mmf for a while are trying to push it to it's limits and I think that's a good thing.

EDIT: I have a decent machine and the breakout example uses 25-30 cpu consistently.

Comment edited by UrbanMonk on 7/20/2009

Posted by Silveraura

20th July, 2009

@Johnny Look: Alright cool, I just wanted to make sure you weren't walking face first into potential legal issues by giving people license rights that are unknowingly also under Clickteams license rights.

Looks like a very high potential program you've got here, good job.

Posted by Codemonkey

20th July, 2009

"perfect for experts and beginners and experts alike."

Posted by Johnny Look

20th July, 2009

urbanmonk: Like I said I believe it's possible to make any kind of game. In the breakout example I made the game loop constantly for all the 20 bricks which can be quite CPU extensive in older PCs. I could have avoided that and selected each object individually which would be way faster, and I bet the example would run perfectly on Sketchy's pc. The speed of the game is mostly up to the programmer's ability to optimize his code well. The next version of bluemoon has a bunch of new commands, and you'll be able to retrieve the framerate of the game. The breakout example for example runs at ~52 fps for me and ~38 fps with 120 bricks. I highly doubt anyone will ever need to do collision check with over 120 objects on the screen at once, so I believe anyone can make the game they want.

BrandonC: Thanks !

Yeknomedoc

ops, fixed

Posted by UrbanMonk

20th July, 2009

Rated :

Well if you really believe that I think you aught to make a few more examples showing this. I created a simple program with over 100 objects all moving randomly and the cpu usage stayed at 0-1. I do think you could do some more optimizations on your end. I. also hope you aren't planning on using any more extensions for the runtime because that would bloat the file size quite a bit.

Posted by Johnny Look

20th July, 2009

Good idea, I'll write a entire game and then release the source, it will serve both as a demonstration to what bluemoon can do and as something for newcomers to learn with.

Posted by bigredron

22nd July, 2009

Rated :

I agree with most of what people have said above. Although its a great idea, it is simply too slow to do anything practical. MMF already has a big overhead when it comes to drawing and moving objects. My recent project I struggled to get 1000 units moving on the screen at one time at a decent framerate, even though I can run crysis on high settings at ~40fps.

And if anyone wanted to actually learn a language they would just stick to MMF2 and integrate lua everywhere as it is very easy to learn.

Posted by Johnny Look

22nd July, 2009

here we go again...
I wrote a 18 lines long post for something, read it.

"And if anyone wanted to actually learn a language they would just stick to MMF2 and integrate lua everywhere as it is very easy to learn."
Hum..that's pointless, unless you really need scripting on you game. If you want to learn programming that bad just download Devcpp, get a book or look for c++ tutorials. Learning a language just for the sake of it is pointless.

Posted by DMT

22nd July, 2009

Umm... I hate to break it to you Johnny, but I have a great free program that can do the same kinds of things. It's called notepad. If you're doing it for yourself, that's fine. I just don't believe that it will be used a lot. But that's just me probably.

Posted by Johnny Look

22nd July, 2009

hum you can make games with notepad now ?

Posted by Chrisbo

23rd July, 2009

Rated :

For someone not in the know...can someone give me a brief explanation of what Lua is and what it can be used for in MMF?

BTW, this is a cool little program!

Posted by DMT

23rd July, 2009

Wait, I thought i wrote make it in notepad and compile it with something else!

OK, just forget it, all i'm saying is that I won't buy it. Maybe someone else will. That's just my opinion.

BTW, Lua is a scripting language.

Posted by Johnny Look

23rd July, 2009

Buy what ?
As far as I remember I'm not selling anything.
And like I said no, notepad doesn't make games, it isn't a proper IDE either (and therefore can't compile anything even if you had a compiler) so I don't understand why you are still comparing it with bluemoon.

Posted by DMT

23rd July, 2009

Oh, you're not selling it... OK, I get it now!

Posted by Johnny Look

23rd July, 2009

I wonder where you got the idea I was selling bluemoon but well, whatever.