are there any other BASIC programs that are for free for mac?

thanks

Sure. Metal and Chipmunk BASIC. Neither is particularly stunning anymore.

As far as payware there is: TNT BASIC, REALbasic, FutureBASIC, and soon...(drum roll)...BlitzBASIC.

There was also CocoaBASIC, but that seems to be dead.

Wait a few minutes and someone will step in to dissuade you from learning any of these.

well i know basic and i know it isnt a way to make 3d games but its programming and i cna make pretty nice 2d games

and i tried those but i liek the one called Qbasic which is for PC i use in my school but there is no mac version for that and chipmunk and metal are different from Qbasic.

thanks

BASIC isnt very powerful, I would suggest getting a book on cocoa (they arent too expensive) and learning something a little better with atleast the abiility to turn out a few FPS .

As far as OpenGL goes I would recommend gettting the red book and blue book, but if you cant afford those nehe gives some "misguided" steps for cocoa OpenGL on his site at nehe.gamedev.net (I think). Dont get me wrong I started learning with Nehe's Guides and they were great they just go about things poorly in the cocoa translations sometimes.

I'll second the suggestion to give learning any of the BASICs a skip, but for reasons other than 'power'; my experience of messing with METAL is limited, but it relies on several pretty poor coding precepts (the lack of a need for declaration of variables, and the lack of any kind of structured design or the ability to easily impose such a design on a project, in particular) which will cause you a lot of trouble in any project more than a toy... I don't know whether all the other BASICs follow these precepts, though...

I'd suggest you learn C or C++; the learning curve will be steep if you've no previous coding experience, but worth it - there are a lot of third party APIs to make your life easier, such as SDL (which can work in conjunction with OpenGL), Allegro, et al

I'd also suggest Processing; it isn't a language with anywhere near the mind share of C, C++, or Java, but it borrows a lot of syntax from those, and allows for pretty easy games coding...

I have friends who have a lot of experience with Processing. I havn't used it myself (can't get Quicktime for Java to work on my machine for anything, thus Processing dies), but from what I can tell it's pretty good for some moderate playing around and may be a good springboard from which to transition from BASIC to other languages.

kodex Wrote:BASIC isnt very powerful...

Which BASIC isn't? And what do you mean by powerful?

Hey Dan have you a contract with the guys of blitz?

Some BASIC languages are quite good, but I haven't found many that are particularly suited for developing games with. METAL and TNT Basic were fun to play around with, but they lacked speed and flexibility so in the end I ended up learning a number of C variants and OpenGL.

I'd recommend giving TNT Basic a try (it's a lot more user-friendly than METAL in my opinion) and just playing with that 'till you've written a few games. Learning another BASIC variant is no big deal, if you know one you know them all. Then, if you're still interested, try learning C and then OpenGL and muck around with that for a while.

Najdorf Wrote:Hey Dan have you a contract with the guys of blitz?

Of sorts.

Daniel_Lurie Wrote:Which BASIC isn't? And what do you mean by powerful?

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

extremebasic is still in development but has an opengl class
http://extremebasic.com/
http://www.extremebasic.com/OpenGL.html

Wait for Blitz. Trust me. Even Najdorf will be able to operate it.

I recommend REALbasic, It's not very fast for 3d games but it can help you learn to
have some good programming practices

I started programming with HyperCard in 6th grade (man those where the days)
then around 2000 or so i found REALbasic, and have been programming in that
ever since.

I learned C pretty much on my own, C By Example, very old book, but AFAIK C hasn't changed much in the last 10 or so years, then in college I learned some basic C++

For the uDevGames contest this year I used Objective-C (which is a GREAT language btw)
and now I'm learning OpenGL

LIke others have said, learn some basic programming techniques first, it takes awhile but you'll be glad you did, then later on (in a year or so, maybe longer) you'll want to learn OpenGL, and that's when you should

bottom line, get some programming experience first, it helps a lot

regards,
ss2cire