Features
These are the features to date. More will be added over time, and may even be added upon request. Clicking the heading will take you to the relevant part of the online docs.
Cross Platform
Written almost entirely in standard Blitzmax, and configured to handle the bits that aren’t. Tested here on PC (XP & Vista), and Intel Mac.
Write your game text and specify filenames in unique locale files, and select which locale to load at start-up.
Use the built-in animation features to make your game come to life. Create bouncing effects, sweeping transitions and much more and have them automatically attached to GUI windows for show and hide animated transitions, GUI controls, sprites and anything else.
Create one sprite (animated or static) and simply use dozens or hundreds of instances. Each instance keeps its own screen position, rotation, alpha and animation time.
A great game UI with buttons, check buttons, scroll bars, labels, images and text input lines. Because it uses the sprite and animation systems it’s infinitely flexible and skinnable and capable of creating sleek and modern interfaces and HUDS.
Player profiles, settings and high score management
Store player progress and other user settings such as volume levels and graphics settings in a single (optionally encrypted) file. Reading and writing of the file is handled for you with extra care taken to handle Vista and Windows7 file writing permissions. Just ask the framework to add, retrieve or store values. It politely handles “default” values; when you request a value you can specify its default should it not yet exist, and whether that default should be stored for later.
High scores can be stored in one of four supported ‘groups’ for games that have multiple modes.
Create Application Modules that work from a resource script. Define sprites, constant values, sound effects, GUI Windows etc in a resource script and the framework will load and handle them for you. It’s possible at run-time to instruct the framework to redirect loading through the locale file, or only use settings required for the target platform.
Got different bitmaps with localised text in them? No problem! Got different URLs for Windows and Mac registrations? No problem! Want to give your game team control over variables, sound effects, sprites etc.. without them touching the code? No Problem!Define and register application modules to act as the Main Menu, Loading Screen, Intro (start-up splash), Game, Pause Menu and Outro (exit screen or nag screen) and let the framework handle the flow between them, automatically loading and unloading resources along the way. All application modules are optional, you don’t have to define them if you don’t need them.
Automagic loading progress (See resource handling)
With a combination of the Loading Screen module and the module resource lists, the framework will monitor and store the loading times in Debug builds, and report it back to the user in Release builds. You have full access to this system if you load custom resources or have intensive initialisation routines you need including in the progress bar.
A simple but effective particle system with a seperate editor that comes with MaxGUI source code.
Track where your code is spending its time, useful for performance tuning and finding bottlenecks.
Grab screen shots quickly and easily with a definable hot key.
Samples, tutorials and documentation
Test the downloads and see for yourself if the framework is what you’re looking for. It’s still early days but with it’s first commercial title already under it’s belt, every effort will be made to lock the interface (function and type names etc) from here on in, and work is under way to improve the samples and documentation with feedback from the users.
All source code provided to paying users
Upon purchasing you’ll be granted access to a private download area where all the source code can be found.
