Blitz Research have announced the availability of a new development platform designed for 2D game programming: BlitzMax. BlitzMax retains the BASIC core of Blitz Research's other languages, Blitz3D and BlitzPlus, while adding advanced features meant to make programming 2D games for modern systems easier.

Here is a quick feature list:

• Function pointers
• Fully dynamic arrays
• Inheritance and polymorphism
• 'By reference' function parameters
• Byte, Short, Int, Long, Float and Double numeric data types
• Array and string slicing
• Flexible 'collection' system for dealing with linked lists etc
• Low level pointer handling
• UTF16 strings
• The ability to 'Incbin' binary data and access it as easily as if it were a regular file
• External language support for interfacing with C/C++/ObjectiveC or assembly code

BlitzMax also includes direct OpenGL programming, making it easy for developers to make hardware-accelerated 2D games.

Blitz Research is offering a 30-day demo of the development tool. Head over to the website to read more about this new programming language.

BlitzMax

Download BlitzMax 30-day demo

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