MoonBASIC: A modern BASIC for building 2D and 3D games | Hacker News Reader

MoonBASIC: A modern BASIC for building 2D and 3D games

github.com

76 pointsklaussilveira27 comments

I'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/

This 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.

This reminds me immensely of DARK Basic built by The Game Creators. It was how I got my start into programming back in the day.

I 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

I 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?

1. 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

Not 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.

For 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.

I 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.

Same here, if it isn't written by myself.

At work, we are even not doing that much code anymore, what used to be microservices now are mcp tools, and it is basically orchestration across SaaS products, with low code, no code tools.

Thankfully at home I can do whatever I want, when I get some coding time available.

>But lately, because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff.

I'm a few years older -and yes, I feel the same way. Not just in programming and geek stuff but in creativity too.

It seems literally pointless, since what everyone else is doing involves AI. It literally takes the point away since folks will simply say "oh, who cares? Look at this shit I made in AI instead"

>It literally takes the point away since folks will simply say "oh, who cares? Look at this shit I made in AI instead"

But that does not make any sense what so ever. Who cares how you did it.

I think people are going to me more sympathetic if you said that you didn't use LLMs to build it.

>I've been coding since I was 11 and loved every minute of it

Can you share some of the stuff you have made (before LLMs)?

>because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff.

Where did the joy for doing it came from, before LLMs?

I mean, did people stop playing with LEGOs because we now have 3D printers?

Either you didn't really "enjoy" making stuff before, and were only doing it as a means to an end. Or you are just misguided for a bit, and will come back to it a while later..

> once I fully gave in to using AI

58 here. I won't even touch it.

It seems to be heroin combined with cocaine for programmers. Not even once.

AI: Just Say No.

Nice. A BASIC for game development takes me back to AMOS on the Commodore Amiga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)

Oh wow, I loved AMOS - it is what got me seriously into programming in the first place.

And the ST equivalent, STOS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOS_BASIC

There's a modernised build:

https://atariscne.org/news/index.php/stos-basic-v5-5-alpha-t...

And a modern descendant, AOZ Studio:

https://www.aoz.studio/

Ditto 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.

BlitzBasic(2) was also great. Hacked together bunch of games with it. Huge fun.

Very 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.

Nice, 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.

oh cool what an interesting proj---

> CharmingBlaze and cursoragent committed

oh..

What happened to Blitz Basic and Blitz 3d?

Monkey. And the author. [0]

[0] https://itch.io/post/1020410

The author, Mark Sibly, sadly passed away late-2024. But what a legacy he leaves behind.

A remote descendant seems to be here:

https://www.cerberus-x.com/

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