Smile Basic
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Well we can't pretend that it doesn't exist and personally I am not going to say anything bad about it without having tried it for myself. I guess that the two products will have pros and cons. Anyway thanks for your kind words. ( BTW the reason that your post didn't appear immediately is because your reputation is still below the threshold for automatic posting, not because it was being held back deliberately)
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Like a fool I bought it and dear gods what a mess. I mean yes I am biased towards fuze but not totally so. I know fuze is far from perfect in its current state but SB4 is just a mess in my opinion. Apart from it talking to you like you are three years old (yes, I really needed it to take FOUR minutes explaining what a damn keyboard is!!) but the UI is just awful and very user unfriendly. I used it for about 3 hours last night and in all that time I didn't even find the image editor! (I've since been told you have to open the built-in keyboard, hold the ZR button and click on something called Gahaku.prg to access the image editor which is just ludicrous)
Put it this way, if Nintendo had a refund policy like Steam does, I would be using it! My £20 did serve a purpose though, it's shown me just how good fuze is, even with it's problems. Thank you so so much Fuze team!
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Thanks pianofire - I apologise I don’t interact a great deal on here but I do use Fuze religiously! I love the forum, and I’ll be putting a few things up I’ve had on the boil shortly.
Thanks again for letting us discuss - that alone speaks volumes regards the Fuze Teams manner, very refreshing.
Like Steve I spent a good while messing about and without wanting to bash unnecessarily, it genuinely feels at this point in time that the interface is designed to be as a wall between you and the code, or creativity. With Fuze I’m used to having an idea, and within seconds seeing the output on my screen. Unless I’m doing something wrong it appears with SB we have to load a sample, exit out, open another part of the app, press a button to get to the code... it’s far too long.
The samples I tried appear to be bundled up into one master sample as a group - I have to load that up, go through the process above, then dig through thousands of lines of code to get to the relevant area of the sample shown... with Fuze we have a small sample showing a concept which covers just enough of the subject to show a succinct snapshot of the tools, just enough to spark that eureka moment where we can then go off and play.
The difference is huge from a learning point of view.At the end of the day competition is always a good thing for us as consumers, and hey Fuze Team may actually be pushed into some functions they may not have been initially if it takes off and gets some serious attention. Pros and cons for both, as ever. I’m going to try and stick with it and pluck through the interface and see what I can learn but in the meantime I’d say Fuze is certainly on the right path, with talk of physics features, 3D format editors / loading of some kind, etc. At the moment I’d say take pride in what you’ve given us so far and keep up the fantastic work
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No need to apologise! You will be pleased to hear that you can now post without moderation.
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Thank you for the kind words guys. This thread means a lot, and it's very nice to see such a mature analysis and comparison. We certainly wouldn't be removing this - it's the sort of stuff that needs to be talked about. Hugely appreciate the comments and we'll keep working hard to make Fuze the best it can be :)
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I see that here we are talking about smile basic 4, let's say that being a novice, I also bought that compiler, I want to learn and I am looking for anything that can help me achieve my goal, I am sincere, apart from the interactive tutorials to introduce the player to the language and the various samples accessible fuze 4 is clearer to understand, smile basic has a really confused edit mode, I don't know, I haven't found myself, I will continue to take a look also at smile basic but for the aforementioned characteristics the my choice falls on fuze 4 and I hope that thanks to this community I can finally learn to program
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It’s a shame that business forces a kind of rivalry between people with such similar goals. Luckily, Fuze and Smile are both affordable, and seem different enough that I imagine many people who buy one will also get the other too. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Smile in the sales - even if I never program anything major with it myself, I’d be well into trying out stuff that others have shared. :)
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Well, I have it. If nothing else I want to be able to see what people create with it. I'm not going to go into massive detail because I don't think it's appropriate but as far as I can see there are enough differences (big in some cases) for there to be more than enough room for both products and everyone. Gut feeling right now is that Fuze seems more beginner friendly (and that's not coming from having my "Team Fuze" cap on) but that's just from a surface skim of a few hours. Time will tell I guess.
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@Martin said in Smile Basic:
Well, I have it. If nothing else I want to be able to see what people create with it. I'm not going to go into massive detail because I don't think it's appropriate but as far as I can see there are enough differences (big in some cases) for there to be more than enough room for both products and everyone. Gut feeling right now is that Fuze seems more beginner friendly (and that's not coming from having my "Team Fuze" cap on) but that's just from a surface skim of a few hours. Time will tell I guess.
What a lovely approach. Good on you mate that’s exactly what I was talking about. Love it
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FUZE and SmileBASIC take different routes in terms of their functionality. For example - maps. With FUZE, you have a mini-app that allows you to create entire maps with tiles, layers, add collision data, etc, and save it as such. Then, you simply load it, and off you go. You create and use as-is. With SmileBASIC (at least on Switch), there are no actual maps, but text screens that you fill in yourself, and then link to an image-buffer/GRP to get it to render. No collision data either. While it seems limited, it's actually pretty flexible in that you can read from and write to it on-the-fly by basically accessing it like a 2D array. While I mentioned it has no collision data, you can use the data from the screens to form your own, but of course, it's something you have to program in yourself.
In my honest opinion, FUZE is more beginner-friendly with its straight-forward approach, as well as having a plethora of assets so the programmer doesn't have to deal as much with making their own until the time is right. SmileBASIC has flexibility, but only if you know how to utilize it right, which can take time for many people who are just jumping into it.
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I don't have Smile, but from what I've seen, it's for a more advanced level. I have "Petite Computer" for DS, which was made by the same people as Smile, but I couldn't get started in anything. It had pretty good tools from what I could see but it was kind of like being thrown in the deep end with no idea where to start.
Had a feeling like that meme about how to draw an owl: Start with a circle for the head, then an oval for the body, then just draw the rest of the owl and you're done.
One thing that I do think Smile does better is the eShop icon. Their one is pretty that clear it's a tool of some kind. I didn't know what Fuze was until maybe the fourth or fifth time seeing it on the eShop and I decided click through to read the description.
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@Something said in Smile Basic:
One thing that I do think Smile does better is the eShop icon. Their one is pretty that clear it's a tool of some kind. I didn't know what Fuze was until maybe the fourth or fifth time seeing it on the eShop and I decided click through to read the description.
Interesting feedback, thank you. The icon is already in it's second iteration so it's interesting to hear things like this.
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@Martin I think I got Fuze when it had the old icon. I didn't realise it had been changed since then. So it might not be relevant anymore.
But about the original icon, with the little pictures of the sample games, almost looked like a mini game collection.It's strange because, on paper, Smile's icon is very similar to the one I'm talking about, maybe it's the little PC that shows it's a utility (and not a game) or maybe just because they had a preexisting reputation on the eShop.
Anyway, it's kind of a tough one, with only one picture to give a first impression, how do you express that something is a tool to make games? Without looking like a tax calculation program?
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I got SB4 and wish I didn’t but there is one thing that I found that I like
And it’s this
I’m going to play around with it more and share the things I like about it and maybe they will make it into fuze -
@LinkCraft Oh i also like this thing i heard the name of it but i cant remember
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i created a benchmark to compare smilebasic 4 and fuze, involving 4096 ball sprites bouncing around the screen
the results were as follows:
smilebasic 4: 60 fps (~85 fps when uncapped)
fuze: ~28 fpsin fuze, the sprites themselves seem fast enough, rather the issue seems to be the language interpreter; smilebasic compiles to bytecode and it seems to have a speed advantage because of it
i posted more details and videos/screenshots on twitter here:
i tried to make the sb4 and fuze versions of the programs as close to each other as possible in the interest of fairness, but i admit that i'm more experienced with smilebasic than fuze, since smilebasic has been around since the DSi... so, if you have any suggestions for making the fuze program faster while remaining equivalent, i would really appreciate it
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If you make the project public (by submitting it), people can look at the source.
Personally I've not bought SmileBasic though. Is it true that you need to pay €5 euro's to add content to the platform. And you need to pay to download from the platform as well, without paying the creators?
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I tried to use it again last night and there are a couple of things I like about it but sadly I am utterly put off by the UI which is just incredibly user unfriendly and I just don't see me ever using it as it's too annoying and that is a shame as more options are always better. Fuze is far from perfect but much easier to use in my opinion.
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@PB____ It has been submitted it is just awaiting approval
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i don't know about euro prices in particular as i live in the US, but it works something like this:
- smilebasic 4 itself costs $25, and out-of-the-box allows for only one download per 8 hours, and no project uploads
- smilebasic 4 with one server ticket costs $30, and allows for unlimited downloads and 10 project upload slots
- each additional server ticket past the first one adds 10 more project upload slots
server tickets never expire or get used up, they're permanent expansions despite the odd name choice
now, some caveats with this:
- technically speaking the $25 version was never supposed to exist. originally smilebasic 4 was planned to only be sold as a bundle with one server ticket, but they had issues with it not showing up properly in the eshop unless it was sold standalone
- it's possible to have multiple program files in one project. the project size limit is 20 MB, and as you might know, text doesn't take up much space, so you could easily have hundreds of small programs in a single project
- project upload slots can be reused if you take down older projects. the 3ds version of smilebasic had a similar system, and what i often saw people do was issue new programs as separate projects initially, but later down the road consolidate multiple into a single project
personally speaking, i've owned smilebasic 4 since it launched in japan 11 months ago, and have never felt the need to buy more than the one server ticket bundled with it. i think it ought to be viewed as a $30 game with $5 upload expansions for the diehard fans, but i'm sure others won't see it that way
