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Monkey

Monkey, the newest addition to Mark Sibly's much loved BlitzBasic series of languages, has just been released to the public.

Like BlitzMax before it, the language of Monkey is a Basic dialect that incorporates simple object orientation with classes, methods and inheritance. However, what makes Monkey special is the sheer number of platforms it can be used to create applications for. And all from a single codebase - write once, run everywhere! This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Windows
  • Mac
  • Linux
  • Flash
  • HTML5
  • Android
  • iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch)
  • XNA (Windows, Windows Phone 7, XBox 360, Zune)

Unlike other development kits that target multiple platforms, Monkey does not compile. Rather, it translates into other languges, and you use the tools for those languages (Visual Studio, Xcode, Flex SDK etc) to do the compilation. This also allows you to make platform specific tweaks for the applications you develop, rather than being locked into the lowest common denominator of functionality.

The full Monkey application is $120 US. However, there is a free non time limited demo available, which you can use to develop non commercial HTML5 applications.

(P.S. I made an HTML5 and Flash port of WitchBlaster in a dev version of it months ago, but I'll see if I can get a more complete version of it up in the next few days)

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Comments

Stephen Knightly (not verified)

The world needs more games featuring snakes with rocketpacks.

And yes, Monkey has turned out really well!

Sam (not verified)

Sounds rather amazing!

Earok
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Joined: 02/06/2009

@Stephen I can't help but feel the game needs Samuel L Jackson references, too

@Sam from my experience so far, monkey is pretty great. That said, it's only just been released, and Mark does a great job supporting his products (He recently released another Blitz3D update, even though it turns 10 years old this year), so I can't wait to see what he does with it next.

arran4
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Joined: 05/05/2009

Technically it is compiling into anouther language. :P

Earok
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Joined: 02/06/2009

True, though the difference I was trying to highlight was it translates from one human readable language to another, whereas other kits (Flash, Unity etc) translate from one human readable language into binary code.

arran4
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Joined: 05/05/2009

Heh. Personally I think that computer generated code is rarely "human readable." Then again a lot of human generated code isn't either. :P 

Earok
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Joined: 02/06/2009

Touche. The code that comes out of Monkey isn't intuitively obvious, but the point is that you can understand it and make the required changes.