Pascal Game Development - Blogs http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/blog.php Independent game development with Pascal and Object Pascal language tools. en Sat, 25 May 2013 01:37:11 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/images/misc/rss.jpg Pascal Game Development - Blogs http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/blog.php Designing In Secret: When To Reveail? Is it ready yet? http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?138-Designing-In-Secret-When-To-Reveail-Is-it-ready-yet Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:40:15 GMT Click image for larger version.  Name: RedAntLogo.jpg  Views: 1094  Size: 77.5 KB  ID: 1080Hello all!

It's been a while since I've written a blog on PGD. I thought I would at least give it a try tonight.

I just finished a session of hacking away at my latest project, Garland's Quest. This game has actually been in productions since 2006 and boy has it really come a long way. I just wonder how it would have turned out at this time if only I had been able to work on it full time. Nonetheless, it is starting to look really good and it's a pretty darn fun puzzle game by my standards. And I'm a picky gamer so I've got that going for it at this point. ;)

The questions remains however; Will others think my game is fun, exciting or just plain attractive and polished enough to pick up and try over and over again? Would someone who has played it then go and tell all their friends via Facebook and Twitter? Will showing my game now get enough people talking about it and wanting to try it and support me when the time comes to ask for funding via IndieGoGo and/or Kickstarter?
Click image for larger version.  Name: 12042005-indiegogo.jpg  Views: 89  Size: 11.1 KB  ID: 1081 Click image for larger version.  Name: kickstarter_1.jpg  Views: 91  Size: 4.3 KB  ID: 1082
To be honest, I'm a little nervous of how it will all turn out this summer. My plan is to have a big reveal this summer showing off all the cool things that have been done to the game so far. This includes new contracted art and music from Chris Rallis and Zack Parrish respectively. I'm also planning on cutting a promotional teaser video to show off the game sending it out to game review sites and on Steam's Greelight community. This will all be geared towards the big crowd funding campaign and getting the word out to see if the game will be worth it's salt and sell as a worthy title in the indie games market.

It's a lot of pressure and excitement just knowing that a successful fundraising campaign could change everything and make a longtime dream come true. No pressure. :-[


Click image for larger version.  Name: GarlandsQuestHeading.jpg  Views: 97  Size: 22.2 KB  ID: 1083

Now Paul Nichols and I have of course teamed up to create and release Subject 33 for mobiles and all other Java run-time capable platforms, but somehow that project just doesn't seem to have the same emotional impact as this. It could be the amount of money it would take to make Garland's Quest compared to the nifty top-down retro shooter and most of all the other prototypes I've started and what it would take to complete them. Now it's nowhere near the usual AAA budgets you would see with six digits bouncing around, but when you are just starting out it's still a sizable chunk to swallow.

Still this game project will be a big one and could potentially launch my career into game development if it goes well enough so I have to make sure I do it right. This summer will make or break the project and how well the funding goes will mean a great game that we can fulfill and possibly expand our vision or a temporary halt in it's development. I'm hoping for success and will be working damn hard to make sure I get every opportunity I can.

It hurts to not be able to show you all that I've been working on. I think it's really great and will be something that the causal gamers and puzzle game lovers amoung you will enjoy young and old. Maybe if I am able to cut an early teaser, like I'm planning I can show that off before I start the funding campaign.

I guess you'll have to keep an eye out come this summer. :) ]]> WILL http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?138-Designing-In-Secret-When-To-Reveail-Is-it-ready-yet Meanwhile... In Southern England... http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?137-Meanwhile-In-Southern-England Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:48:05 GMT Well I've been doing lots of code recently, but very little of it would appeal to PGD... All C/C++ and after 2 weeks of having to wake up, work and go to sleep to C's quirks, tantrums, and other such "specialities" my head feels like its about to explode...

So, whats all the sinning for? Well, the project relies on code as much as it does completely insane people - an attempt to develop and build a tiltrotor UAV with VTOL capabilities. Along the lines of a V22 Osprey but with a lot of design changes. Of course, the arduino's AVR chips just happen to only play 'nice' with the worst dialect of C in the history of the universe (as far as I know)...

As development presses on and costs start to push the current budget a site of data and goodies as well as donations and maybe even sponsor gear might be an eventuality... For now, its back to the team debate as to why the planes in C and everything else in pascal... :D ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?137-Meanwhile-In-Southern-England On the road with Blaise http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?136-On-the-road-with-Blaise Mon, 05 Nov 2012 03:08:25 GMT Hello, So, I am looking and looking and looking but I can not find any publications, blogs, forums, tutorials on how to build a planet. Every time I... Hello,
So, I am looking and looking and looking but I can not find any publications, blogs, forums, tutorials on how to build a planet. Every time I search I find all kinds of info projects to put a globe into a C++ application but nothing in Pascal.
One of the demos for Final3D has what appears to be a sphere but of course the demo does not allow any direct manipulation of the sphere so I have no idea what it is capable of.
Is there any body who has knowledge of a solution to this issue?
BTW I did see a PDF about imbedding C++ code into Pascal and I would rather not do that. I already have the daunting task of learning Pascal the last thing I want to do is learn C++ and then the skills to overcome the conflicts.
I will be discussing this with my Pascal programming friend in the coming days but would like to explore all possible opinions.
Until later,
Bill ]]> whtemple1959 http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?136-On-the-road-with-Blaise Going multithreaded... http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?135-Going-multithreaded Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:14:56 GMT Well, after having dabbled on this topic many times before - I decided I'd do AMD's latest chips a favour and make my code benefit from all that threaded goodness they can offer ;). So, I dove into the code archive and found some bits and bobs that had been gathering dust for a almost 2 years now... Turns out that since then a few bits were depreceated with FPC 2.6.0 :o. So I changed all the Execute() calls to Start() and hey presto, the old code had some life breathed back into it.

So, after a bit of sitting around a couple weeks back I thought I might make some of my code benefit from the now common as grey weather in england this time of year multicore chips we all learnt to love back in the day. Multi threaded loaders, getting those pesky CPU based rotations and other such horros to work in parrallel and what not. So I set about making a generalized threading unit to be used with prometheus. It now works - point it at a procedure (sort of rather literally as it were8)) and tell it when to start working some magic and then you can launch 1, 2, 8, 16, 50 - or as the testing phase I ran had a crack at, 300 threads in parrallel. In short, it works - but any test with more than about 6-8 threads tooks this old dual core penryn deal I have here on holiday to breaking point :D

So, now that I know it works, I've started rolling some utlity functionality - such as a function to get the ideal number of threads, work queues (lists of things for each thread to do), management for those queues (eg. Split into 2 threads, merge...), wait for loads of threads to finish, prioritizing threads (eg. Thread A can only be safely run after thread B is done, or thread C gets to a certain point)... All the goodnes that has me tearing up some big bits of code I previously thought were 'efficient enough' to make prometheus that bit faster. And in turn, everything I make that bit faster too. For now, I tested some of the TMX goodness and let me tell you - its a not much faster (maybe the fault of my running it on a mechanical laptop HDD). Though the fact you can now load small TMXs in under 90ms whereas you had to wait a whole 120 before might not help you much... It is a start :)

Edit: almost forgot, for anyone wanting to get into threads and whatnot, AthenaOfDelphi put up a great tutorial here on PGD which is where I picked up the large majority of what I know on the topic - however small that is :D and you can find the first part right here: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...lass-Fantastic (I reckon they should still compile great - with the only compiler warning as of FPC 2.6.0 being that TThread.Resume is obsolete for some techincal reason you can try to understand here: http://lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=14920.0 (as if things sort of werent secure enough already :D)
Click image for larger version.  Name: PM Threads IT1 Test.jpg  Views: 50  Size: 32.0 KB  ID: 955 ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?135-Going-multithreaded <![CDATA[Back into development - why breaks aren't a good idea...]]> http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?134-Back-into-development-why-breaks-aren-t-a-good-idea Sun, 21 Oct 2012 14:21:34 GMT Well, as promised, I'll be putting a few more things up after having come back into the development scene. I'm pretty much jumping ship with my LD entry - despite it showing good progress, something I wont go into the details of :D.

I see lots has changed now I'm compiling more stuff (and a lot of older stuff to make some new stuff work ;D). Especially on the depreceated front. I've got these in audio, threads and just about everywhere else. Even in bits of code I didnt even knew existed ::).

At any rate, its good to see embarcadero planning linux support (do they include android in that as a form of 'linux'? ???) as well as they're new mozilla style release cycle which seems to ensure I'm always out of date with things in the pascal world XD

Looks like I have a fair bit of catching up to do over the week long break coming up :) ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?134-Back-into-development-why-breaks-aren-t-a-good-idea Quixote 1 http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?133-Quixote-1 Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:39:05 GMT So as I begin this journey this is my line of thinking.. The game is played on the surface so I want a 3d representation of our planet. I have... So as I begin this journey this is my line of thinking..
The game is played on the surface so I want a 3d representation of our planet. I have found that several organizations will provide the data to create a 3d representation and I have found sites that have overlays for city names. I want to be able to start the game by seeing the whole planet and then zoom in to street level much like openstreetmap, but without the actual streets showing up.
So, I am teaching myself about terrain engines and how they are implemented in the code.
The game also has an aspect of money changing hands for various reasons. So I need a database. I do not want to shove frontaccounting into the game but I will need to create a simple spreadsheet to track finances. And of course there will be items to be purchased which will need to be tracked.
So I need to learn about databases engines.
The game I am playing uses sprites for everything. Sprites what are they and does Pascal use them or is there an equivalent item.
These are the first three things I need to learn …I know I need to learn other more basic stuff also… but if you have some guidance on these three important subjects, or an easily understandable explanation why I need to focus elsewhere please let me know.

Until later….. ]]> whtemple1959 http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?133-Quixote-1 An Indroduction http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?132-An-Indroduction Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:22:43 GMT Hello PGD. A little about myself, as a young man and while in college I worked for my father’s construction company. In my first summer I came to... Hello PGD.
A little about myself, as a young man and while in college I worked for my father’s construction company. In my first summer I came to understand the importance of a foundation, the intricacies of electrical and plumbing systems, the importance of use of space and the joy of creation.
I now bring that understanding to this new journey. I have begun to read what I can find at my local library, I hope I can get by without the need to take college classes. My 3 year old would be disappointed. I hope and believe that I can find everything I need via the internet.
Why am I interested in Pascal game programming? In the quiet of the night I enjoy playing a certain open source strategy/simulator game. And while it is challenging and addictive I came to the opinion that it needed some tweaking. So, after reading hundreds of forum posts, asking some question, being reprimanded for sending private messages, and being told that ideas I had would require “too much” coding and the game was “not within my vision” I decide to look for a new game. I did indeed find a couple of other games but they too were lacking. My first question was that if all three games where open source, players posted to the same forum board and they were all written in the same language then why not combine them, to create the ultimate game. You would have thought I was Armageddon incarnate. I was politely informed that unification would never happen.
So, I decided to take on the task myself. After all what else do I have to do with my time after every one has gone to bed.
And, I just happen to have a good friend who has a commercial chess training program so I asked him for advice. He started rattling off these reason…which went way over my head…as to why he felt Pascal was a better platform. Well I say to myself if I am going to learn a language I might as well learn one that has structure and…one where I have some local guidance.
So, in the coming months forgive me if I misuse terms while I learn and feel free to input your suggestions if you desire.
More to come… ]]> whtemple1959 http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?132-An-Indroduction Back into games and... stuff... http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?131-Back-into-games-and-stuff Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:42:26 GMT Well its sure been a while since we've seen a blog post round here, and even longer since I last went up and wrote something... Reminds me theres that game tutorial I need to write up for the article pages ::) along with a potential followup to that little OS development spiel I did a while back, but on a slightly broader platform...

So anyways, what have I been up to these past months? Nothing special other than the culmination of the 5 final years of compulsory education and college entries and the like with results returning 2 odd weeks ago and all the follow-up parties after (Oh yeah ;D). In all, slacking paid off for me there with a smattering of A*s, a good bundle of As and the one lonely B (music... speaks for itself XD). On the other hand this approach does not seem to be working for my code... ???

So at any rate after my return to the UK from a months stay over in Brittany I figured I might log onto the prometheis sourceforge page for the horror of seeing some now really old code. And then more horror to find the odd lost sould grabbing a copy every few days. Petrifying news given the number of known bugs I'd left it with :-[

Still, on a more serious note I can say that although code has not progressed much, other areas have, since the last checkin I have a barebones OS which is hella fast at low level maths if you need to process large files with a basic algorithm, the workings of my own linux distribution all set with custom scripts, themes, configurations and nice fixes to make it work how I want it, a home SVN server for keeping tabs on your personal codebas (yes I do think this might be article material though it is VERY easy to setup i you google around) a whammy of unfinished projects - courtesy of some heavy experimentation going on in each one - and a need for a new router, monitor and storage space... Fun times :)

Though its a relief to see those new captchas captching those spammers, only a dozen or so a day at peak times so a "GREAT JOB!!!" is due to WILL and Athena as well as everyone else helping out to help keep PGD clean 8) ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?131-Back-into-games-and-stuff <![CDATA[Garland's Quest Redux & Stranded]]> http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?130-Garland-s-Quest-Redux-amp-Stranded Mon, 09 Jul 2012 21:12:41 GMT Hey everybody! Been hard at work at my day job and on the new house. Both have left me not too much time for supporting the PGD community, however... Hey everybody!

Been hard at work at my day job and on the new house. Both have left me not too much time for supporting the PGD community, however it has left me with a little bit of personal time to work on some of my special projects such as Garland's Quest, which recently has been taken on as a budgeted commercial game project. I've already hired a professional artist and musician who have been coming up with some great stuff for the game's complete make-over. The other big project is a comic book or graphic novel, if you prefer. I'm writing, editing and directing the story to which my own sister is penciling and inking. Both projects are something I've had a longtime passion for and I hope that others will be able to enjoy playing and reading them as I am currently enjoying the creating of them.

I have also just recently bought and moved into my new house. Thankfully I was able to find a place that had a fully finished room in the basement which I can use as my new office. Here is a picture of the beginnings of it getting all setup.


Click image for larger version.  Name: IMG_2490.jpg  Views: 159  Size: 97.1 KB  ID: 882
(Click to see a larger image of this mess!)


Garland's Quest (Redux)

I started the project "Garland's Quest" roughly six years ago. I've actually been working on the game since I was a kid after I had played Adventures of Lolo on the NES for a while and needed something to do on the bus rides to school and home in grade school. So I used to draw my own versions of all these puzzles on grid paper, coloured pencils and all. I had my own enemies and way of completing each level so it was a little different. I believe I called it "Marbal Man" or something like that --hey I was like 8 or something, how was YOUR spelling back then. :)

So one day about 6 years ago I remembered that and was looking for some kind of neat game idea at the time so I thought it would be easy and fun to make a game like that. After a few months It started to come together and I eventually met Kierren Small who made this neat Wizard character and remade a lot of my original programer's art which I thought looked pretty good. I still think the Drakes are the cutest things! :)

So Garland's Quest was well into development, I had a Map Maker made with Delphi and DelphiX under Windows and the game it's self had been eventually switched over to OpenGL developing under Lazarus. Then Kierren couldn't take part in it's development anymore and I was left without a full set of sprites for the game. Decision time. Do I keep developing it hoping for a new artist somewhere or shelf it? Well then I changed careers and a whole bunch of other changes over time, but in that time Garland's Quest fell to the bottom of the development trunk.

A couple of years later I get my first iMac, the iPad comes out and the whole gaming world changes. I still want to make a high quality commercial game that people will love and the iPad and other multi-platform indie games have me thinking. What happened to Garland's Quest?

Well I had a new plan for the game, which involved porting the game to Mac OS X while keeping Windows support. Thanks to the help of Mr. Johannes Stein (aka Stoney) I was able to get a working setup of Lazarus on my iMac and he ported Garland's Quest over to the Mac and made it easy to compile for either Mac OS X or Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. (We have plans for iOS later, but that is another huge milestone.) I would later have hardware problems on my iMac and eventually got a MacBook Pro to act as a temporary dev platform for while I was away or should I have any future problems with my iMac. (The screen isn't as nice as a huge 27" screen, nor does it have the nice new Retina display, but at least it has longer battery charge life than the new ones!)

So we got the porting out of the way and it makes for easy deployment and bundling, eventually we got the source uploaded and is now managed by GitHub, which is also very nice to use and share source with other developers and transfer updates while working on code on multiple machines.

After we got the game ported to Mac, I went on a search for a graphics artist. I needed someone to give the game a level of detail and beauty that a volunteer couldn't. More importantly I needed someone who could guarantee that he or she would finish the job without question. I needed a professional and I knew it would cost me. I was planning to make money off it, so I was ok with this.

I eventually found Chris Rallis' portfolio online and fell in love with his work. He was available for work and we made up the contract. Since then he and I have been hard at work coming up with a whole new look for Garland and Nem and designing Garland's new animations. I think you'll love Chris' work on Garland and will like the new "hand-drawn" style we are going with.

I've increased the frame count on the game from 7 to 14 to create a smoother level of detail for animation. He will also be completing the entire set of required animations including death animations and special sequences.

Another part of what we are doing is redesigning the graphics layout for the levels. Currently there is a very simple tiling layout to the level graphics and everything is an 80x80 tile. That'll change as I'm going to have some overlapping and more space for wall tiles and the blocking objects in the game level to help increase the beauty and uniqueness of the look of each level and theme in the game.

We've only gotten as far as Garland and Nem's concepts and the Garland animations primarily, but we are making progress and it will continue until we are ready to show something with the remade version.

Not only did I get a graphics artist, but while I was looking for Chris, I also found Zack Parrish who fell in love with the whole concept of the game and wanted to do the music so very badly. I was so happy for his enthusiasm and really liked his music shared on SoundCloud so he was a shoe-in. We were less formal about it, but made an in-email agreement that he will be scoring the game. His first task, create the theme/title music for the new Garland's Quest. Not too tiny of a task at that. However after a month of hard work and some cross-inspiration sharing graphics and artwork between artist and musician (a experiment I'm trying throughout the development of the project) he came up with this amazing and beautiful track that will go into the final game. It is complete, however I'm waiting until we have the other parts of the graphics ready to show anything off, just yet. There is heavy influence of an orchestra feel and various fantasy elements. The rest of the soundtrack will continue this trend.

He will be doing another track as soon as the first level theme concept is created and we come up with a prototype so he can get a sense of the visuals. I want both music and graphics to have the perfect marriage in this game. A part of that I believe is to add a bit of ambiance, like that of Donkey Kong Country and other games which soundtracks took queues from the level's visuals they were to be a part of.

I have also contacted and got someone for sound effects work, but I'm holding off until the level graphics start going in place. I thought this was key as how things sound will be directly influenced by how they look. And of course the background music which Zack will create.

That's about where the project is now. I'm working towards the completion of Garland's animations and the first level theme, the title music and first level music and sound effects.

Once we have that all complete I'll be looking towards funding the rest of the project as this endevour isn't going to be cheap to continue at this quality. I've been looking at "Kickstarter" type options such as IndieGoGo.com to help in running my funding campaign. Kickstarter is a no-go as they only let US citizens do fundraising through them. Thankfully it's not the site it's self that brings in the fan/funding support. It's the pitch it's self and it's grown popularity. ::)

I'm hoping that the community will also be willing to pitch in by at least being able to spread the word of my game and linking on tweets, blogs, Facebook and other forums about the fundraising campaign. WoM is going to be the biggest asset to me successfully completing the game. Amoung the prizes will be a DRM-Free copy of the game, because DRM sucks! :P I'll also come up with some pretty nice stuff that will look great on any gamer's wall/shelf. Plus anything else uniquely themed towards the game that I can come up with I'll try to do as well.

So that's what I've been doing with Garland's Quest. I can't wait to show you guys what it'll look like. :) Since having nothing to look at sucks, I can at least show you this...

Garland's Quest brainstorming work. :)
(Click on the image above to see lager version!)


Stranded

Oh you didn't think that I was done did you? No sir! I've been writing like crazy too. So it seems that my creativity has gotten the better of me and I finally sat down to write out some sci-fi fiction. This time instead of trying to fit it into a video game, I'm going the way of comic books. Or graphic novel, the jury is still out on what the "proper" term is, but I used to enjoy and love the medium so this isn't too painful a project for me. Plus having a sister who went to university to learn how to illustrate and draw doesn't hurt it's chances either.

On my last visit back home I sat down with my sister and we came up with the concept; A somewhat "Grey" looking alien pilot crash lands and is stranded on a strange planet and has all these adventures trying to get back home. That's the original premise. As it turns out this was such a great canvas for my own creativity to grow and develop (what I think is) such a great little story that has a few layers of depth. I'm hoping that other sci-fi lovers out there will like it as I've never published or written anything quite at this level before. This is my first.

I am on issue 2, with only a few minor rewrites needed for some of Issue 1. We are into page 2 for drawing. And we have one of the two planned promotional posters for the launch of the comic book series. A good start, but we have lots of work ahead of us.

Originally I was going to just do a couple of issues or something small to help get my sister into it, but as things went along I started to form this great plot and back-story along with the story I'm telling each issue themselves and decided that I want to flesh it all out. I'm planning on keeping it to a limited series for now. We could come back to it and do spin-offs, but that's for us to decide on later. For now however, I want the story to run it's course and come to it's full conclusion. There will be strange monstrous creatures, fighting with other alien races, the things our hero does in his struggle to survive and get rescued.

A really fun element of the series will be the flashback sequences I'm writing for the main character that tells of his past. There will be things that tie in what is happening with him on the planet personally and other events which unfold later. There is also a whole other story involving his people and the major war that there were involved in not long ago that is causing troubles even decades after they happened. I'm having some fun and experimenting with my first trip into the writing world. I hope it comes out well. If you like comic books (or graphics novels) I hope you'll give our series a shot when it's out.

Now I couldn't show too much of my game, but I can show you a small version of the promotional poster we've made up for the comic book series. My sister has done all the artwork save for the all white series title that I did in Photoshop CS5. This scene will appear on the first page of the first issue and there will be a second promotional poster from another scene that will appear in the first issue as well. That one will have the main character in it.


Promotional post of the comic book series Stranded.
(Do I really need to tell you to click for larger at this point?)


Well that's all I've got for ya, boys and girls. (Are there any girls? Well there is AthenaOfDelphi, of course, but any other?) I'm really sorry for all the distractions taking me from the community, but as you can see these projects take some involvement. That and moving and working the extra hours that I have been really takes you time away even more so.

I hope to get a few more news posts in the near future and potentially do a few more podcasts. (Those were fun!)

Until next time, happy coding! :)


- Jason McMillen
Pascal Game Development
Co-Founder / Community Leader
]]> WILL http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?130-Garland-s-Quest-Redux-amp-Stranded Ludum Dare 23 anybody? http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?129-Ludum-Dare-23-anybody Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:44:48 GMT I know we have the PGD challenge on at the moment... But who doesn't like a blitz paced game dev jam? I know I have a lot of work on my entry to do still... But if I'm honest I've now sort of got that - I hate looking at my code a little since its virtually all the code I've done recently... And so, I decided I needed a break - but one where I didnt fall out of touch with game code... A break called LD23.

Just to give you guys a heads up - the themes are looking absolutely awesome so I'd highly recommend checking it out - the main event is this weekend, and I'll be on the go again, so I'll see what I can pull together :D

So, if any of you guys/gals out there were just waiting for an invitation - consider this as one!

LD23 - JOIN IT.... Now wheres that hypnotic smiley........ ??? ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?129-Ludum-Dare-23-anybody <![CDATA[2nd PGD Challenge & Jolting The Community]]> http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?128-2nd-PGD-Challenge-amp-Jolting-The-Community Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:57:34 GMT Hey everyone!

It's been a while since I wrote a new blog, so I figured that I should make an attempt to give you all a slice of my thoughts of late. I've been a little busy for the past few months, so you all know I have a full-time career on top of all this volunteer stuff I do with the community. Though I love it, I have to put food on the table after all, right?

I've been back in full swing over the past few weeks however and I've ben trying to jolt the community into a little higher amount of traffic and activity. I've been pushing the Social Networks such as Twitter and Facebook. YouTube has received little love. I believe this is because I haven't quite found that video capture software for my Mac just yet. I should get going on that since I would need it to help promote PGD Challenge competitions by making my fun videos and community ads. Been a while, I should change that soon.


PGD Challenge

Yes finally, I'm hoping you will all start saying soon. Okay I know I've been toying at that thread for some time, but this time I really mean it. I've even set the date and posted it all over the place too. That's got to get you pretty excited no? Don't make me get the ole' cattle prod. >:D

I could talk about the details, but I think that's all covered in the announcements and you'll get the rest upon the start date anyhow. Just do me a favour though folks, don't burn yourselves out on the first day. :P Take the first day or so to plan out your game projects and make realistic goals. As you go, trim the fat if it seems like you've gone overboard despite your best efforts. It happens. Stoney and myself did as such with out mock entry so don't feel to bad. Just don't do what we did. ;)

In all seriousness, I'm pretty excited to see it happening within less than a year of the last one. I think we should have more of these than we did of the Annuals. I think we finally got the formula right this time. Of course feedback helps, you guys are terrible at giving feedback. Maybe it's the old 'programmers laziness' rule of thumb. Who knows, but it would be nice to hear it from the horse's mouth some times.


Community Laziness

Well that does lead me to what I'm finding is a whole lot of laziness to be truthful. I'm not one to follow the stats too closely. If people are enjoying the community and being active, I'm happy. However I've been spotting lots and lots of creepy lurkers out there. Many of them are long time regulars too! You know who you are! :)

I mean, really guys? Is it that you are too busy and feel that nothing you have to say will help or hinder anyone else's posts? Afraid of becoming a "troll?" Secret project got you down? Well it wouldn't at least hurt to say hello once in a while though.

If a community is rated solely upon it's activity, then lately you guys suck. lol

Now there have been some people speaking up and posting lately, but it has really dwindled down to those few. What happened to all the exciting new projects that were posted? And all the crazy tools you used to make? I suspect that it's the new full time job or it's exam time at school. Still it would be nice just to have the extra posters so it doesn't "feel" all that lonely on the site.

If only you folks knew what I paid to keep the site going until 2016... :/


Something Else I've Been Working On

Well you all know by now, those that actually have known me for some time, I can write. Oh boy can I. ;) Well instead of another game project, I've decided to try my hand at writing comic books. I've written a few drafts of the first issue and am currently rouging out a draft each for the 2nd and 3rd issues as well. I'm hoping to make it go for a limited series. How many I don't know, but it'll be enough to tell my story that I've been plotting along with.

It's pretty exciting as my sister is working with me as an artist doing pencils, ink and colour. Though the first run will be solely in B&W to help speed to publication. Hopefully you will get to see it on multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, Kindle Fire as well as the web and Facebook. I'm planning on going through Graphicly as they now offer a great deal for digital publishing and eventually making an iOS app where you can get the issues in HD and in full colour. Printing is an option we would be considering, but we'd have to find the right distribution partner for that as well.

Who knows maybe subconsciously this is just an excuse for me to travel down to Calgary for a comic convention and shmoose it up with all those great graphic novel writers and artists. Run into a few sci-fi actor dudes as well. ;)

The series name is 'Stranded' I'll blog about it again once I have an issue to wave around and show. Any artists or writers out there interested in writing/drawing single stories give me a shout.


All Done!

Well that's it for me, I'm done for now. Smacked the community around a little, added more blurb about PGD Challenge and waved a new unenviable project around for all not to see. Yup, a full nights blogging all ready to post.

Till next time happy coding!

Jason McMillen
Pascal Game Development
Webmaster / Co-Founder

]]> WILL http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?128-2nd-PGD-Challenge-amp-Jolting-The-Community Helios - and low level pascal http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?127-Helios-and-low-level-pascal Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:50:32 GMT Well, looks like time is going to be on my side for the next few weeks so I figured I'd just drop a line in to PGD for the summary of whats been going on these past weeks (months!?)...

Internet in the UK - Plastic box routers that look like they should contain pop tarts (bar the cat poopin magic rainbows) seem to perform as such and as a result the faithful old Livebox 1.1 has had to be barred from the house after 5 of them failed in weeks of each other - Orange and BT blamed our cables so I sent them packing... Now its back to some old(er) technology in the form of an outdated but rock solid Shiro DSL805e hooked up to a WNR100v2 from netgear. In english, thats an old faithful modem we brought back from south africa that now syncs at a cozy 18-20mbps and a cheap as chips 150mbps N router to pipe it all out to us. As easy and straightforward s that sounds theres 6 weeks right there :o... And when I told them it wasn't my wiring they still didnt listen 8)

Past Exams - hey, its first results day thursday :) so that went well... More to come though so I'll be having some more time out soon unfortunately :(

Prometheus - Yep, this one is STILL in the works. I've cleaned up the GL and some relevant docs are ready to be passed through fpdoc for publication, so yay. I can now say the graphics are now workable although my interpretation of XLib and X11 could use some refining - so if theres a good book out there please drop a line below ;D Win32 and Mac can make do with SDL for now, but something permanent would be very nice...

PGD challenge - looking forward to it. Period. It'll be prometheus powered and hopefully that'll be more field experience with it for more tuning and development. Oh, did I mention I'm reading Andrus source to make it (sort of) integrate with ZenGL, think fonts so far, ;) so now resources fit together - Andru, credit where its due, there sure is some insanely good code in ZenGL...

Helios - Yes, the little article that took FPC back to the bare metal. Well, I've had an idea after poking around my network and finding I have aeons of CPU time to burn so I might just get a diary of that focusing on getting a command line and some script language together - thinking something for number crunching on gargantuan scales could be fun since I have some code for that kind of thing already 8)

So yeah, lots of smileys, happy times - work, but happy. I'll be keeping a small log going and if I ever get a playable game out of my prototypes, I'll see if I can get a write up in the tutorial section. Now about that photo for the PGD page will wanted...................... ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?127-Helios-and-low-level-pascal Prometheus - The 2nd Generation: Almost there http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?65-Prometheus-The-2nd-Generation-Almost-there Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:43:47 GMT After a tedious 1 year of SDL and other performance, stability and compatibility hassles its was time to rebuild. Prometheus now runs faster,... After a tedious 1 year of SDL and other performance, stability and compatibility hassles its was time to rebuild.

Prometheus now runs faster, smaller and more flexibly - and work is still being done in this area. Now theres an application logger that can be toggled at a flick of a bit, its pure OpenGl code that talks directly to X11/WinAPI and it has no DLLs/SOs. And to add another plus theres some extra niceness in the Utils unit that lets you lear out arrays with a single command, convert types on the fly, generate variables with the Quick prefix - all for that RAD element. Or how about PM_TextUtils, grabbing the name/value/information from XML and HTML meta style tags is a function away, or searching for what line of a file an occurence of a string is one? Its one function away.

So, after a few months of rebuilding here's where its all at.

What works:

  • PM_Colour
  • PM_Config
  • PM_Debug
  • PM_Event
  • PM_Images
  • PM_Maps
  • PM_TextUtils
  • PM_TileSets
  • PM_Utils
  • PM_Window
  • PM_X11Window
Now, this doesn't mean they are in their final implementations or that they are bug free - only that they perform their intended function equally well at equal or better performance than the 1st generation Prometheus on more than one platform. Sure, more in depth functionality will be added - but now its modular. Need Prometheus to do something it doesn't already? Its one unit away!

Plus, as an added bonus - because its easy I'm looking at a PM_Legacy unit for 100% compatibility between Gen1 and Gen2, just for all those snippets of Gen1 I liked.

Whats next?

Well, first theres finishing off the Win32 side of things as those can still be experimental at times, legacy support and hey - for the SDL fans among us that like their := instead of xyz.abc() then I'm thinking about you too :)

Just a quick update from me, as to how I spend my pre-exam week revision time and how the obscure thread in the Prometheus news thread really is. Oh, and did I mention, all the WIP elements should be done for the next Ludum Dare - and the Android units are hitting the repositories as soon as I get my compiler working for my shiny new galaxy ace 8) ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?65-Prometheus-The-2nd-Generation-Almost-there Computer Down http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?64-Computer-Down Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:19:39 GMT Well it would seem that my plans to provide more news posts and start promoting PGD and Pascal Gamer before I left in November have collapsed. My... Well it would seem that my plans to provide more news posts and start promoting PGD and Pascal Gamer before I left in November have collapsed.

My slightly over one year iMac has gone wonky on me and I cannot seem together it to work again with reinstalls and diagnostic tools. Therefore there must be a hardware issue of which I'll have to send it in together it fixed. Sadly that will take more time than I an spare as it means a 3 hour drive to the next major city of where there is an Apple Store where it can be dropped off. Since the weekend has come and gone I can either take a day off work or wait until the next weekend to drive there myself.

From then I will most likely have to wait at least a week just to get an answer back or for some kind of resolution of which I will already be gone on my trip until the end of November.

So for all those who follow my blog and wonder why it has been a little slow these days, I've been a little tied up and my computer is now a 27" brick sitting on my desk. My iPad thankfully has been able to augment some of my simpler day-to-day simple tasks such as email and web browsing, however other more integral things such as generating graphics and other materials for PGD news posts, updating that Pascal Gamer website to promote the iPad app, creating documents and materials for the next PGD Challenge, etc cannot be done until I have my system back up and working again.

So stick with us as we push on and keep PGD going but unfortunately the exciting stuff will have to wait until December it seems. ]]> WILL http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?64-Computer-Down Articles vs Blogs - the ultimate question http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?63-Articles-vs-Blogs-the-ultimate-question Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:40:28 GMT Now before the wise guy/gal says it, the answer to my dilemma is NOT 42 :D... Ok, just jokes... In all seriouslynesses (I am familiar with grammar... Now before the wise guy/gal says it, the answer to my dilemma is NOT 42 :D... Ok, just jokes...

In all seriouslynesses (I am familiar with grammar btw) my blog posts may hit 900 or so views - and thats fine with me but then there's that article section that has more discussion about 'Tripping the Class Fantastic' By AthenaOfDelphi (Great read, highly recommended - especially the one on multithreading) and TileD demonstrations among a quick tanks tutorial by WILL (Also a great read and intro with lots of nice concepts) and thats about it. Meanwhile there is my blog posts with ubuntu themed like a mac (ubuntu RIP for me as well as windows, but I still have that theme kicking :)), general life things like when I wipe my hard drive from time to time and lose everything by accident or actually something to do with Programming and the list continues...

So I sat down for 9 seconds, okay 11 tops, and engaged around 25 neurones and thought - which is a rare occurrence to be entirely honest - caffeine does a similar thing, I believe its called hyperactivity; they're quite similar when it comes to code.... Besides, back to the topic at hand: what if instead of posting random junk on this blog for 900 people to spend their time on I immortalized some of those ideas into some articles that could be indexed and be useful to everybody?! :o I know, its good isn't it 8)

So from now on, or rather, without further ado, let me say, if I may, keep your eyes peeled on that new article box, (around 1/4 of the pixel real estate of the front page - you can't miss it) for some random bits of advice/tips/tutorials and other junk that might actually be useful to someone somewhere in sometime in the future (yeah, thats a mouthful :P)... The first installment is ready to be published and that way - those that want serious words from me can go to the article section, those that want general stuff can stay here, those that want both can read both and those that want none - then 1. Why are you reading this? and 2. Keeps your eyes and mouse of that articles box - its only 1/4 of the page...

ASIDE from all that, I recently had a brainwave about something that could be fun, useful and generally good for the community in general - a SNIPPET OF THE WEEK! I might have to look into the best way of making it happen but I reckon that with the whole of PGD to submit their suggestions and my general lack of diligence and bored browsing - we could get some nifty stuff out to everyone to make those few lines of code - so much more powerful...

Or we could do procedure of the month, or type of the fortnight... OK, maybe I should shutup now... Its 20 to midnight and I'm about to burn out at this pace.

So thats really it from me for today (in this timezone at least). Really. :-X zzzZZZ ]]> code_glitch http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/entry.php?63-Articles-vs-Blogs-the-ultimate-question