Any Free Pascal projects out there?

[WILL]

in pascal asm is super maintainable! just stick it in a function. Besides even in C you'll need to use asm to bump out the speed for almost any type of optimization.

[{MSX}]

Hey, I'm just currious if there are any Free Pascal projects out there worth mentioning in this forum?

I'm working on a project that builds with freepascal and delphi on both linux and windows., but i'm using mainly Kylix as a platform. I've tryed lazarus some times ago but it looked not so good to me. Kylix looks quite old too.. Indeed i'm searching for something else (hence my thread on IDEs ), but i don't think there are so much cross platform pascal IDE out there.

BTW freepascal gives me some problems in windows, for example when loading DLLs.. Instead in linux it works nicely

[cairnswm]

I've just started looking at FreePascal as an option. I've basically decided on JEDI-SDL as the graphics library. I havn't started anything proper yet but I am expecting my next game release (due July 2005 ) to be done in FreePascal.

At the moment I'm making my own set of Screen, image and drawing controls. I was thinking of using them in a tutorial but haven't had time yet.

[noeska]

@TUX: Lazarus already runs under osx



http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mo...q=showsc&id=32

[savage]

Very cool Indeed. FreePascal may one day replace Delphi in terms of Pascal popularity, if they can just iron out a few more of the bugs they have.

It would probably also help if more of the Delphi/Pascal community actually helped out. If only we all had more time.

[cairnswm]

Savage - what are the main problems they are having - what bugs should we be watching out for? I've seen this sort of thing (free pascal has bugs/problems) but havn't been able to get a feel for what sort of problems they are having.

Looking at the freepascal bug list it seems pretty specific issues that are causing problems. If we just do our normal sort of basic games with simple screen manipulation - will we have problems?

[Anonymous]

Hi William,
The bugs I was referering to are specifically to do with the Lazarus IDE. It is functional but has a few things that need polishing, so stick to command line or Delphi/Kylix for now or help them fix the bugs.

Though I have not used the FreePascal compiler extensively, in the couple of years I have used it, it has done well with the JEDI-SDL stuff. Just remember to set Delphi mode when compiling and it should be fine as long as you tend to use Delphi 5 or 6 syntax. My command line always starts with...
fpc -Sd -B <project name>.dpr
The -Sd sets Delphi compatability mode.
The -B does a build all so is optional.

Other things to watch out for are things like the fact that FPC does not have TCollection class as far as I can tell. But then I tend to use TList or TObjectList as my base classes for lists. The other thing to note is that if you are making use of RTTI, the underlying structure is slightly different to Delphi. This became particularly evident with Igor's SDL Controls ( http://sdlcontrols.sourceforge.net ), and that is why his controls can only be used with Delphi/Kylix for now. Eventually SDLControls will also work with FPC once we iron out the RTTI issue.

Keep these simple things in mind when writing your JEDI-SDL FPC code and it will compile and run on Win32, Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS X, and maybe oneday even PS2 or XBox

[Anonymous]

Hi William,
The bugs I was referering to are specifically to do with the Lazarus IDE. It is functional but has a few things that need polishing, so stick to command line or Delphi/Kylix for now or help them fix the bugs.

There are some general problems:
- DLL support is immature, no packages
- COM support etc on Windows is skimpy.
- tthread.synchronize is only implemented since a few days.
- No delegation uses "implents"
- Unicode basis done, however most string routines unchecked.
- class wrappers for variant types are not complete.
- db support is much less evolved.

Other things to watch out for are things like the fact that FPC does not have TCollection class as far as I can tell.

Better, it has two. The Delphi one in classes, just like Delphi, and the TP one in (which is more TList like) in objects.

Keep these simple things in mind when writing your JEDI-SDL FPC code and it will compile and run on Win32, Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS X, and maybe oneday even PS2 or XBox

1.9.6 is imminent and AMD64, Sparc32/64 are amongst them.

[Almindor]

I'm working on a game called Lentilwars for a year now(i'm heck lazy).
I use FPC for it lazarus as an editor. I use SDL and my own net code + I just finished the 1st part of a Game Abstraction Layer for the blitter so I can swap between SDL and openGL. I think fpc is good for games programming specialy because it's so cross-platform(unlike even C which has "issues").

As for those unfinished parts of FPC, apart from the DLL (for big multi-language projects) I don't see any problems.
FPC also supports a few things which delphi doesn't have that might come in handy.

[savage]

Just so you know, in a future release ( maybe 1.2.9 ) of SDL, they will be hooking in an OpenGL backend which will work transparently with 2D applications/games. In theory, you won't even have to recompile your app and it will make use of OpenGL calls and give you HW acceleration ( if available ) just by installing the updated libraries.