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Thread: A PGD Challenge without Scoring and Judges?

  1. #1
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Question A PGD Challenge without Scoring and Judges?

    Hey guys, what do you all think of the idea of having a sort of Game Jam style competition for the next one? No scoring and no judges. Would you still be up for it?

    It's easy enough to come up with a great theme and some decent rules. Of course hosting all the games on the showcase site takes a little bit of time to gather up screenshots and such, but the biggest "challenge" in all of these competitions is finding people out there that are able and willing to play all the games objectively and score them individually. It does take that extra bit of effort, and usually that's what delays competition start times.

    So without Scoring and Judges at all, we can still have an event take place for all those that want to take on a challenge as a community. The benefit, besides the obvious learning experience of starting and completing a project, would be that you get to show off your game in our great event showcase, but without the stress of scoring, having to match up with a specific system and so on.

    I would open up the competition for ALL platforms so long as it's created with a Pascal-based developer tool.

    What do you guys think? Are you all really aching for a new PGD Challenge event?
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  2. #2
    Perfectly sound! Of course my question is: is it enough that the engine is Pascal-based and the game mechanics driven by a scripting language? You know my project, it's the EGSL interpreter which is completely made with Freepascal. The game would be made with Lua, though. If this wasn't allowed on the other hand, what would happen if I'd replace Lua with Pascal Script or this one http://sourceforge.net/projects/scriptengine2/ ?
    Best regards,
    Cybermonkey

  3. #3
    Yes, nice. I'm in.

    Anyway I've yet commented that some other contests ("Speed Hack", "TINS" ...) the scoring is done by the participants themselves.
    No signature provided yet.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Cybermonkey View Post
    Perfectly sound! Of course my question is: is it enough that the engine is Pascal-based and the game mechanics driven by a scripting language? You know my project, it's the EGSL interpreter which is completely made with Freepascal. The game would be made with Lua, though. If this wasn't allowed on the other hand, what would happen if I'd replace Lua with Pascal Script or this one http://sourceforge.net/projects/scriptengine2/ ?
    why should it be a problem? since its your project, its like using a script language inside pascal

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Daikrys View Post
    why should it be a problem? since its your project, its like using a script language inside pascal
    Yes, that's my opinion, too. But maybe Jason has another view of that issue?
    Best regards,
    Cybermonkey

  6. #6
    Eh, I would love to start in some competition but work takes also my spare time :|

  7. #7
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Hmm... interesting question, but I don't think I'd have an issue with it. If you think about it. You make a game that has it's own AI, but you don't use any kind of strict Pascal syntax for the script, it's still a Pascal-made game.

    Well I don't see a major issue with it as the majority of the code is/was Pascal, but if you did want to make it more "legit" as a Pascal entry then I suppose you could switch to PascalScript. You might even have made your engine better by adding support for another script language too.

    Since there is no scoring and judges, I'd say that it should be a bit more relaxed too as long as Pascal is used as part of the game as well.

    Well that makes 3.5!
    Last edited by WILL; 04-01-2013 at 08:32 PM. Reason: added a half :P
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  8. #8
    Somehow I have a feeling that I will be pasing this over. Till now I tried competing in two PGD competition and fail to finish my project even to the phase where I could show it to others (I psnd to much time on the core of the game so that I run out of time for games interface).
    For me personally judging of my work isn't seemed as priority but it can be helpfull to see others opinion on my work. But since you are having problems in finding official judges why not give the comunity to be able to judge the entries by themselves. So everyone who go and tries to play the entries can also rate it. So finally you can just sum up the scores given by the comunity. As we don't have prizes I don't see any problem in that.


    Some time ago I was actually thinking about some other idea which can help in the promotion of our comunity - a Programing Challenge.
    The goal of a Programing Challenge isn't to make a whole game but actually just to solve certain basic problemof making a game. For instance:
    How to make your game be able to have several thousands of differemnt units on the game field and theese units doesn't just have information for their position, their orientation and their health but also have other details.
    As you can imagine the min problem of this is the amount of memory you would require. So goal of the challenge would actually be to find an eficient approach which would alow you to implement this in a way so that your game won't use up all the computers memory just for this.
    And since different peope usually use different aproach in solving problems there is great chance that different participants would provide different solutions for this.
    So in the end we could go and try to find posible benefits and drawbacks for each of presented aproaches.
    In the end this could be excelent resource for other pepole to use when deciding which approach would be best for their game.
    Becouse when newbie game developers starts working on their games they are usualy searching for code sapmles from similar games. But only in rare cases these code sapmles comes with the infromation about posible benefits and drawbacks of this code. So why not we be first to change this?

    I know what you are probably thinking now. If someone wan't to know how some problem can be solved he can always just ask on the forum. Yes that is true. But the thing is that what he will probbably get is just one answer from first person who toks enugh time ti think about it and provide an answer.
    But what I'm suggesting would actually provide more answers to single question and in the end even alow us as comunity to actually give opinion on each others answe and therefore find posible benefits and drawbacks of each o them.
    And there is no rule that someone should go and ask of how something can be done. If wanted any comunity member could go and present a problem and one solution to solve that problem. So then other would go review it and provide their posible solutions to the problem. In the end it would be similar as just writing a tutorial but it is probably easire for some pepole to simply show a code example thatn write full tutorial especially if that person isn't natively Engilsh speaking.

  9. #9
    It has been mentioned before and is related to Silverwarrior's suggestion of a programming Challenge, but I think it could be interesting with an AI challenge like the Google AI Challenge. It would require that someone would make a simple game with some interesting multiplayer challenges. Furthermore the game will need an API that can be used by various Pascal dialects.

    I realize that it does require some effort from whoever must create the game, but I find the benefits interesting:

    No judges will be needed. We just have to make the AIs battle each other and see who wins or gets the highest score.
    The problem with unfinished entries should hopefully not be an issue. With a well designed API it should require minimal effort to make a simple working AI. It may not be any good, but it Can be submitted to the contest even if you haven't finished it.
    It's a clean programming challenge. No need to fiddle with graphics and Music. No need to waste time on setting up rendering contexts, reading game assets, do proper input handling, collision handling, etc. You only have to focus on designing and implementing your AI.
    Everyone can participate. No matter your skill level you can make a valid entry. Beginners may implement some ad hoc method while more experienced programmers may want to play with decision trees or even experiment with neural networks or reinforcement learning.
    Lastly it is plain fun. We will be competing directly against each other and it is always fun to see how your AI compares to some other AI. It is also interesting to see if some type of AIs fare better against other types of AI but are weak against a third kind.

    Personally I think this could be a great and fun challenge and the competetion length can be as long as you wish. You can get an AI running in one day but can spend a month on improving it.


    btw. I'm writing this from a borriwed iPad and I am really hating the auto-correct.
    Imagine I've written something clever here inspiring you to make something awesome. If that happens give me credits

  10. #10
    I like your idea but you do have to realize that AI development is far from easy. Sure making AI which controll simple movments is easy but if you wan't anything more than that it does becomes quite demmanding. So I'm afraid that many pepole with low programming skils would simply avoid participating in this challenge.

    Anywhay do you volunteer yourself to write such a game to alow us to do this challenge?
    I do have an idea of making game similar to Colobot where the goal of the game is for you to write boots AI. In Colobot you need to write boots ai using C++ so I thought of using Pascal Script for my game.
    But before I can do that I still need to learn a few things about the game development before I would be able to finish any of my game ideas.

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