What tools are you currently using to makes games with these days? - 2013

[Lifepower]

Why would that be minus?
Sure it seems that in mobiles there is much faster advancment but in reality most of the technologies currently present in mobiles are just existng technologies from desktop world being ported to mobiles. And it is the rate of how fast theese technologies are being ported to mobiles which actually creates mobiles lifespan so short.
[...long list...]

I wasn't referring to accessories like camera and GPS, but CPU and GPU. I think these will be receive most innovations, while on desktop they are becoming somewhat stagnant. Worse, if desktop market is going to shrink considerably, it may have repercussions on major players like Nvidia or AMD.

I really need to think before I write if I'm on topic. There's forums on the web where you get burnt alive for that kind of thing.

I don't think you should worry about it. I'm myself am used to... err... controversial responses, when state my opinion.

This comes into mind...

[Daikrys]

personally i use delphi for coding and make the android ports with FPC, for graphics i use inkscape, spriter, photoshop and glueit
for my gamedesign docs i use the good old pen and paper

[paulfjeld]

I use FPC only and in a "barebones" old school, Turbo Pascal, pre-Object Pascal way. I have an iMac running Mountain Lion with FPC 2.6.2. I have all my projects in BBEdit (nice syntax coloring for OP) and evoke scripts for making, building, running, etc. It is FAST and a very pleasant environment to code in, especially since I write code in itty bitty steps and run often - feels just like an interpreted environment.

I don't know if this is a good thing but FPC makes it possible for me to write simple code w/ SDL and do what I need it to do but I am stuck with old style API stuff like OpenGL 2.1 and the old Jedi SDL headers. I am trying to use 2.1 in a modern style (eg: VBOs not display lists) and hope it stays relevant for a while longer. I don't see any upside to "Delphi on the mac" but I do worry that FPC remains just a hobby for Florian and his cohorts of exceptional programmers. I love the clarity of Pascal. C (++,#,Objective, etc.) just bugs the hell out of me, but I can see a future where I have to spend months getting my C chops back and running "p2c" on all my code. Hope it doesn't happen...

[Murmandamus]

Our primary toolchain consists of:

1) Lazarus/FPC - primary native development
2) Notepad++ - primary text editor for code, data, html, xml, etc
3) Blender, 3D Coat - for 3D modeling
4) GIMP, Photoshop - for 2D art and texturing
5) GIT for version control and asset management backend
6) Jitsi and ejabberd for communications
7) Scribus and Art of Illusion for vector and paper markup.
PHPbb, Trac, and MediaWiki for project and document management and long-term communications.
9) Several internally-developed apps for things like time-tracking and asset management tracking.
10) OpenOffice for business/administrative needs.
11) SynthFont, Audacity for music/sound. We're also looking at Propellerhead Reason for composition when we get to that point (and get a real sound/music director rather than a dabbler ).

plus a number of ancillary tools depending on need.

[WILL]

Speaking of Oxygene, is it possible to use the free command line compiler with Java game engines? I think you mentioned that you are currently using libgdx with Oxygene, but I don't know if you're using the IDE or the command line compiler.

Ah, sorry I didn't catch this last time. Been extremely busy developing.

Yeah Paul and I are learning so much working with Oxygene for Java (commercial product packaged with VS shell) and libGDX. We have found the combo to be very powerful and capable and I can see a great many projects of ours being ported over. Paul ported over Subject 33 from a Lazarus Program w/ SDL to Oxygene for Java w/ libGDX in a matter of a couple of weeks at most iirc.

As for the free command-line compiler, I believe it would be, however not overly desirable since using the full version allows you to do everything practically out of the box. ie. apk packaging and debugging direct to and right on the Android device it's self using CrossBox and various other features that make the whole point of using Oxygene amazingly easy to work with.

The only downside I find with it is Visual Studio.

My cons are:

• Windows only IDE. I'm a Mac user/developer. -10 points!
• laggy editor that will freeze up on you periodically even on a fairly high end Win8 laptop
• updates and support of the IDE is via Microsoft made installers (enough said there! )
• working with asset folders in the Solution Manager can be awkward; and
• I suppose you could also state that Oxygene has to integrate into it, but that would be consistent with any other solution unless RemObjects finally rolls their own.

On the flip-side, some of my pros are:

• debugging code in VS isn't that bad to be honest, there are even some cool features that I have yet to see in a more Pascal-centric IDE (ie. listing all your variables/values in a single tree view)
• other various features that Lazarus/Delphi users are used to have been integrated by RemObjects thankfully (code jumping between implementation and interface!)
• CrossBox allows you to compile and debug on your target device (hook up an Android phone/tablet via USB, install the drivers, configure your device for development and away you go!)
• CrossBox also allows you to do the same with a Mac under Nougat(aka Oxygene for Cocoa!)

So the transition from Lazarus to Oxygene has been pretty nice thanks to the help of Jim McKeeth and Paul's porting efforts. I'd like to see this tool used more as it has amazing commercial potential not seen in many of the other Pascal-based tools around. Overall the price for all 3 Oxygene compilers at ~$500 is pretty good considering what some would pay for Delphi. Plus you get a whole year of updates from the date you purchase it, unlike Delphi's complicated and disappointly under-performing version update scheme.

That said, if you are stuck on free only, then Lazarus is probably your best bet, but if you are really serious about making $$$ with your games Oxygene may be the great new way to go.

[WILL]

I think only Macs at this moment are stable, but still, I think they'll be giving terrain to mobiles continuously, with desktop/laptop becoming an elite only / developer-only tools.

It's kinda interesting and funny to hear you of all people stating this. Sort of a complete 180 from things you have stated a few years back if my memory is serving me well tonight. Maybe we are both just getting that much older or the computer world has changed that much huh?

To share in the irony; I myself was a Winblows user over Mac through-and-through, until Vista. (*throws up in mouth a little*) I never upgraded beyond XP, seeing how poor Windows was "moving forward" and with the passable improvement of Win7. I had been watching Apple since they moved to Intel chips and started actually looking into what Mac OS had become and what it was based upon. A handful of years back I bought a big-ass iMac and I'm never going back to MicroCrap land.

If not for the Windows requirement to be able to run Oxygene, I'd not have bought Win7. It's the only thing I use it for.

On mobile front, Oxygene and Smart Studios are non-native and forgive me for saying that, they are no more useful than any other Java or HTML5 tools out there, even worse because they are not-native to non-native conversion tools (i.e. they are intermediaries). This is the same as Oxygene for .NET: you'd better use C# instead, as it is also a very good language. If I would develop games on non-native, I'd pursue HTML5 directly, but there are only a very limited kind of games you can make with that due to performance limitations, especially on mobile. For that, you *need* to go for XCode. FreePascal barely works on Android and iOS, albeit with RTL bugs and it's a pain in the ass to configure, not to mention that you need to develop everything from scratch, starting from keyboard input to window management, etc.

You are correct what you say about Oxygene for Java being on par with other Java-based tools, but that is kind of the point really. To that, I wouldn't say that Oxygene is "non-native" with what I have come to know of them. It is true that they do not generate native EXE or ELF executable code that runs on a traditional desktop OS, but what Oxygene for Java and Oxygene for Cocoa both do is generate code that runs 100% native to their respective platforms. Both Java bytecode files that run and operate exactly as any Java compiled code would and Cocoa projects that compile via XCode into native Mac and/or iOS apps that can be uploaded and sent directly to their respective App Stores.

After talking at length woth both Jim and Marc about their products they both portrait their desire to not trick or hack their compiler's output into some kind of equivalent, but rather to slide right in as a 100% authentic end product. So what you produce in the end is 100% as if you used the more usual tools. The difference is that potentially (they are still working on it) you can use the same code-base to compile to all 3 Oxygene compilers to support ALL platforms. And with the exception of Mac OS X and iOS the rest are interprited or managed technologies, of course.

As for HTML5, well... unless Google makes an HTML5-based OS... lol However I have seen some impressive things done with it in the Smart Mobile Studio graphics competition. Games competition is coming up too btw!

[WILL]

I don't know if this is a good thing but FPC makes it possible for me to write simple code w/ SDL and do what I need it to do but I am stuck with old style API stuff like OpenGL 2.1 and the old Jedi SDL headers. I am trying to use 2.1 in a modern style (eg: VBOs not display lists) and hope it stays relevant for a while longer. I don't see any upside to "Delphi on the mac" but I do worry that FPC remains just a hobby for Florian and his cohorts of exceptional programmers. I love the clarity of Pascal. C (++,#,Objective, etc.) just bugs the hell out of me, but I can see a future where I have to spend months getting my C chops back and running "p2c" on all my code. Hope it doesn't happen...

You are going to have problems with JEDI-SDL which uses SDL 1.2.x headers on the Mac. Mainly you will not be able to go fullscreen. I know from experience using the older SDL 1.2.x for one of my projects that does compile and run for both Windows and Mac under Lazarus. If you can update the headers or (re)write a new set of headers for the 2.x specs that would offer you a solution, but I'm afraid that my old friend's SDL based library project has seen better days.

It is and still remains a great library to learn game programming though! Esp. on Windows!

As for VBOs, weeeelllll I thought those were depreciated in favour of older and possibly even some newer methods? Can someone chip in on this? Sascha, Luuk, Yuriy?

I myself stuck to Display lists on my own Win/Mac projects and the performance boost from immediate mode was still very nice. Of course this all depends on what type of graphics you are doing I would assume.

FPC is what it is. That's what makes it both great and not as great as it "could be." Very east to talk to guys though. Even more so if you speak German.

[Sascha Willems]

As for VBOs, weeeelllll I thought those were depreciated in favour of older and possibly even some newer methods? Can someone chip in on this? Sascha, Luuk, Yuriy?

Nope, it's the contrary VBOs are actually the preferred way (together with VAOs) of storing vertex data in OpenGL 4.x, while old stuff like immediate mode and display lists can't be used anymore (for some years now display lists have been torn down into VBOs by the graphics card drivers anyway).