I'll start with the competition question
  • Short. Rather have them more often, than one big one once a year. Also the longer the time is the bigger the quality difference per entrees can become, depending on how much they dedicate time on it.
  • Kudos. Even potential idea of claiming such prices sounds like trouble to me
  • Themed or freestyle, i guess we can have all kinds of. Mainly themed i think, some might even come with ready code and art base to start from. I guess we are just looking for ways to spend time in a fun way, not here to make a selling game title in each competition.
  • Many ways to go about this. How about community can give each entry 1 or 2 thumbs up, but no down?


Engine is always interesting topic, i likely would want to participate in community engine if we decided to do so. I have to admit i haven't tried all the previous engines even though started nxPascal. I started programming with DelphiX at young age and it got me far. As time went by i felt limited by it though, as the needs for more GPU power came up and DelphiX was slow at that. At that time i tried what i could to look into DirectX and even made a small 3D tetris with DelphiX of that time. But it was still giving me various restrictions, and so i stumbled upon OpenGL.

That's where i first got the graphical engine freedom i was looking for, and so GLEngine was born. It is the predecessor of nxPascal, a bit like DelphiX. Had a Delphi IDE components similar to DXScene and DXTimer, and i got some nice demos done with it. But it had to end aswell... I learned alot of Pascal doing all that, and the whole structure of GLEngine seemed lacking and bad. I felt that IDE components for game engine are actually not needed. Especially with Lazarus it brings all kinds of complications to it, such as needs to rebuild the whole Lazarus.exe when adding components. Also if i wanted to support both Delphi and Lazarus, there could definitely be differences in that code, even if just between many different Delphi versions. So i completely dropped the idea of IDE integration and i have not regretted that. It actually gives me much more detailed control of the program flow too, and still being quite simple at it. In some level nxPascal was supposed to be kind of community engine, it just never got any other interested developers to make it grow. The potential is still there, and being very modular it is not restricted by anything. But i don't mind if you want to start a new one from scratch.