Hi all,

Well, I have to say sitting in the management chair for the site brings on a huge mix of emotions for me. The site (or more specifically, the people) has helped me in the past when I've come unstuck with issues so I have a strong desire to keep that going. At the same time I'm acutely aware that the number of active users has declined steadily, pretty much in-line with the decline in popularity of our favourite tool. With the increasing popularity (this is based on job postings and the number of questions and Delphi related posts I'm seeing) I'm hoping that the decline will turn into an increase.

But, I'm not content with sitting back and just letting it happen around me. I want to try and help the rise and start showing all those nay sayers who believe you can't use Pascal to make games that they are quite frankly wrong

As a slight aside, if you are in touch with any one who was once an active member and they still use Pascal and they still develop games with it, I'd be interested to hear from them, in particular I'm interested in why they stopped visiting the site. On the flipside if they don't use Pascal for games development, I'd be interested in knowing what they now use and why. And what we could potentially offer as a community to encourage more use of Pascal.

Since taking over, I've had one or two chats with the active staff and well, there are a couple of things we really like the idea of.

The first, depending on how long you've been visiting, you may be familiar with... our competitions. So I'd like to ask a few questions about them (I'm happy for private messages if you don't want to air your opinions in public), mainly the questions relate to format.


  • Long or short (months vs. weeks)
  • Prizes (are prizes an important factor or is just getting community kudos enough?)
  • Themed or freestyle
  • Judged by a judging panel or by the other competitors


I guess really what I'd like to hear is everyone's views on this. I want to run a competition but I want to try and make sure we get plenty of viable entries.

The other big idea I floated to the staff was this...

There are some actively developed engines/frameworks at the moment, but nothing like it used to be. Lots of us want to write our own engines, but that can take a lot of time and if you look around there are guys here that have spent a long time writing engines and never seemingly used them in anger to make games with them. I know this is what some people like to do, but doing it solo can be a real drag, and well, at least one of these guys has said they wanted to get involved with a project with other people.

So the question I have for the community is this... do you think there is any mileage in building a community engine? Just to be clear, it would be open source, built by us for us (and of course anyone else who wants to use it, but primarily it's feature set would be driven by the members of this community). I would aim to support Windows, OSX, iOS and Android (courtesy of Delphi) and of course pretty much anything that can use OpenGL that Free Pascal can build a binary for. If you've got an engine or components already that you'd be willing to throw into the pot, please let me know, also feature requests... I'd like to try and get some sort of list together or the main features the community would want.

Comments and thoughts on that idea too... again, if you don't want to share your views publicly, please feel free to drop me a PM.

And finally content...

One of the biggest issues any community site has is it's content. WILL struggled with it, Traveler and I struggled with it. I'm sure you guys want regular fresh content. Well, you can all create content. You can post news items, write articles and request that they be published, you can blog. Thats a lot of different possibilities right there. If you've got an idea for a tutorial or a series of articles on some tech that's close to your heart but you're not sure whether it's relevant to the site... PM me and we can have a chat about it.

In fact, I'm happy to take a PM from anyone who wants to discuss pretty much anything about the site.

And on that note, I'm quite looking forward to what you guys have to say.