PGD - Some thoughts about the future

[SilverWarior]

I personally don't like competitions. Always seems like a waste of time to me. Like I'm trying to prove something that I don't have to prove

Competitions are not a waste of time! Main benefits of competitions are:
1. By participating in competitions your are actually advertizing yourself. You are showing your knowledge level to others. This can be especialy benefitial if your are trying to get a job in computer industry.
2. Competitions offer you great opurtunity to test some of your ideas.
3. By participating in competition your would probably be doing something different than you are usually doing. This could provide you with a new perspective. And that new perspective may even help you get better with your primary work.

One can use Pascal to make games. Do you really want to prove it? What for? I personally don't feel like proving anything. There are games written in Pascal. What other proof one could possibly want.

It is not question wheter if it is posible to make games in pascal. It is question of it is posible to make games in pascal which are of todays standards? And we all know that game standards have changed greatly in the past few years.

There are fewer and fewer developers who use Pascal. This is a problem.

That is true. But answer me this. Is there more buisniess application developers or game developers in computer industry?
Answer is that there are more game developers in computer industry than buisniess developers. Game developers are those who drive the whole computer industry.
But if you look at pascal comunity you will realize that the above fact is not true. There are actually more buisniess pascal developers than pascal game developers. And that is sending out the message that pascal is more suited for buisniess application development which then draws away lots of potentional developers due the fact that game development is most popular.
So the main purpose of PGD is to show that pascal is as suitable for game development as it is for buisniess application development as this would atract more pepole into using pascal.

I am an experienced game developer, I probably could develop a game engine.... given infinite time.

I'm not an expirienced game develoer but given infinite time I could develop a game engine on my own. Heck given an infinite time I could develop a whole OS

What if most people stop using PC soon?
What if most people stop using Windows soon?

Haven't you noticed? Objective Pascal is no longer limited to Windows and PC platforms

What if programming skills will be no longer needed soon?

I can figure out only two posible scenarios for this to happen:
1. We somehow develop an AI which is capable of reprogramming itself. We are doomed when this happens.
2. A catastrofic event causes all electical devices to stop functioning. We are also doomed in such scenario.

Like the author of the first post said, there are already game engines. So why create another one?
Commercial game developers can use commercial game engines like Unreal Engine. Hobbyists can use hobbyists game engines including existing game engines for Pascal.

Why do big game development studios develop their own game engines and not use the existing ones?
Becouse no matter which game engine you are using there is a large posibility that sooner or later you will hit the limitation of that game engine. So if you are using some third party game engine you need to contact the original developers and ask them to help you get rid of that limitation or you have to live with that limitation.
But if you are developing the game engine on your own then you can get rid of that limitation on your own.

ACTUALLY I think that it's great idea but.... but..... at the same time it's difficult and pointless.

Being hard it doesent mean it is pointless.


As for those of you suggesting that we simply go and make headers to use most popular game engines like Unity:
While this might seem better solution in the short run it is not necessarily better solution in the log run.
As I have sad above you are limited by the functionality of that game engine. Even worse due to language differences you might be even more limited due to these language differences.
As it is with most third party libraries/components debugging can be a nightmare. You coučld encounter a bug and not know if it is cause by your code or by third party game engine. Now if you have game engine written in Objective Pascal you might convince the author to share the code with you so you can literally debug both your and engine code and thus find the bug wherever it is. But if the game engine is written in another laguage you can forget about this.
So far I haven't heard of any utility that might alow symuntaniosuly debuggin one application whose components are designed with multiple programming languages.

[Andru]

@SilverWarior

Answer is that there are more game developers in computer industry than buisniess developers.

Can you give any proof? Because I doubt Game industry is big, but I know how big companies(I mean how many developers) are involved in developing software and other "business" things. Probably you think like this only because you see a lot of games around, but there is huge amount of software not available for average people.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

@SilverWarior

Can you give any proof? Because I doubt Game industry is big, but I know how big companies(I mean how many developers) are involved in developing software and other "business" things. Probably you think like this only because you see a lot of games around, but there is huge amount of software not available for average people.

I think the point that Silver is making is relating to the relative proportion of developers using a particular language. If you consider C++ there are alot of people using full stop and a certain proportion of them will be using it for developing games. If you then consider Pascal... the proportion using it for games is significantly smaller. I agree with that assessment.

[dj_sharp]

Speaking of contests;

I now suddenly remember why I don't like contests. Because I participated in a contest once and I got disqualified because I broke the rules. Sort of. I don't think that I should describe in detail what exactly happened; the point is:
If one wants to find a reason to disqualify other person, he|she will undoubtedly find one.

On the other hand, for me following rules always seems unbelievably hard. It is difficult to pay attention to all those rules. Especially when there are two sets of rules: some general rules and rules specific to the ongoing contest. I always miss some points. And when I try to follow contest rules I just can't help but think "hey, I don't even get paid for this".

And one more thing: I believe most contest organizers allow participants to use so called game creators. But I'm a programmer, I can't draw art for gaems, I can't write music; I am only good at writing code. So I really feel like I can't compete with ppl using game creator software who's also good at drawing and such; it just seems so pointless

[SilverWarior]

And one more thing: I believe most contest organizers allow participants to use so called game creators.

Those programs are usually refered as Game Worskhops.

But I'm a programmer, I can't draw art for gaems, I can't write music; I am only good at writing code. So I really feel like I can't compete with ppl using game creator software who's also good at drawing and such; it just seems so pointless

Well I'm much like you more or less a programmer (average one).
I'm not good at grawing hraphics,
I haven't even tried composing music. Well did once and couldn't do it. End result was complete crap.
But none of the above discouraged me in participating or trying to participate. So far I trieed twice but both time ended up with nothing to show as all I managed to did is some code without any GUI. So I never submited my entries.
Infact failing to finish any of my entries actually gave me motivation to go and start making myself tools which might help me in the future:
- texturing program where I could create ingame graphics in a way that I think would suite me
- I developed an idea for a GUI library which should make GUI development much easier. Goal is to make library work with basically any graphical engine provided that you make suitable eader interface between my library and graphical engine.

On the other note PGD competitions doesn't alow the use of readily made Game Workshops. You can use existing game engine provided that it is written in Objective Pascal. And that is the main reasony why I hapily try participating in them as I know that I athleast have some chance in being good.
I suggest you check the previous competitions and their rules to get better idea on them.