About the goal of this engine

[code_glitch]

Edit: Just saw you'd replied before I posted this. By all means, ignore this if you find it irrelevant. Everyone seems to have found closure on this and I don't want to start another debate on this topic which we all seem to be happy with at last

Relfos: I'm sorry if my intentions came across badly in that post - I wasn't trying to doubt your expertise and involvement in the industry. We're also not attacking your engine or your work - the PGDCE is, for many, a learning experience on making a more comprehensive engine in a team. Which allows the PGDCE to employ far more complex construction that what smaller fragmented teams could achieve on their own. Of course we aren't able to persuade the entire industry, but look at it this way:

Pascal game development today:
-ZenGL
-TERRA
-CASTLE
-GLScene
-nxPascal
-Allegro
and the list goes on.

What if, a couple years from now, those developers see promise in the unification effort of the PGDCE and bring the defining features of their old engines to it as well as their expertise. The scene would then have far fewer fragmented options and duplication of effort - something you yourself pointed out as a problem - and in its place, fewer, far more advanced and better supported engines with one large community around it. That, I think, is one of the largest goals of the project: to get everyone behind one project that will, in time, be able to replace the many smaller efforts. And in the process - the developers who had to spend many hours maintaining their small engines on their own could spend that time making games with the PGDCE as the maintenance would be spread across all the developers from all the teams that joined.

If people were working in improving Castle or TERRA they would still be working *together*.

This is the age old argument everyone who maintains their own engine has had. Problem is - it was built by one person a specific way and everyone thinks different. The PGDCE is built by everyone so rather than say "my engine is best, help me work on it. I had all the control making and I built how I see its perfect" we say "our engine is best - help us work on it and have your say in its development" and everyone contributes to what is, in essence, their own engine in part and not someone else's. The PGDCE, thus, could largely be the TERRA engine's code under a new flag if it was offered and was agreed on by the developpers as a goof fit for the envisioned structure of the PGDCE. This would put the PGDCE light years ahead of its present state and would speed it up. As it stands, you rightly point out - it's your engine. We can't touch it. I think I speak for pretty much everyone in the project here - we would welcome any code drops to the project from previous projects to help make parts of the engine. All we need are people to offer that code to us for use.

For the record, I don't mean to start a flame war - or war of any kind. I do however like a good debate, and the PGDCE is something I, along with many others, are starting to feel quite passionate about as a project that has a lot of potential that we would all like to see realized.