About the goal of this engine

[Relfos]

If your engine were opensouce you might have and easier time recruting help. I can't imagine your making much money off the engine anyway

Errr... but the engine is open source?
This engine is just the continuation of my old LEAF engine, that was always open source. I changed the name to TERRA, ported it to iOS, and closed sourced it two or three years ago and tried to sell it as comercial product yes, but since no one was interested I open sourced it again after some time and announced it on the mailing list. And I'm pretty sure most of you are registered on the newsletter, as I have like 500 pascal developers registered, maybe you missed the announcement?

Still no one contacted me with interested in using the engine, so I did not make a public rep for it, but I did make continous releases of production code each few months. Still had mostly zero downloads, so I thought no one wanted to make games in Pascal and forget about the site and never updated it, it is quite outdated now, but the engine continued being developed.
If people really were interested I would put it on github or something.

And note, I'm not talking only about my engine, if you check the lazarus wiki you will see a list of other pascal open source engines. I talk about mine because mine is the one with more features (if this is not true please correct me). As as I far I know ZenGL has a big number of users, altought it is just 2D, and there other 3d pascal engines that maybe could also be used as base if people really don't want mine for some reason.
So why not just work with one of those open source engines?
As I said, making a engine as complete as mine took almost a decade, and at least two of those years I worked full time on it, so why spend so much time rewriting the same again?

[Carver413]

Errr... but the engine is open source? This engine is just the continuation of my old LEAF engine, that was always open source. I changed the name to TERRA, ported it to iOS, and closed sourced it two or three years ago and tried to sell it as comercial product yes, but since no one was interested I open sourced it again after some time and announced it on the mailing list. And I'm pretty sure most of you are registered on the newsletter, as I have like 500 pascal developers registered, maybe you missed the announcement? Still no one contacted me with interested in using the engine, so I did not make a public rep for it, but I did make continous releases of production code each few months. Still had mostly zero downloads, so I thought no one wanted to make games in Pascal and forget about the site and never updated it, it is quite outdated now, but the engine continued being developed. If people really were interested I would put it on github or something. And note, I'm not talking only about my engine, if you check the lazarus wiki you will see a list of other pascal open source engines. I talk about mine because mine is the one with more features (if this is not true please correct me). As as I far I know ZenGL has a big number of users, altought it is just 2D, and there other 3d pascal engines that maybe could also be used as base if people really don't want mine for some reason. So why not just work with one of those open source engines? As I said, making a engine as complete as mine took almost a decade, and at least two of those years I worked full time on it, so why spend so much time rewriting the same again?

I remember your anouncement on the pgd years ago and if I'm not mistaken I said I would be interested if it was opensourced but then it seemed that you choose a different route so I never really followed it after that. I think it would be a good Idea to put it up on github and let people have a chance to play around with it. you never know, it might be enough to sway the minds of a few and from there things could take a different turn. I myself am not sold on the community engine it is one thing to talk the talk but quite another to do the walk. As for myself I am working on a procedural design mostly and tools that I believe would be useful it any engine. if the community engine is successful then I would probably wrap my works around theres or some other engine like yours maybe.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

The fact is, everyone has different desires and aims. Relfos, I looked at your engine and I was put off by the commercial aspect and the lack of available documentation. The lack of documentation has put me off a lot of the projects.

On the help front, like Mirage said, I've seen requests for help from peeps on here. Requests to help with a project that they've been working on for X months and it's like no, I don't want to jump in when you're that far along. The learning curve is pretty steep, I want to get in on the ground floor and learn on the way up

I've already learned some stuff and all I've done thus far is write up some design documents. Picking peoples brains about their designs has been enlightening. I'm starting to read around some of the stuff relating to 3D maths and such and I'm loving it.

I'm looking at this as an opportunity to learn. It's been said that this should have happened ages ago and it should have, but the fact is no one has organised it until now. I've taken those first steps because I've got games I want to write but I need to learn some stuff first. This project will give me that chance (and anyone else who wants to join in), and well... to the best of my knowledge it's the first time this community has worked together on anything like this.

It may be ambitious, but I'm planning on having some fun with this. I hope we can surprise the doubters and produce something that really shows off this community and the talent that exists within it. If the enthusiasm that has been shown thus far continues, then I'm pretty confident we will produce the goods.