So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[Carver413]

IMO there's literally nothing else you could use other than OpenGL or DirectX to write a reasonably well-performing game nowadays (whether in 2D or 3D.) I mean, you could build it around a general-purpose graphics library like BGRABitmap or Graphics32, but that's still ultimately going to be significantly slower than any hardware accelerated solution. There's no advantages to ever using a software renderer unless you have no other choice... Also, in regards to: I personally think the real reason is because 80-90% of the "engines" people have written in Pascal are useless to begin with. Namely, a huge portion of them use immediate-mode OpenGL, which is about as slow as you can possibly get. It's honestly even slower than a well-optimized software renderer in certain cases. Yet for some reason the Pascal community has continued to use it well into the 2000s (and still does in many cases). Why? I don't know. Maybe because people think "stuff that reminds them of C or C++ is scary" (which is another huge problem honestly. If you think C++ is scary you should quit trying to develop games right now, as you will never make it anywhere.) As far as I'm concerned, there is no logical reason for anyone to have used glBegin/glEnd or anything of that sort any later than 2001 or so. Anything after that is just laziness on the part of the developer. Even if you don't use shaders or vertex buffers, you can at least use glDrawArrays with client-side arrays! Sorry if any of this sounds abrasive, that honestly wasn't my intent... and it is worth pointing out that things ARE finally starting to get better in this regard. The Castle Game Engine for example, has a well optimized modern OpenGL renderer that doesn't use any immediate mode at all, as far as I can tell.

I dont think that there is really anything out there that is still in production that uses legacy opengl.

[Akira13]

There definitely is..... GLScene for example is like 90% immediate mode. Even most of the shader components it includes are written in the deprecated "ARB Assembly Language" and not GLSL.

[Carver413]

There definitely is..... GLScene for example is like 90% immediate mode. Even most of the shader components it includes are written in the deprecated "ARB Assembly Language" and not GLSL.

Glscene hasn't had any focused development in years, just a bunch random coders going in and changing this or that to there liking and moving on when they get bored.

[Akira13]

Glscene hasn't had any focused development in years, just a bunch random coders going in and changing this or that to there liking and moving on when they get bored.

I'm not sure that's true. I'm aware they kind of dropped off for a while around 2010 or so, but for the past few years they seem to have resumed a pretty organized development process with regular releases. And the coding team isn't really random.... seems to be the same 5 or 6 people all the time, headed up by someone named Pavel Vassiliev.

[Carver413]

I'm not sure that's true. I'm aware they kind of dropped off for a while around 2010 or so, but for the past few years they seem to have resumed a pretty organized development process with regular releases. And the coding team isn't really random.... seems to be the same 5 or 6 people all the time, headed up by someone named Pavel Vassiliev.

well maybe there is still hope for it then.

[Akira13]

well maybe there is still hope for it then.

Only if they start to focus on modernizing the rendering code. No amount of features will make up for an underlying engine that simply doesn't perform well....

[phibermon]

Only if they start to focus on modernizing the rendering code. No amount of features will make up for an underlying engine that simply doesn't perform well....

EDIT : in the branches of their revision server there's a Vulkan branch - so no I don't see any modern OpenGL code but it looks like they're not idle on the technology front.

However I hope the developers have been engaged in some hardcore work behind the scenes - Vulkan is hardly a drop in replacement for OpenGL - you really need to know what you're doing and going from an immediate mode GL design to a low level Vulkan design without extensive experience in the upper echelons of OpenGL could become quite the nightmare for them - Vulkan is very unforgiving of errors and it doesn't hold your hand.