Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
@SilverWarrior - Yes I do see what you mean but Pascal engines currently available as good as many of them are still don't come close to the ease of use and rapid development capable with some of large and free engines that are available in other languages
Yes I perfectly agree with you on that. But why is that? Is it because Pascal as a language is not suitable for game development? Or is it because none of the "weaker" Pascal based game engines never remained in development for so long as development of those powerful game engines that were developed in other programming languages have?
Below you are mentioning Unreal 4 game engine. Do you even know how long was Unreal 4 game engine in development? Development of the Unreal 4 engine started in 2003 and it was published in 2012. That is 9 years of development done by experienced team before publishing but its development still hasn't stopped. But we should not forget about Unreal 4 game engine predecessors as they also affected the Unreal 4 game engine development in a way.
First unreal game engine was published in 1998 which is 18 years ago. So this in a way means that there is almost 20 years of development behind Unreal 4 game engine.

So how many Pascal based game engines have seen so long development time? I could come up with only three potential candidates

  1. Your unpublished JINK game engine that as you have said has been in development for over 8 years
  2. Platform extended which is successor to several popular Asphyre game libraries where the oldest one was releast back in 2007
  3. Castle game engine for which I don't have release date of its first iteration


Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
if a game developer working in Pascal right now wanted to produce even half of what unreal engine 4 is capable of - they need to write it themselves.
That is true. But what would be better? For them to start from scratch (all the way from writing OpenGL basics)? Or perhaps by extending one of the above mentioned game engines?
I think that the latter would be better.

Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
Many of us have been working hard for a number of years on better and more capable engines but compared to the dozens/hundreds of developers that contribute to something like Ogre3D, unity etc - progress is slow.
But why is progress so slow?
I guess main reason for this might be the fact that each of the above mentioned game engines is basically being developed by single developers or very small team.
Now you may argue that in the past you offered others to join development of your game engine but there wasn't interest in that. I'm willing to bet that main reason for that is the fact that since you still hasn't published your game engine no one had a chance to see its capabilities and with that also its potential for improvement.
But then looking back at my last sentence I think that the main reason for lack of decent progress with Pascal based game engines is not due the lack of developers but instead lack of users.

So how can we bring more users to these engines?
Is it by teaching them basics of OpenGL which would potentially allow them to start creating one of their own game engines?
Or by teaching them topics that I recommended which would allow them to use one of the existing engines and actually start making games with it and maybe even join developers of these existing game engines with goal of adding additional features to them in order to bring them closer to Unity or Unreal 4 game engines?

I personally think that later choice is much better. That is why I'm so adamant about it.