So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[SilverWarior]

I also agree that Ludum Dare should be used instead of our own competitions, as there's not enough people to make a competition.

I don't agree with this. Well I admit that due to low recent activity there probably won't be so many participants in PGD competition as they were in previous years but still I'm sure we can pull it of.
Now don't get me wrong I don't say that participating in Ludum Dare or any other competition is bad but the truth is that when you are participating in Ludum dare you are basically only promoting yourself.
The main goal of PGD competitions was not to just promote individual developers but to promote us all as a community. And that is one of the things that can bring new people in.

Here is another wild idea that might boost our promotion. Why don't we personally challenge Eli M. from Delphi boot camp to participate in our next PGD challenge
https://community.embarcadero.com/bl...oot-camp-day-4
I guess that for a man who developed over 300 mobile based games (many of them with Delphi and FMX) he should have no problem in participating. Also his participation could also bring some other Delphi developers to give it a try.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

To answer the question which has been asked about hosting costs for PGD, they are about £135 per year.

To add some context to what I said about regular visitors and 1 article each per year... so far this year, 50 unique users (nearly all with well over 10+ posts) have visited the site. 1 article each = 4 items of new content every month for the next 12 months. And if you consider the costs, if everyone who visits regularly donated £2, the costs would be mainly covered. I'd rather not go down the route of having a subscription which say removes ads, but if we want to do some stuff, like get good prizes, being able to buy them from community money would be a good plan... if you've never tried to secure prizes for one of our competitions, trust me when I say it's hard work and it always feels a little like begging.

I absolutely agree with the comment about quantity vs quality, content is not about quantity, quality is important.

My view on the competition front is that I'd like a mixture of both... involvement under a PGD banner/team in the likes of Ludum Dare and the chance to run our own. If I actually sit down and finished the site I was writing to run them, running them won't be an issue (most of it is done, it's that illusive last 10%).

And I don't want anyone else posting apologies etc. or implying that they haven't done enough. What I'm after is honest feedback from every regular visitor about what they would like to see. Do you want tutorials about things? If so, what? Should they be geared to a particular platform, be entirely theoretical, what? Interviews... if you could interview anyone in the industries related to the site (game development, marketing, language development etc. etc.) who would you want to interview? What would you want to ask them?

Engine devs... can people help these guys out by writing documentation, quick starts, tutorials for their engines?

I guess what I'm wanting is information about the future... what the site needs to do to be more appealing, and if possible get a firm commitment from as many people as possible that they will do something to help. Does anyone want to volunteer to post news? Anyone want to volunteer to go hunting out projects developed in Pascal and write articles about them, interview the devs about stuff?

[phibermon]

And I don't want anyone else posting apologies etc. or implying that they haven't done enough. What I'm after is honest feedback from every regular visitor about what they would like to see. Do you want tutorials about things? If so, what? Should they be geared to a particular platform, be entirely theoretical, what? Interviews... if you could interview anyone in the industries related to the site (game development, marketing, language development etc. etc.) who would you want to interview? What would you want to ask them?

I'd like to see a series of step by step tutorials that produce a visble, working output at the end.

Each successive tutorial building on the previous tutorials code.

Each tutorial coming with complete working source code available to download.

They should target Lazarus - it's free, available on all platforms and would require the bare minimum if at all covering platform specifics (up to a certain point at least)

They should target OpenGL 3.0+ style contexts, firstly focusing on 2D (but very briefly) then bringing in 3D. Any tutorials on old immediate mode GL are just teaching bad practices - GL3 is *easier* - there's just less information around for learners.

Tutorials should be pushing people towards 3D. People should get into 3D straight away instead of seeing it as this distant target that they have to be a master of 2D before they move on to. I've always found this mildly aggravating and to the determent of people's progress - nobody insists on learning to ride a motorbike before they get in a car because they want to master 2 wheels before they move onto 4. It's not 'the next level up' and learning 2D first only spawns naive notions about working in 3D. There should be absolute emphasis on the fact that 2D and 3D approaches are vastly different and the former is NOT a precursor to the latter.

Basically exactly like the famous NEHE OpenGL tutorials (http://nehe.gamedev.net/) but specifically for Pascal/Object Pascal and the standard GL3+ way of doing things.

[SilverWarior]

They should target OpenGL 3.0+ style contexts, firstly focusing on 2D (but very briefly) then bringing in 3D. Any tutorials on old immediate mode GL are just teaching bad practices - GL3 is *easier* - there's just less information around for learners.

I think that making tutorials about specific graphic API is a bad choice. Why?
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the purpose of graphic API to provide a uniform way of using graphic hardware regardless of which programming language is used for the application/game development? Or in order words if you want to create same graphic scene in let us say Object Pascal, C++, C#, .NET, Python or JAVA you would in the end always end up calling same graphical API functions. Right?
If I'm right then it would be possible to go and learn about specific graphic API even by checking tutorials that are written for other programming languages. Sure it would be hared but still possible.
Also graphic API's keep changing. So we could start teaching OpenGL 4.5 but what if by the time our members get to master it OpenGL 4.5 is no longer the dominant graphic API? Excellent first impressions about Vulkan are definitely opening this possibility. That could mean that we invested a lot of time writing tutorials for something that is no longer useful for game developers at that time.

I think we should more focus on making tutorials about various game mechanics like:

• managing game states
• working/managing with in-game entities
• path finding algorithms
• AI
• procedural assets creation
• physics
• and so on

The main advantage of these topics is that they will stay relevant in 10 or 20 years as much as they are today. Also none of them depends on certain existing libraries or API-s. So no fear that you will have to relearn them because certain library or API became obsolete.

Also why should we bother people with learning about graphic basics when there are several quite capable graphical libraries out there which make the whole process about working with graphics a lot easier?

To be honest I'm pretty disappointed with game industry (especially big AAA companies) because they are spending too much focus on graphics and not enough on gameplay and game mechanics.
You see a great looking game with poor gameplay will still be a poor game. But a poorly looking game with great gameplay will still a great game.

[Akira13]

So we could start teaching OpenGL 4.5 but what if by the time our members get to master it OpenGL 4.5 is no longer the dominant graphic API? Excellent first impressions about Vulkan are definitely opening this possibility. That could mean that we invested a lot of time writing tutorials for something that is no longer useful for game developers at that time.

I believe Khronos has explicitly stated that they have no plans to move away from OpenGL, and it's also unlikely that the basic structure of the OpenGL API is going to change much more going forwards... everything after version 3.0 is just an "add-on", essentially. Vulkan is also not even really meant to be a replacement for OpenGL... it's pretty much specifically oriented towards seasoned industry professionals (we're talking 10+ years of experience) who need extremely high levels of performance 100% of the time (as it is much lower-level than OpenGL with more optimization potential, but also a significantly higher learning curve.) It's far more likely to gain traction in the film industry than it is the gaming industry, in my opinion.

[phibermon]

I think that making tutorials about specific graphic API is a bad choice. Why?
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the purpose of graphic API to provide a uniform way of using graphic hardware regardless of which programming language is used for the application/game development? Or in order words if you want to create same graphic scene in let us say Object Pascal, C++, C#, .NET, Python or JAVA you would in the end always end up calling same graphical API functions. Right?

Hey man I agree with you but where do you draw the line? do write all our examples in pseudo code because we can't garuntee the future of pascal? do we not talk about games because people can learn general programming elsewhere and apply those principals to game development?

Yeah somebody can go learn OpenGL anywhere - they can also go learn programming anywhere. Is not teaching them Object Pascal because they can learn general programming and apply the principals to Object Pascal - exactly the same as not teaching them GL because they can go and learn general GL and then figure out on their own how to apply it to Pascal?

Also why should we bother people with learning about graphic basics when there are several quite capable graphical libraries out there which make the whole process about working with graphics a lot easier?

You literally just dismissed OpenGL because it might not be relevent in 10 years and then you suggest they invest the entire future of their project on an even smaller and less supported graphics library?

Why bother teaching game programming or indeed programming at all because they'll be irrelevant when we have holodecks and the computer interprets our requirements?

In fact why do anything whatsoever because the universe is going to end rendering everything ultimately pointless?

You have to start somewhere - you have to make some assumptions - believe me - there's *plenty* of 3D specifics that your highly generic categories will not cover, there's entire designs that are specific to 3D hardware - compute hardware.

Like it or not hardware accelerated 3D is a massive part of gaming and has been for nearly 2 decades and there's far more complexity, far more to learn in the 3D realm (NOT just graphics) than in a thousand collections of generic 'timeless' catch all principals.

Definitely what you say is a good idea, I'm all for general principals and good coding practices - give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day but give him the means to catch his own fish and he'll eat for a whole lifetime.

Totally agree - but by the same token teaching him to fish isn't going to let him build a spaceship.

A game with great gameplay running in software at 2fps is a game with bad gameplay

[SilverWarior]

@phibermon
I'm afraid you misunderstood me. I'm not saying we should abolish using any modern graphics. Heck most game ideas that I have revolve around 3D graphics (even have one or two VR ideas).
What I was trying to say is why teaching people of how to initialize OpenGL rendering pipeline, why teaching them how to store textures in video memory, how to apply transformations onto 3D models, applying lighting and shaders, and so on low level if there are already available graphics engines that can do all this for them.
If we go and start teaching this do we also expect that each one of them will be using this knowledge to create his own graphical engine. I guess I don't have to be telling you on how much work is required in order to make your own graphical engine as you already have experience in this area.

Any way if you decide to start writing articles about using of OpenGL 3+ is won't say you shouldn't . In fact your rich experience in graphics and game engine creation is probably making you perfect candidates fur this topic. And it is quite high possibility that I will read through them.

I just think that it would be more beneficial for PGD as community if we focus more on the topics mentioned in my previous post. Why? Because you can find a graphical engine that potentially allows you to create a game without any knowledge of OpenGL or any other graphic API for that matter.
But you won't find a library that would allow you to make a game without knowing at least some of the topics that I mentioned in my previous post. At leas in the past 7 or 8 years since I focused my learning on game development I have never found one.

[laggyluk]

@phibermon
What I was trying to say is why teaching people of how to initialize OpenGL rendering pipeline, why teaching them how to store textures in video memory, how to apply transformations onto 3D models, applying lighting and shaders, and so on low level if there are already available graphics engines that can do all this for them.
If we go and start teaching this do we also expect that each one of them will be using this knowledge to create his own graphical engine.

Yeah but when someone looks for OpenGL tutorials and all he/she can find are for c++/c# then why would even bother with doing it in pascal?

Dev forums are dying thanks to stackoverflow and this one is no different.

Pascal is obscure choice for making games considering lack of learning resources/user base and imo this can only change if some big company picks it up for their next big publicly accessible game engine. But then, why would anybody do that same reasons considered?