So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[phibermon]

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 Your unpublished JINK game engine that as you have said has been in development for over 8 years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

Yes I'd agree with you on that too - there's been numerous engines over the years that seemed to die off - another notable mention for your list would be GLScene - while not an engine in itself? it's still in development and is very capable if you know how to use it. GLScene, Jink, Platform extended/Asphyre and Castle are probably the most advanced pascal frameworks/engines that are actively developed, Cast II is noteworthy too although I've not seen updates for quite some time.

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.

Agree again - lack of users - something I'm very much aware of! but it's certainly not a lack of potential users. To my mind the two biggest barriers to 3D development are :

1. Lack of knowledge in the 3D realm
2. Lack of 3D resources to use in games or the skills to make them cheaply

The first I think is still underestimated. We've had GLScene for years and it's very capable - so why isn't there a dozen, large 3D game projects making use of GLScene? well it's mainly number one - it's not good enough to say "here's a model loaded and rendered to the screen" and "here's a particle system with a fire preset" if you want an amateur to create a game using your engine - it has to be, as we've often said, a game engine and a game engine to my mind should be something like Quake or the engine used in Fallout/Oblivion/Skyrim etc

You should be able to load some resources, allocate some defaults - assign a few events and have a 'working game'.

If a great set of useful components were going to take the Pascal Gaming world by storm? it already would of done.

All engines so far, have stop too short in terms capability, to gain a meaningful user-base, given the already small number of potential users.

The second is an issue for game development in general and not just specific to Pascal but it effects all game developers and in terms of the adoption of Pascal 3D engines - I believe it's a factor.

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.

Again I agree - perhaps then a tutorial that shows how to do the same basic thing in three different engines?