Page 10 of 14 FirstFirst ... 89101112 ... LastLast
Results 91 to 100 of 133

Thread: So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

  1. #91
    Quote Originally Posted by AthenaOfDelphi View Post
    Not to be too morbid, but what would happen to PXL if you ended up dead tomorrow? And it's a sad reflection of the times in which we live, but that's not a threat, it's an honest question...
    Yes, the Bus Factor. That's the beauty of open-source: the entire source code is documented and a lot of effort was spent into making it as didactic as possible, so if anything happens, you can continue use it and someone eventually make take it over. For instance, Ultibo developers ported PXL to their platform without my intervention. In fact, I'm planning on liberating it on a more liberal license such as Apache, which would give even more freedom for the development.

    Remember AGG? That's exactly what happened there, the author passed away. The project is still alive last time I checked as people forked version before it was GPLed.


    Quote Originally Posted by AthenaOfDelphi View Post
    Seems like you've just made my point for me... none of the existing Pascal engines would suit you. Isn't that what I've been trying to say? Isn't that a good reason to consider building one as a community?
    No, no no, of course not. What is mean is quite the contrary - there are very few newcomers to Delphi/Pascal world anyway and with current availability of libraries, making yet another engine is the least thing that is needed right now, IMHO.

    Quote Originally Posted by AthenaOfDelphi View Post
    In essence what you're saying is that promoting Pascal, creating content etc. should be entirely on me? Why?
    No, of course not, I'm not referring to you personally, but in general. I know any activities like LAN parties, conferences and so on cost money, but maybe this is something that we could actually organize together. Instead of building a framework/engine that no one needs, do something together than would be more meaningful, with higher impact.

  2. #92
    At least for me (and perhaps others if the goal is to lure new people) a collection of reasonably well documented example projects (preferably concentrating on one thing only) or source to existing (non-engine-utilizing) game project is worth more than extensive engine or framework (even if it includes examples). I'm usually after one thing at a time and I prefer to make it myself at the lowest level so I know what is going on. In most areas I'm not so fluent I would automatically know how to do things, I first need to see what other people did. Understanding what and why and how, are things one needs to tackle first before even thinking about things like performance and portability. In this context (learning) a library or engine project with 100's of functions or features may be exhausting to crawl through. When I go look at one method, it leads to several new ones, header files to bunch of dlls, dependency injections and interfaces. A project doing one thing or limited set of things would be more useful.

    In my books the E in PGDCE should stand for effort and not for engine. Whatever you do, comment it with extra effort and share it. It will strengthen the community and bear fruit in the long term.

  3. #93
    Quote Originally Posted by LP View Post
    No, no no, of course not. What is mean is quite the contrary - there are very few newcomers to Delphi/Pascal world anyway
    And why is that? I see two main reasons:

    1. The fact that there aren't as many useful resources (game engines, libraries, tutorials) available for Pascal as they are for other programming languages.
    2. People who keep bitching that there are not enough suitable resources available, like you are doing lately, instead of helping with creation of such resources.


    I wish I would have at least half as much experience in game development as you do because that way I would not have much problem writing some tutorials on this topic. But I don't.
    And yet this is not stopping me in very slowly writing quite extensive (perhaps too extensive) tutorial about using classes in game development. So why I'm progressing so slow with this tutorial of mine?
    1. I no longer have as much available free time and energy as I used to when I started it. If I would be starting to write it today I definitely would go for less extensive one.
    2. I'm still learning about game development during the whole process. And that I think might actually make the whole tutorial more interesting as I might also show some bad practices that I come up with providing good explanation of why they are bad practices and with which practices they could be replaced.

    Any way I'm trying to contribute to Pascal Game Development community as best as I can.

    Quote Originally Posted by LP View Post
    I know any activities like LAN parties, conferences and so on cost money, but maybe this is something that we could actually organize together.
    While money is one problem another big problem is great demographic diversity of PGD members. You see PGD has members from all around the world so it is quite difficult to even get in live chat with other members.

    Quote Originally Posted by LP View Post
    Instead of building a framework/engine that no one needs, do something together than would be more meaningful, with higher impact.
    If no one needs such framework/engine then where did the idea for it come from? Why are people inquiring about what happened with it?
    Also what in your opinion would be more meaningful and have higher impact to Pascal Development Game community?

  4. #94
    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    [*]The fact that there aren't as many useful resources (game engines, libraries, tutorials) available for Pascal as they are for other programming languages.
    I don't think this is the case.

    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    [*]People who keep bitching that there are not enough suitable resources available, like you are doing lately, instead of helping with creation of such resources.
    Please don't jump to conclusions. In real life I have done my part of homework. For instance, when offered to give an introductory course to game development, instead of Unity, I've insisted to go with FPC/Lazarus as basic toolset and usually have tried to promote Pascal/Delphi tools during development as much as possible. However, one would be very naive or stupid not to realize that Pascal popularity is not as it once was and since I, among other tools, use Delphi for work and maintain Delphi/Pascal framework, am generally concerned with it.

    However, I do see a couple of issues myself, but they are not technical problems. It's not lack of game engines, online tutorials or Pascal resources - for Delphi and Pascal I think there are many resources for almost everything - graphics, networking, security, databases, etc. However, I think it's general blindness on purpose and ignorance for identifying issues that Delphi/Pascal developers tend to have. Spelling out issues is discarded as bitching (as you've just called it) and in overall is received with hostility and rose-tinted glasses.

    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    While money is one problem another big problem is great demographic diversity of PGD members. You see PGD has members from all around the world so it is quite difficult to even get in live chat with other members.
    I can't help with demography problem, but I could help organizing an event by participating myself, giving a course, tutorial or a seminar, or even shed some budget for it provided that it would have an appropriate invoice.

    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    If no one needs such framework/engine then where did the idea for it come from? Why are people inquiring about what happened with it?
    Because it is a general problem - for an unexperienced developer to start and work on an engine instead of actual game. Except that, this time, this activity that should generally be avoided, was explicitly organized by PGD and performed by multiple developers, only to fail miserably as it always does, because, again, you should be doing games, not engines.

    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    Also what in your opinion would be more meaningful and have higher impact to Pascal Development Game community?
    At least in the universities that I've visited, whenever a programming or game development course is given, what I usually see is Java, Unity, C#, etc. When I try to convince the administration to consider Pascal, it is usually met with some eyebrown lifting. I think this is something, addressing which would be more meaningful. How? Well, I think it does require some community involvement, so it means spending (or more accurately, wasting) time on unimportant things... like making yet a new damn engine!

  5. #95
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Location
    England
    Posts
    524
    We do need a modern game engine for pascal - there are a number of people working on the next generation of game engines for our preferred language - Castle for example has matured into an excellent engine and it's getting better all the time. We don't yet have an Ogre3D or a Unity but we're closer now than we ever have been.

    But that's not the main reason for a community engine - at least not for me. I wanted to see the community come together and pool its collective knowledge on a large project. Something we can all be proud of, spawn new collaborations. Something that people can learn from and even use in their own projects. It doesn't have to be Ogre3D, there's engines in development right now such as Castle that are tackling the high end - it's not for commercial success or making money - it's to have fun, together.

    "Make games, not engines" is fine if you're making small games but isn't going to cut it for large games. I'd love for someone to be able to pick a modern pascal game engine off the shelf and write a modern game but we're not there yet.

    I'm personally not interested in making games, I'm interested in making engines, developing new techniques and systems to abstract the game development process. I'm fully aware that engines are massive project and I'm fully aware that many engines fail - I'm not some kid dreaming of making the next quake! I'm a professional developer that's taken on a massive task in his spare time because it's fun to me

    But at the same time, "make games, not engines" is the realm of the hobby coder making small indie titles that have access to things such as Unreal and Unity. People still need to render 3D objects, use shaders, utilise collision detection, path finding, steering etc etc

    There's still an engine inside every game even if that engine is a one off specifically tailored for the job - there's a clear line between code related to gameplay and the code it calls as an abstraction to get the job done.

    I understand the core mentality that the article is trying to get across - if somebody wants to make a game they should focus on making the game as it'll be more productive towards that end goal. It's trying to dissuade hobby coders from reinventing the wheel or writing code that they can't or won't use. It's written assuming people will be writing games in C++, javascript or any other far more popular language where all the tools already exist.

    "make operating systems, not compilers" only makes sense if there's already a modern tool chain you can use. Making a modern 3D game in pascal right now, given its available engine/game related resources is like writing Linux in Cobol from scratch - yeah you can do it but the job would be way easier with the latest GNU C++ tool chain.

    Almost everybody shouldn't be writing engines - it's bloody difficult and most want to make games so "make games, not engines" applies to them. But *somebody* has to write the engines, develop modern examples with Vulkan, GL4.x, write steering libraries, skinning libraries, asset trees so that people *can* make modern 3D games. Without a Unity, Unreal, Ogre3D etc to start from - that task is monumentally difficult.

    Yeah you *could* of released Skyrim using the morrowwind engine and it would of been a good game but not as good as what they did release. We're moving forward, not backwards.

    Can we please get back on topic and try an analyse what went wrong with the project so if there is another effort, we can make it work this time.
    Last edited by phibermon; 14-06-2017 at 05:50 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  6. #96
    In my case I got side tracked and when came back it was kind of game over already. Also task that I chose (network) wasn't much fun to work on, ended up wrapping up 3rd party library with some higher level logic but then what's the point of network code that is not tightly integrated into the engine? And it was going that way (my lack of knowledge and other devs not considering multiplayer being core engine feature).

    If there's going to be another try some time then I think there should be an online road map with general features to implement and detailed task lists people can pick off from. Trello/google docs. Completing small steps gives a feeling of progress and maybe more people would participate.
    Of course some big head needs to be able to think things through before such tasks list can be created. Are our heads big enough?

    Btw maybe this legendary pascal engine could have some feature others don't have to draw interest? Like built in soft body physics or true voxelness (boxes<>voxels). Of course there is a good reason popular engines share more or less common feature set - probably not enough demand for other stuff
    Last edited by laggyluk; 14-06-2017 at 08:39 PM.

  7. #97
    Quote Originally Posted by laggyluk View Post
    If there's going to be another try some time then I think there should be an online road map with general features to implement and detailed task lists people can pick off from. Trello/google docs. Completing small steps gives a feeling of progress and maybe more people would participate.
    This thread is 10 pages long so clearly there is interest. Starting sketching up a roadmap sounds like a great way to start. And instead of listing everything what a perfect engine should have, people could just add what parts they are willing to contribute to and what they wish to see. That way we get easy overview.

    I'll start: I have unused domain and webhotel in case hosting is required. Would love voxel related stuff. Can do random name generation unit/voxel stuff.
    Last edited by Thyandyr; 15-06-2017 at 09:05 AM.

  8. #98
    Quote Originally Posted by Thyandyr View Post
    (...) Would love voxel related stuff. Can do random name generation unit/voxel stuff.
    I would like to see something like Ken Silverman's VoxLap engine. I know that nowadays voxel has lost its initial meaning (volumetric picture element) thanks to Minecraft and maybe also Unity and Unreal. I really like that "pixelated" feeling of such engine.

    I did a voxlap-style try a lot of time ago in C named VoxRend. I have some success but I avandoned because I messed with maths and I didn't know how to fix it (not long ago I discovered I used different axis and projection for camera, scenary and objects ). I still think I should resume the development (in Pascal, of course) some day.
    No signature provided yet.

  9. #99

  10. #100
    Quote Originally Posted by Ñuño Martínez View Post
    I would like to see something like Ken Silverman's VoxLap engine. I know that nowadays voxel has lost its initial meaning (volumetric picture element) thanks to Minecraft and maybe also Unity and Unreal. I really like that "pixelated" feeling of such engine.

    I did a voxlap-style try a lot of time ago in C named VoxRend. I have some success but I avandoned because I messed with maths and I didn't know how to fix it (not long ago I discovered I used different axis and projection for camera, scenary and objects ). I still think I should resume the development (in Pascal, of course) some day.
    Yeah I meant something like that. There are attempts at this subject from time to time but so far nothing 'successfull' so I suppose it might not be the best idea to try
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClz...x9v66YRza5u_Mg

Page 10 of 14 FirstFirst ... 89101112 ... LastLast

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •