Coding for each others mutual benefit

[phibermon]

Hi guys, I'm fairly new to this community and I'm only starting to get an idea of the kinds of things that are of interest to those that post here.

I have seen numerous people working on seperate projects but I've not got too much of a feeling of many collabarations.

I propose the following :

We can set out a general template for coding and naming conventions that we can hopefully encourage community members to adopt, this would bring a base-line commonality between the projects that people share.

We could pick some of the best existing 'essential' libs or collaborate on some together that are used across the board. this would greatly increase the rate of learning for fledgling programmers as there will be shared usage and knowledge of a fuzzy set of libs.

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There are other and I'm sure, better ways to code for everyones mutual benefit, but I would personally love to see some standards set, our language is in the minority against the tyrannical behemoths of C++,java and what not..

we must be united, not divided! join me and together we will bring in a new era, the age of the common code base!

*ahem* A little carried away there, but yes, I would like to know your thoughts and if you think that the pascal game development community is the right place and if coders of all levels could benefit, I would not want to prepose anything that could potentially steepen the learning curve for people.

[phibermon]

hmmm.. guess I didn't read 'style guide'..

but it still holds true damn it, What I really want to see is a big community game and engine project.

Edit : come on, there must be someone that agrees that a shared code base could be of great benefit, especially those of us working on 3D engines and the like

[chronozphere]

I like the idea of more collaboration in this community.

In the past, it was always me working on my own stuff. Usually I was working an my engine. I've made a number of versions and I never finished any of them.
A few months ago I started to work on DeleD together with some others and the original developers. I must say that it felt quite good. If you only work on your own code, you'll always see it, the way you left the day before. It really motivates you when you see someone else contributing to a project you like.

I'm making plans to write a new engine for my IGF game. It might be a cool idea to share the sources with others so they can help/learn too.
Also, there are some great projects running in this community. I'd like to see some of their sources and maybe contribute to them, if I find the time.

More collaboration might be the key to make PGD a vibrant community again.

[phibermon]

Perhaps a simple start would be a 'collaboration' section in the forum? Where people can state the compenents they intend to create in their engine/project and then any obvious duplicates can be planned out by all that need it. For example, I'm working on an engine and right now I want a steering system for my entities. I'm converting opensteer to delphi but it's slow going, however if someone else needed it too? we could split the conversion in half.

Another example : I have a number of systems working, I'm sharing my model lib for example, but say person X has a steering algoritm but no model lib?

Since I know my code, and they know theirs, we could make requested modifications/additions to our code so that they work in both engines.

I really want to see more people working together, I know from personal experience that too many of my projects wind up unfinished, but this way my work is never wasted and I might just finish more projects with a common code base to work on

[WILL]

Hmm... a collaboration forum isn't a bad idea. Could be a way for others to post ideas that they want to find a development partner to work with. The only down-side I can see is a lot of people may get discouraged if there are a lot of non-replied posts, but I guess this sort of issue should be expected in that kind of a forum.

What I'd love to see more of myself is more group/team-made games. And nothing so grossly huge and overbearing a project as an RPG or the next big thing with so many features that kill any hope of finishing it at all. Nono, I mean a game project that 2+ individuals can grasp, plan and execute with a release in sight within a year or so time-frame. Thats reasonable.

I think that when others try these sorts of 'large' projects they doom themselves to fail because everyone gets their hopes WAY up and the more the merrier, but all the more to manage. Keep it small or at least reasonable. Take it from an 'old guy' whos had a few group projects. Bigger is not always better in game dev.

[phibermon]

I've too learned about setting realistic goals the hard way I'm sure that any over ambitious ideas would be tamed however, I certainly wouldn't wish a dead project on any coder

[phibermon]

Hmmm thinking along those lines.. groups and teams.... perhaps in future PGD could be expanded to host projects by community members? possibly even CVS/GIT, bugtracker etc This could also tie in nicely with the PGD Annual compitition

I like the feel of the community at pouet.net (The scene, scene, where all those 64kb asm nutters live) it would be nice to scroll thru community projects, check progress etc at pgd