Greetings....

[jasonf]

Hi Chaps,

It's been a while, I thought I'd pop back to see how everyone was getting on.

I've not been doing any Pascal since CrashBlock, work has led me to other languages and there hasn't been the time to do anything game related.

I'm now running a company (www.songbird-creations.com) which takes most of my time. However, I do miss writing games. Unfortunately, I'm of the opinion at the moment that the PC market for hobbyist games is in really bad shape... however, the mobile market is thriving. Android in particular.

I purchased a book a few months ago called Pro Android Games; it talks about writing games in java, but states that if anyone wants any REAL performance, then you have to write the games in C++ and link it into the JNI.. so my question is.. as C++ is a bit of a horrid language and as there's always been a kind-of rivalry between Pascal and C++, has anyone made any steps in getting FreePascal compiling for the mobile processors so that they can link into the Java bindings in the same way that a C++ native game would?

Sorry if the question is a little out there, it's more for discussion more than anything. However, I'm trying to get back into games programming, saying that, I'd like to leverage my Object Pascal knowledge if possible and the Android Market is just ripe right now.


Thoughts anyone?

[Legolas]

Hello there!

Check this topic on Lazarus forum: http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/in...c,11391.0.html
Some more infos here: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Android_Interface

[JSoftware]

Android is just ARM-linux and some extra fluff. The JNI stuff is tedious to work with, and it needs loads of extra description files that are a mess, but that's the same as for Java programming

But yeah, it should work fine. Lots of people have made Android apps with FreePascal

[Traveler]

Wow, long time no see!

[jasonf]

Cheers Matey, I'll give those links a try - from what I've seen, they look very interesting.

[chronozphere]

Wow.. jason. It's been a long time. Welcome back!

[WILL]

Hey Jay! I've said it about 3 times by now, but heck it's nice to see ya back!

Free Pascal is in fact "the daddy" when it comes to platforms using Object Pascal. Embarcadero would love to get on that platform, but it'll take some time for them. RemObjects however has created a new compiler that will be out sometime this year that does native Java apps that will run on Android. The compiler is called Cooper. It's based off the same dialect as Chrome and Oxygene so all .NET projects made with Chrome/Delphi Prism will work with little to no code changes on Cooper. However that'll take a while for them to get it out the door.

Your best bet is for Free Pascal right now.

[jasonf]

Thanks for the warm welcome back

I was only away because I had a series of catastrophic PC failures coupled with starting a business (which I had NO IDEA how much work it would involve).
It's a software engineering company though doing C#, PHP, Java etc; and we're looking to get something onto the Android Market.. It's frontier land right now and there's a lot of crap on there, so I KNOW I can do better.

Although I didn't lose any source code (thank God), I couldn't seem to re-install Rad Studio afterwards and I didn't have the time to get it working.
But, I've recently downloaded Lazarus again, and I'm going to see if FreePascal can offer a nicer high performance option to writing in C for Android.

I'd rather not do too much Java, I've been porting an old game to Java that I had written like 15 years ago in C++, so I know I can do it, go the tilt sensor working and so on... but I think that a decent game needs more power than Java can provide and Java isn't as nice a language.

Anyway, it's really nice to see some old faces here again, Feels like I never left - although I noticed you redecorated the place