Very interesting topic. Something I think about, is that I spend a lot of time building comercial apps. I have skills building database and GUI stuff. But when it comes to games, I feel to be 10 steps behind anyone in this community. Of course learning is The Option, it takes time and worth it absolutely. Time is a Villain.

The propose to create our own game engine, is something I look with hope, but we must think that we can also create wrappers for popular game engines. Is there an obligation to do everything in Pascal? Why? Of course pride feels good, but we are reinventing the wheel. It's round and it works fine, use it, period.

About the engines build by members, some are amazing, but have one thing in common: they are not truly game engines, most of them are more graphic engines with extra features. Please don't take me wrong, and don't be blinded by your own proud, you deserve more recognition for what you have done. On the other hand, these amazing frameworks have a big lack of documentation. To be honest, having an HTML/RTF/DOC/whatever file describing one or more class structures is far away from documentation, neither "self documented" is an option.

We are a bunch of experts programmers with deep knowledge on many development areas, we don't have a clear goal... unless we take on that proposed community project as a whole team, not just as talented programmers contributing on spare time. Maybe I'm asking to much, I suppose that all of you have daytime jobs, just as myself.

So, to compete, we need to invest (not money, but knowledge, skills, time, responsability), to cooperate, to define objectives, and then we will be ready to take on any competition!