Of course, without documentation there's point in trying to use an engine, but was I said, there was documentation before, in a wiki I wrote, I had to delete it because I got hit by spammers that made the wiki grow to 200mb or something and exceeded my host disk quote :\
Anyway, it is way faster to write documentation for an engine already made that it is to write a new engine from scratch, no?
What I mean is, the market/userbase for something like this in 2014 is very small, especially now that such things as Unity and UDK exist.
I'm pretty sure that right now we have a infinitely smaller number of newbie pascal game developers compared to like 5 or 6 years ago.
To tell the truth, if I was starting right now and wanted to make games I would not use Pascal or C++ or whatever, would just go with one of those solutions. I even have a old prototype of my MMORPG game done in Unity, I just went back to my engine because I needed lots of features only available with the pro license and I was not interested in paying 2000$ for the iOS + Android pro licenses when my engine already had those features (networking, render targets, dynamic shadows and other stuff).
About your question, theres was two points in time when I decided to develop my engine.
First one, the first version when it was still called LEAF, it was because I tried to use GLScene and found lots of limitations with it and I think it was not compatible with FPC (and of course, I wanted to learn about graphics programming myself). At that time there were few engines available even for other languages, there was Torque, maybe Ogre, possibly others still in an early stage.
Then the second point was some years later, I went back to it because I wanted to make mobile games with pascal and there was not a single 3d engine that could be used for phones. Even Ogre had barely functional mobile support :\
Not understimating pascal developers, but the truth is, the pascal community is very small, and the chance some pascal developer has the means, money, time etc to make a game that requires a powerful engine is very small.
I don't remember for how long this forum exist, but I've frequented it for a very very long time.
How many big pascal games were released before?
I think the number is very very small, what is because such a powerful engine not exist?
I think that at least 3 "powerful" pascal engines do exist, and I also think that all of them are free to use, if people really wanted to use pascal to make a big game, they could just use one of the existent engines no?
If the problem with them is lack of documentation, as long as the developers did not disappear from the face of the earth, it would be trivial to ask them. In my case I still have the documentation saved somewhere in my old disk, would be just a matter of updating it to the current features.
Also making a wrapper for a C++ engine is something that can be done in a week, if people really need to use something like Ogre.
Of course I know it, I've done 2D games for clientes before and I've been evolved in the Unity community, one of my jobs two years ago was being a Unity game developer.
True that there are people that spend such money on a indie game there, but this is a small number, there a huge number of Unity devs who just play around with stuff from the Asset store. The ones that do spend more than a few hundred are either small companies, teams that somehow got funding, or in some cases guys like me who saved some money to invest on a game.
[QUOTE=SilverWarior;146036][QUOTE=Relfos;146032]Finally, my plans for my current engine was to forget about the "pascal" part, since I concluded the market was too small and I had decided to start distributing the engine as a precompiled dll for users of other languages. This will be probably what I will do.Not really, my plans is to stop adversting the game as a "pascal engine" and provide a engine with bindings for most common languages, to try to get users from other languages. Pascal users could still use it, no problem at all.Bare in mind that doing so you might alienate even more pascal game developers.
Sure, I can help discussing stuff etc. Trust me that I have lots of experience in this area, I'm not just an hobbyist. I've been working as graphics engineer for many years in various companies and have developed not only this pascal game engine, but also a C++ graphics engine and currenty working on a Javascript/WebGL engine for another company.
Also I'm not sure about what skills you guys have. I'm pretty that most of you are excelent pascal developers, and maybe some have worked on their own engines. However I've been seeing people refer to this project with the goal of making powerful engine, using latest APIs/tech, etc. Let me say that one thing is to make a "graphics engine" that can load and displays textured 3d models, another is making a engine that supports all current expected graphical features, eg: - a proper shadowmapping that actually works for any general scene and light setup
- a very powerful material/shader language (working on raw glsl/hlsl shaders is not scalable, only suitable for small projects/demos)
- a flexible mesh animation system (just implementing a ms3d loader was enough 5 years ago, today a developer expects much more, auto-armatures, animation blending/trees etc)
- proper text rendering (bitmap fonts are ok only for demos!)
- etc etc
Things have advanced quite a lot since some years ago, and some of this advanced stuff is quite hard to implement even separaterely, and much more to make it all work together.
I know that there are some Pascal developers who developed some advanced graphic engines some time ago, I talked with some of them, I remember one who had a very impressive engine in terms of graphic features, sadly I don't remember his nickname. If you one of those developers is willing to participate in the development of this engine it would very good, especially if they can reuse some of their code etc.
Otherwise if there's no one with enough experience and people will only work on this in their free time I would say to forget the idea of making a powerful engine and focus on making a functional project, otherwise by the time stuff is done, the tech would be obsolete. Remember that engines like Ogre took years to get to the current state and I'm pretty sure it is easier to find C++ devs than pascal devs.
To end this post, and resuming my opinion.
Making a pascal/delphi engine in 2014, when stuff like Unity exists and is free, and no way a small team can compete in terms of quality with them, well, I think it is not a really good idea. Note that when I started my engine the situation was very diferent, indie games barely existed and the tech available to make them was either rudimentar or cost money that many people did not have.
Finally, I would estimate the time to get something usable to make a "real" game would be around a year, if everything is made from scratch and no one works on it full time, or possibly more, depending if everyone continues working on it or if some people quit (very common to happen).
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