So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[Akira13]

I honestly have no idea how we got onto this particular tangent about APIs/ZenGL/C++/e.t.c to begin with, but I certainly agree with what AthenaOfDelphi said above. Also, on a more general note, there are two specific things I've noticed in the sources of various dead Pascal game engines I've browsed through that seem to crop up consistently and are likely part of what contributed to the death of the engines in question, that I thought I'd outline here as "things to be avoided" for any future Pascal game engine devs:

1) They all try to "reinvent the wheel" when there's absolutely no reason for them to do so.

By this, I mean: they have their own "System" or "Core" or some similar name units where they redefine all of their own keyboard codes/mousebutton codes/e.t.c, and re-implement already-existing basic things like string handling functions, file system handling functions, and so on and so forth. 99% of the time these functions are objectively worse/slower/buggier than the Delphi RTL or FPC RTL equivalent. The overall point being: Design your engine around the existing, established "Object Pascal" RTL core shared by Delphi/FPC. I promise you that your handwritten string routines aren't as good as you think they are. Also, your redefinition of all the keyboard codes is both utterly pointless and incredibly inconvenient. Just use the "VKs"!

2) They attempt to implement their own image loading/handling code instead of using established image libraries that actually work.

I cannot count the number of times I've encountered some utterly broken low-level behemoth of an OpenGL texture loading routine, full of pointers getting typecasted to integers and other stupidity that won't even come close to working in anything other than 32-bit applications compiled in ancient products like Delphi 6 or 7. Every time I encounter methods like this I just replace them with the same less-than-twenty-line BGRABitmap-based loading routine I use in every project, and immediately everything works perfectly! The overall point, for this one, being: if you were the sort of developer who wrote useful, high-quality image-related code, you would already know it. The rest of us should just pull the libraries written by those people into our own projects!