What? Delphi...?

[IlovePascal]

lol thank you so much for all of your advice!

I think you convinced me to stay with Free Pascal! Im gonna get DirectX and see what I can do, so be expecting lots of new threads asking for help :lol:

Will, sorry about placing this in the wrong forum, it's because I wasn't expecting it to 'drift' away from its original topic which was how to get Delphi, which one to get, etc!

Diaboli, I dont even have all that money! lol! and Im not gonna download it if there are other similar options around. Thanks anyway!

And Necro, one day Ill use your SDK, but for the moment, Ill stick with something simpler!

[OnYourMind]

I was looking for something descent with FreePascal alone as well. It seems that there is no other good graphics engine to use with it when it comes to DirectX. I could always do OpenGL but my card does not like it.

I've heard of the clootie directx/3d headers but do you have to actually learn the Direct3D API in order to use it?

[WILL]

I was looking for something descent with FreePascal alone as well. It seems that there is no other good graphics engine to use with it when it comes to DirectX. I could always do OpenGL but my card does not like it.

Just curious, what is your card? (make/model)

I've heard of the clootie directx/3d headers but do you have to actually learn the Direct3D API in order to use it?

Well if you dertermined Clooties headers are probably the best DirectX solution availible. (You can get the most out of DX with them out of anything so far.) You would have to learn how to initialize everything and how to do some of the more basic stuff, but after that you develop your own codebase and just reuse it. (Thats what all the professionals do!)

All in all though, learning DirectX just might be as fun as building your game it's self. I know that when I dropped the graphics codebase from SDL to move on to OpenGL I found the experience to be quite fun. And though I know enough to do what I want now, I plan to learn even more in the future. Learning is good.

[OnYourMind]

My card is an ATI Radeon Express 200M.

[LP]

You can get Turbo Delphi for free. They are making Asphyre to work with Turbo Delphi (if they haven't done already).

Yes, but it will also work with previous Delphi versions as well. It is just not based on VCL.

Also, there is Asphyre on Lazarus effort directed by Pegasus_Seiya to port Asphyre to Lazarus!

[WILL]

Hey nice spot Yuriy!

How big are their plans? Serious or tinkering around with it?

My card is an ATI Radeon Express 200M.

Thats the same card I have. Laptop, right? Oh and it's Xpress. Changed the chipset's name to Chrome I believe... OpenGL works well enough on the card I don't see a problem with you working with it.

[marmin]

It seems you are confused as to what is needed to create a 3D environment. You'll need a 3D card, instructions that tell the card what to draw (dirextX, opengl). The programming language doesn't make the rendering go slower.
You'll need to study any 3D API (DirectX, opengl) and use it in your application/game.