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

[WILL]

Oh yes, it's all pretty and fully featured now huh?

Android is definitely an application vacuum compared to the iOS. I'd say both are still on the fronteer as far as the new and exciting. Especially with the iPad 2 still just coming out. (We haven't gotten it quite yet in Canada. March 25th for us.) And who knows what devices the Android people will be coming out with to compete.

Here is the development run-down as I've experienced it...

Developing for iOS:

Need an actual Mac! This is because Xcode is required for just about every part of the management portion to compile and to upload your apps to/from your iOS device for testing.

Next you'll want to have FPC and install their templates for Xcode. Lazarus unfortunately is not very stable on Mac right now, so it might only hinder your progress, I'm sad to say. (It's still great on Windows, but ultimately fails on Mac due to the GDB debugger issues.)

Your code will have a little bit of Objective-C in it to make it fit nice into the iOS architecture/platform. The rest will be Object Pascal, but rather some things will be a little different which the FPC people like to call it Objective-Pascal. More can be read about this here

You could use Delphi Prism if you wanted to try the MonoTouch / XNATouch route. It's fairly new and untested, but there have been whole talks and white papers by Dr. Bob and the like. I predict that these wouldn't be as fast as the more native FPC+Xcode approach.

For API, you'd be looking at SDL, OpenGL|ES, OpenAL and fmod that I know of have seen working so far.

Developing for Android:

I've not done much of any research for this side as I sorta swing the other direction, device wise. Despite the large market trend these devices do seem neat and could serve as a nice payday for game development too.

FPC/Lazarus seems to be the only way to go for now. RemObjects is developing Cooper, but we only know that it'll be out sometime this year. It would seemingly allow you to seamlessly develop for both iOS (via MonoTouch) and Android at the same time, however there are issues with that too.

On top of that, all I really know is that FPC is your only non-Java approach for Object Pascal.


Sorry I didn't know much more about Android, I'm just facing the other direction for devices. If you are interested in developing for iOS as well you should get a hold of me sometime, I've been working on a project that I hope will someday appear on a portable device near you.

[code_glitch]

Ah, starting a business... I am all too familiar with that one. Our school does Young Enterprise; basically you set up a company with students from your school under the legal help of the Young Enterprise programme. I am currently the Managing Director and I know exactly what spending 2 months sitting around doing Admin is like - hell lol I'll second FPC for literally everything.

Brainwave: They should have a prize if you can find an architecture used by a handful of people that won't compile for