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Thread: The future of Pascal as language for games

  1. #21
    It is comforting to see that there are people who realize the potential of the Pascal language.
    This post renewed my courage to go ahead, not only with my game engine, but with the IDE I'm doing for Free Pascal.

    Thank you very much, guys!

  2. #22
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    I believe that for commercial game development, pascal will one day be a viable choice in the financial sence but that won't happen until there are sufficiently advanced cross platform capable libraries to choose from. And for pascal to be an attractive option for increasingly larger game budgets, it's often preferable within the industry to license engines and libraries that don't require them to reveal their code assets due to various open source licenses.

    Now indie development is a totally different matter, we already see FPC compiled games released for IOS and people are making great headway with Android framework designs that can make efficient use of OpenGL. Win/OSX/Lin are all sorted and to top it all off there's a myriad of other supported operating systems as an added bonus.

    The best thing that could happen at this stage is for one engine to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. An engine that does so much for you, that it's just a pain in the ass to consider anything else. I think projects like GLScene are pretty close to that idea and I've seen some impressive engines here in the forums but it's like they've spent their experience points in different stats, and nobody has reached level 60 yet.
    *edit* me included. *shame*
    Last edited by phibermon; 01-06-2012 at 07:27 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  3. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
    I believe that for commercial game development, pascal will one day be a viable choice in the financial sence but that won't happen until there are sufficiently advanced cross platform capable libraries to choose from. [....] The best thing that could happen at this stage is for one engine to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. An engine that does so much for you, that it's just a pain in the ass to consider anything else. I think projects like GLScene are pretty close to that idea and I've seen some impressive engines here in the forums but it's like they've spent their experience points in different stats, and nobody has reached level 60 yet.
    These two statements assume that everyone in the game development industry uses third-party engines for creating games. By this logic, I guess we all should forget programming and software development beyond anything trivial and start using Unity3D from now on... On the other hand, I think you don't need any third-party engines to make even the largest game project, which in this sense is no different than any other software project out there. Therefore, the existence of third-party engines and libraries do benefit the game development community, but they are not essential to consider Delphi and FPC/Lazarus as viable platforms for commercial development.

  4. #24
    You can make commercially successful games without spending massive of amounts of money. Take Angry Birds, written in LUA. The hard part coming up with a brilliant idea and pulling it off with style.
    The views expressed on this programme are bloody good ones. - Fred Dagg

  5. #25
    I've gotten the "Pascal is dead" asshattery a good deal the past few years... usually they'll point at this ancient article filled with half truths and outdated information as their justification -- they'll call the language 'useless for doing anything' or "inferior to C dialect for getting to the hardware" when that's total 100% grade A farm fresh MANURE!

    ... and I love rubbing their noses in the sheer number of programs written in Pascal they are probably using and don't even realize it!

    Avant? (the IE wrapping browser?) Asus Power4Gear? ThinkSQL? Pixel? GBXEmu? FLStudio? PC Tools Spyware Doctor? Inno Setup? CambridgeCAD? MSI Afterburner? MediaMonkey? PE Explorer? MyCORSA? AVS? BitZapper? IMGBurn? Daring Apprentice? Space Rangers 2? All of CoffeeCup's software?

    ... and that's the little stuff... How about Partition Magic? MagicISO? CloneCD? IcoFX? Spybot Search & Destroy? ADAWARE?!? WINRAR?!?

    How about this one: SKYPE?!?

    All those software packages? Written in Delphi... or Lazarus+FPC when there's a cross-platform version. Modern Object Pascal being used to build modern applications... Quite often for multiple platforms at once!

    It goes back to something I've been saying for years, the only thing holding Pascal back was a lack of a decent cross platform compiler. Delphi was a good start to keeping Pascal modern by tossing Visual programming on top of it, but FPC+Lazarus takes that cross platform. There's really little you can do in C or C++ that a modern Pascal compiler like Delphi or FPC can't do.

    Well, other than write needlessly and pointlessly cryptic code with a half assed object implementation. C++ really excels at that -- hardly surprising since we all know that C and Unix are a hoax.

    But as I've said a million or so times the past 30 years, I'd sooner hand assemble 8k of Z80 machine language than try to find a bug in 100 lines of C code.

    I swear that C and it's derivatives exists for the sole purpose of perpetuating the idea that programming is difficult -- it isn't... Assembly is simpler than C! It is an ugly, half-assed language that I cannot fathom the desire to use.

    But to keep that in perspective, I say the same thing about HTML 5.
    Last edited by deathshadow; 15-06-2012 at 08:18 PM.
    The accessibility of a website from time to time must be refreshed with the blood of designers and owners. It is its natural manure

  6. #26
    That is some interesting list of software you got there. I think it's many of the people that discover pascal, that think it is good. But i know exceptions too that are just lifelong C-coders that won't change. Support for C is just too big, especially if their operating system is Linux based.

    But the issue relates to another topic, which is "Game making in general as a hobby is dying". Nobody really makes these small games and experimentations that we use to see some years ago. The standard that modern games put on us is a little depressing. It's not possible to reach them with just some homemade game-library, against commercial engines built by hundreds of coders with huge mathematical expertise. The barrier that something like Super mario karts, or Doom 2 put, is not that big. Many can attempt to make better games than them, but already something like Unreal Tournament goes beyond the limit, and it was already released before 2004. Now the expectations are sky-high.

  7. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by deathshadow View Post
    I swear that C and it's derivatives exists for the sole purpose of perpetuating the idea that programming is difficult -- it isn't... Assembly is simpler than C! It is an ugly, half-assed language that I cannot fathom the desire to use.
    Absolutely correct!
    Quote Originally Posted by User137 View Post
    Game making in general as a hobby is dying.

    That's my impression, too.
    Best regards,
    Cybermonkey

  8. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by deathshadow View Post
    I swear that C and it's derivatives exists for the sole purpose of perpetuating the idea that programming is difficult -- it isn't... Assembly is simpler than C! It is an ugly, half-assed language that I cannot fathom the desire to use.
    I think you are confusing C with C++, which is quite a jump from one to another. C is like Pascal without objects, which at these days would be quite useless. I don't know why you keep bashing C since as you have said yourself, it's pretty much dead. You should be comparing Delphi / FPC to something on the same level, for instance C++ Builder (Embarcadero), which is also quite a powerful tool.

    Other than that, I wouldn't say that Pascal is any better or any worse than C++ (even though there are some things I like in Pascal more), it depends on how your code is written. There have been notorious examples on both ends: I have seen Pascal code that was so poorly written, where you would probably look for other alternatives including C++ if you want to understand what it was doing. (cough... GSM encoding... cough)

  9. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by User137 View Post
    But the issue relates to another topic, which is "Game making in general as a hobby is dying". Nobody really makes these small games and experimentations that we use to see some years ago. The standard that modern games put on us is a little depressing. It's not possible to reach them with just some homemade game-library, against commercial engines built by hundreds of coders with huge mathematical expertise. The barrier that something like Super mario karts, or Doom 2 put, is not that big. Many can attempt to make better games than them, but already something like Unreal Tournament goes beyond the limit, and it was already released before 2004. Now the expectations are sky-high.
    I don't agre with you on that. Probably I would a few years ago but not today.
    Why? What has happened since then? I would say Minecraft happened. Don't get me wrong I don't say that Minecraft alone is the reason why I disagre with what you are saying. But when Notch sucseeded with Minecraft despite Minecraft having poor graphics this inspired many other indie and hobby game developers to work on their own games.
    You see the gaming industry is putting a huge amount of money into advertising their own games as well as into development of advanced game engines. The gaming industry also aqured IP rights for most sucsesful titles they were in gaming world mostly buy buying small gaming studios. Why? This is the way they try to gurante themself to be earning bug bucks seling their games even when some of them are catastrophic. And when some indie game developer makes a potentionally sucsessful game they quickly check if some contents of that game might violate some IP rights from many game titles the industry aquired in the past.
    I have seen several game project being closed becouse the gaming industry was saying that those games are violating IP rights from some other game(even some old ones wich are nowhere to be bought anymore). For some cases I'm convinced that the gaming industry would not sucseed to terminate theese projects if all would come into court. But the hard truth is that most indie developers don't have enough mony to afford being sued by the gaming industry. So many of them have just canceled development to avoid all that.
    And that is the main reason why there aren't so many indie developers out there.

    But the situation is changing. In the last mont alone I found several good and promising game projects. Last two were Towns and Gnomoria. Also you shouldn't forget about flash games. I belive that most small games are now being built in flash. Just go and visit some internet site with flash games and look at the selection it is offering. The main reason for that is probably the fact that flash games can be run on almost all platforms (and you don't even need to have any platform specific code for that). The similar goes to JAVA. And I belive HTTM 5 will folow.

    So what does your game needs to sucseed in theese days? High end graphic engine with support for best graphics and visual effects? NO! Your game needs just some uniqe idea. Why? Take a look to all those big games develiped by all those big gaming studios. Dosen't most of them seems the same?
    Until we indie developers would be implementing new ideas into our games we would always be able to compete with theese big gaming studios. WHy? Truthfully the players are slowly becoming tired of playing the "same" games over and over and seek some uniqe games. That's why we have several sucsessful games being developed by lone programers or small indie teams.

  10. #30
    short answer : the future of pascal as a language for games determined by (pascal coders) not by the language itself .


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