And then there was silence...

[Sascha Willems]

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one wondering what's happening here or on the pascal/delphi game developer scene in general. You usually have that summer time where many coders spend more time outside than in front of their boxes, but like with the birds flying south they usually come back around this time of the year, when it get's cold and rainy again.

But this year it is looking like most of them didn't come back. It's very quite on the Pascal/Delphi scene (not only game developement or 3D stuff, I mean in general) and finding any news related to that is very very hard.

A ''good'' example is the forums of PGD. Just look at the numbers of posts or the people that were recently online. Both are very low and it's getting worse and worse, but that's not only the case for PGD, other Pascal/Delphi pages and forums also suffer from this

This is something sad to watch, and so I thought why not bring up this issue. Maybe a vital discussion would bring some ideas on how to get the wheel rolling again.

[LP]

Well, you could've posted few words about unofficial Asphyre we released, but I thought you didn't care... :oops:

Also, you could post some news about JawBreaker and Tanker games that were posted on our forums (www.afterwarp.com).

Finally, there're few impressive game projects posted on Delphi Sanctuary (www.delphisanctuary.com), but it remains unmentioned also.

Oh my bad... perhaps you don't like Delphi here... :cry:

[savage]

Delphi has nothing to do with it, we post news about GLScene, which is written on Delphi and just happens to work with FreePascal. Lifepower, if you notice any Delphi related games news, please let me know. If I have failed to post something it is usually because I have forgotten about it, and for that I appologise, but it had nothing to do with Delphi. We do care about Delphi, so please let me, WILL or Sascha know about any news that we miss, I repeat, we do care.

I have added Asphyre, www.delphisanctuary.com & www.afterwarp.com to my watchlist on www.changesnotes.com to keep track of changes on these sites.

The fact is, we are not all seeing and all knowing, so unless someone sends us an email about a news item, we may not know about it. Sure changesnotes.com helps, but it only helps if we add it to the list of sites to keep an eye on.

[LP]

Thanks for the clarification :)

Actually, Asphyre Pro 1.1.2 may not be worthy for a news, but since Sascha posted about "silence", I thought to mention it (http://pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?p=16687#16687 topic was posted 3 days ago).

My main concern is that Delphi community with the release of D2005 is having its bad days and lack of Delphi-related news is not helping it :(

[marmin]

That A board isn't very crowded doesn't mean that no one is programming with Pascal/Delphi etc. I am very busy but I do not come a lot to the board, simply because I know a lot of stuff :D and just don't need to visit a lot to seek information.

And there's always the fact that Pascal is not widely known for game development so people do not trust :twisted: a pascal game site, maybe.

For me,the more I read c++ code the more I hate that and love Pascal even more and I really want to see it grow to a living game dev language, but how? Programmers will go for what is best known, even if it's an ugly language. They're scared, they go for what is safe!

[savage]

I've updated the main news post with the more information from the http://pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?p=16687#16687 thread.

Thanks for pointing it out. I actually missed that whole thread.


Thanks for the clarification :)

Actually, Asphyre Pro 1.1.2 may not be worthy for a news, but since Sascha posted about "silence", I thought to mention it (http://pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?p=16687#16687 topic was posted 3 days ago).

My main concern is that Delphi community with the release of D2005 is having its bad days and lack of Delphi-related news is not helping it :(

[Traveler]

WILL has seen it coming. (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?t=2619) I have seen it coming (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?t=2374). To say, 'see, I told you' would be a bit unfair. But its coming real close.
Perhaps it is still that time of year sascha is talking about. (Fall doesn't seem to be coming either (here in Holland in any case)) but things are slower, more quiet than ever before. Lets hope it wont come to a full stop.

Lifepower, the Afterwarp forums are only open to members. I as a guest, can't see images nor download the games people have posted. By changing that level of access, people might be inclined to visit more.

edit: Just realized that with these 'sub' forums around, (Afterwarp, omega, delphigamedev.com) I can understand that people do not visit PGD.

[LP]

Lifepower, the Afterwarp forums are only open to members. I as a guest, can't see images nor download the games people have posted. By changing that level of access, people might be inclined to visit more.


Traveler, as I mentioned in the other topic, someone was exploiting the anonymous access to resources by opening many connections. The access is unrestricted now so you can see all resources again.


edit: Just realized that with these 'sub' forums around, (Afterwarp, omega, delphigamedev.com) I can understand that people do not visit PGD.
Actually, there only two reasons why we're running our own forums on Afterwarp:

1) PGD forums have lack of features such as attachments so it's not possible to post files, source code, etc. The visual style is not helping either (few days ago links, for instance, were yellow and invisible).

2) Back in DGDev days, BlueCat made me a moderator in Asphyre forum, but that's gone now. No announcements possible. It seems wrong somehow to refer to external forum (from Afterwarp) where you're just a reader yourself.

[Traveler]

I understand your points perfectly. I probably would have done the same if I had a product of my own.

[Paulius]

For PGD thing are the same way they always were. Of the regulars here some are happy with where they are now, others work on more advanced stuff which falls out of interest or ability of other regulars, or dependence on the language for that matter, which turns them from potential posters into potential repliers. We want newbies with their questions to stay, but they come and go or sometimes turn into quiet regulars and drift away latter. I?¢_Tm sure everyone here is working on something, maybe some projects are not ready to be revealed or had a posted before and did not attract much attention.

[technomage]

I think these are allot of experienced coders here, all of which would be able to help anybody new to game programming in pascal, but we very rarely get any posts for people starting out.

All I can say is to anyone out there, if you have questions, dont be afraid , ask, we're all here to help each other :D Don't just limit yourselves to "how to I code that" kind of questions, how about some questions on class design for game objects or the pro's and con's of storing game data in proprietory/open formats or anything else for that matter. :idea:

[cairnswm]

I - a regular here - no longer find this site as welcoming as it used to be. To me there are no longer enough supporting posts on the site. People seem to be a lot more negative here than in the past :( ("Too much"/"not enough Delphi", "not enough posts" etc)

If I as a regular no longer feel that I want to come here anymore how do you think newcomers are feeling.

[Paulius]

I don?¢_~t agree with you cairnswm, the most negative things here are topics likes these, but they shouldn?¢_Tt be avoided. Not enough supporting posts? You do get more support than average here. Have you given feedback on anybody else?¢_Ts project recently? Sure you?¢_Tre a regular who barely has time for his own projects, but maybe that?¢_Ts the way other regulars feel too.

[Traveler]

I dont really share the negativity point, but I agree on the supporting posts part. Paulius, I think cairnswm was refering to posts in general. There's room for a lot of improvements in that area.

[Specis]

I am sort of new around here. and well tbh it is kinda of uninviting, there's a lot of Freepascal / SDL etc fans around these parts and the vibe definatly comes accross, all in all, when i first found this place, It stunk of elistism, i know this not to be true, but not from the forum itself. From the irc channel.

This is just because most of have been around each other in some format (online/irl/etc) for a while and are comfortable with each other which is how it should be, But to us new folk its hard to find a place to fit in.

Also as ive said before, the forums are very very crowded with sections, and tbh most if not all of us are making games as a hobby, and just browsing every section of this place to see new posts takes far to long. A nice recent discussions list on the main page, in place of the blank space... which i think is some javascript new article thingy (I have javascript disabled most of the time) would bring more people into the forum and generally make it easier for people to find threads instead of having to slog through the sheer amount of sections.

Also how about some little code off's? not prizes and nothing large like a complete game etc, just something like a weekly procedure/function/etc that does xyz. that might get more activity :)

and as another suggestion, how about an actual showcase for projects instead of just a forum section? something thats right there on the main page, News is great, but well the whole site doesnt just revolve around the news does it?

[Traveler]

and just browsing every section of this place to see new posts takes far to long

But there's a search for new posts feature at the top of the page [clicky (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum_search.php?search_id=newposts)
Alternatively all sections with new/changed topics have red buttons.

I definitely support the showcasing of projects. And I believe WILL is working on it, but I'm not sure what the status is.

Btw, savage nice attempt to bring back some older members, by bumping threads http://www.gameprogrammer.net/pics/outside/thumbsup.gif

[savage]

Nudge the tree and see if anything falls out :twisted:

[Mirage]

This is very good site, but it's too hard to find it. Especially for newbies.
The google rank of the main page is 2, which is very low for a one year old site. The normal value (without any special efforts) is 3-4. (fpc4gba.pascalgamedevelopment.com has 4! :shock: Add a link from there to main page!)
For the keyphrase "game development pascal", "pascal game programming" etc in Google you can find a lot of much less relevant sites, but there is no pascalgamedevelopment.com on the first page!
I suspect that the traffic from Google is close to zero.

The absence of the alexa traffic rank is also very strange. Pascal is not very popular among game developers, but it's not SO unpopular. Delphigamedev.com has 222716 alexa rank which is pretty good.

So what can be done to attract traffic to the site?
1. Make it search engine friendly. I've noticed a "&sid=xxx" part in URL. This is not SE-friendly. The code is also not SE-friendly.
2. Good old link exchange. With thought-out keyphrases as anchors.
Most friendly sites are still linking to old URLs (delphigamer, etc) which useless for search engines.
3. Submit it to DMOZ!

Even 100 visitors per day from search engines (there should be much more) can at least animate the forums.

[BlueCat]

*BUMP* Ouch! :shock: :fuzzy: :scratch: Who nudged the tree? :? :D :D :D

[JernejL]

i don't know how you missed this news but you didn't post anything about Quake 3 -> delphi project!!

http://quake3.delphigl.com/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.delphigl.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=27&lang=english

[Traveler]

Ahh but there was in fact a post about the new quake 3 project (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/newsarchive.php). It's about half way down the list.

[technomage]

Also how about some little code off's? not prizes and nothing large like a complete game etc, just something like a weekly procedure/function/etc that does xyz. that might get more activity :)

and as another suggestion, how about an actual showcase for projects instead of just a forum section? something thats right there on the main page, News is great, but well the whole site doesnt just revolve around the news does it?

Good ideas, it'd be nice to see how different people code solutions for a particlar problem.

The show case would be nice, we have a Your Projects sections, but it would be nice to showcase say 1 project each month, to give them a bit more visability and feedback.

[savage]

If there is any news that I have missed, could someone shout what it is.

Thanks,