Pascal binding for Horde3D engine

[Srki_82]

Slowly but surely my friends and me are starting to create games for newer graphic cards. We are currently looking open source engines for some good ideas for our new home-brew engine. Horde3D looked like really nice basic framework for us, so we wrote Pascal binding for some testing before we start developing from ground up.

If you are interested, you can check out Horde3D (http://www.horde3d.org/) and Pascal binding with one quick 'n' dirty translated example (http://www.mediafire.com/file/5atzjmmjlig/Horde3D.zip).

[Stoney]

Really interesting. Nice work.

I'm personally not that much of a fan of Horde3D for a couple of reasons:
- Relatively high system requirements especially for laptops (the engine only works on newer laptop hardware with dedicated graphics card, my older laptops had problems even though OpenGL 2.0 was supported)
- Not cross-platform enough for my taste (Windows is the only platform which is 100% supported, Linux usually works and Mac OS might probably work, but has not been officially tested by the developer team)
- There is little to none backward compability to earlier versions
- The documentation of Horde3D is not always up-to-date
- I'm quite unsure about the future of Horde3D or if it can establish itself against the strong competition of Irrlicht, Ogre3D, Unity, Vision, etc.

From what I've seen of the Pascal binding (just took a like at the source, because I'm not under Windows at the moment, but I will compile it for myself later) I like how much there has already been done. :)

Btw: There is an updated GLFW binding (version 2.6, see my signature) or check out the SVN of GLFW (version 2.7) which also has the option of linking statically when FreePascal is being used.

[jdarling]

Hey homes you need to clean your Delphi install of the virus :(. Ran a scan and sure enough it has the proper signature and thus anyone with Delphi installed will be infected by your app if they run it. Granted this "virus" isn't destructive, but it is something you should be keeping an eye out for since its a known vlun in Delphi (and any compiler for that matter) itself.

More details at: http://www.sophos.com/blogs/sophoslabs/?p=6117

- Jeremy

[Stoney]

Hey homes you need to clean your Delphi install of the virus :(.


I can confirm this, I also got a virus alert with AntiVir.

As for the demo, I recompiled it with FreePascal 2.2.2 and it is running really smooth, but the benchmark wouldn't show up after I started the application with the parameter '-bm'.
Would be nice to see if there is a noticable performance difference between the Pascal sample and the C++ sample. ;) (There won't probably be any difference.)

[Srki_82]

Just a small fix in demo application (-bm switch is now working - link in first post is updated).

BTW we have new Delphi 2010 installation on new computer, and still some antiviruses report exe as infected... so it's only source files are distributed.

Link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5atzjmmjlig/Horde3D.zip

[WILL]

The files you uploaded don't exist there anymore. So much for public file hosting huh? Did you want to post your old project using our new file attachment system so that it'll stay here forever? That is if you kept your project around still.

[Stoney]

I have those files still on my computer. If Srki_82 doesn't object I could upload it on my webspace.

[WILL]

Or you can attach them to this thread in a reply post too I believe. Just go to Advanced mode and click on the "manage attachments" button below and you can upload with that. Max size limit for a zip files is 500kb though. How big are the wrappers?

[Stoney]

Max size limit for a zip files is 500kb though. How big are the wrappers?
The units itself are relatively small, but the ZIP file also includes the Horde3D Knight demo written in Pascal with all its assets which brings the size of the zipped file to 2.6 MB.

[WILL]

Tell you what, email them to me at contact@pascalgamer.com and I'll edit and attach them to Srki_82's original post.

[Stoney]

Hey guys, I just wanted to let know that I updated the Horde3D bindings to 1.0Beta5. Beta5 has been released just two weeks ago, so it's all very new and shiny :)
(The 1.0Beta4 Pascal bindings stopped working for me unfortunately. Well, I actually rewrote most of the bindings from scratch and updated the dependencies and the KnightPas demo.)
For those of you who prefer classes more than functions I wrapped some of the functions up into a few classes in the unit Horde3DHelpers.
Besides Windows, Mac OS X (except for the PowerPC architecture) and Linux are now supported as well. Windows 64 should also work if you compile GLFW for the 64-bit architecture yourself. (If you want to compile for Mac OS X you need to download and compile GLFW as a static library and put it somewhere where the FreePascal compiler could find the file.)
I tested the bindings with FPC 2.5.1 and 2.4.2, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work with Delphi though. Lazarus project files are included.
I also translated the Chicago demo to Object Pascal. (For a screenshot of that demo take a look at the image below.)
439


The downloads and source code can be found on Github: https://github.com/Stoney-FD/horde3d-pascal (The separate download page is located here: https://github.com/Stoney-FD/horde3d-pascal/downloads)
The compiled shared library files have been uploaded to the Github wiki: https://github.com/Stoney-FD/horde3d-pascal/wiki

[WILL]

Hey that's neat. :)