PDA

View Full Version : PGD news postings



WILL
06-04-2010, 11:25 AM
Hey whats up with the PGD news posting of late? Or should I say the lack there of. PGD used to post tons of news posts of whats going on around the world even back in it's pioneering days as 'DelphiGamer.com'. Even when I took the reigns and turned it into PGD in it's slow days we at least popped out one a month. I know there is more going on out there in the world of Pascal (I'm Mr. Pascal, right? it's what I do ::) ) Whats going on guys?

de_jean_7777
06-04-2010, 01:02 PM
Yeah. I wish there were more news postings too. This way it seems like nothing is going on in the Pascal world (I hope this is not true).

Traveler
06-04-2010, 07:38 PM
Since I used to post most of the news I probably can take most of the blame.
However, my gamedev activities have been on a standstill for quite some time now. I don't code anymore, I hardly visit any gamedev related websites, even closed my own site and projects. I do still make it a point to visit pgd to quickly check on new members and posts (usually only to see if there's no spam involved) before I get to work, but that's pretty much it nowadays.

To be totally honest, I've lost interest. :(

Stoney
06-04-2010, 09:45 PM
There are certainly some Pascal-related news out there. For example: A new version of Hedgewars (http://www.hedgewars.org) has just been released and personally I would definitely deem projects like BESEN (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?topic=6202.0) news-worthy.
And if we go back in time a little: Stalker_23b (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=989) placed 6th out of 121 entries with his Delphi game Dark Fire (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?uid=1447) at Ludum Dare 16. That's impressive.

WILL
07-04-2010, 01:58 AM
I can somewhat relate Alex. Thats sort of why I've started the magazine so I didn't have to struggle with all these new site templates and complicated posting software. I just wanted to have a simple way to gather all that I've discovered and disseminate it as best I could. I also have only myself to answer to in how I go about such a task as it's a self-ran publication. Makes dropping it and picking it back up again later easy.

PGD is not such an easy beast. I recognized this day into the job of making the first site for this all. Truth is you need something that is easy for 'the next guy' to pick up and continue adding and putting the time in. I'm not sure the new PGD is that. Sure people post, but to be honest I think the first one the we(Alex and I) made, though incomplete and buggy as hell had more of that hey come on in and contribute factor that this one seems to miss. Even I have a hard time posting news as someone with an administrator's account.

I dunno, PGD needs to do something to inject a bit more life into it. I'd hate to see things progress to the point where the site turns into a 'ghost town.' There is a lot you guys can do that take little or not time, but alas someone has to action these things, but noone has the time.



There are certainly some Pascal-related news out there. For example: A new version of Hedgewars (http://www.hedgewars.org) has just been released and personally I would definitely deem projects like BESEN (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?topic=6202.0) news-worthy.
And if we go back in time a little: Stalker_23b (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=989) placed 6th out of 121 entries with his Delphi game Dark Fire (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?uid=1447) at Ludum Dare 16. That's impressive.

All true Stoney and thanks for pointing these out to me, I'll be sure to have some of this in the new issue. I miss seeing these on PGD. :(

jdarling
07-04-2010, 12:29 PM
Another vote for BESEN as news worthy as well as everything else :). How about a way to suggest news for the sites? Members post an item to the mods so they can approve it and post it to everyone? Then it becomes our responsibility to provide it and yours (PGD mods) responsibility to show it to everyone else :)

WILL
07-04-2010, 03:45 PM
GameDev.net has this sort of system in place and it seems to work well. I like the idea too. Problems is and I'll be blatantly honest about it, all the CMS software out there suck so bad at ease of implementation that using any one thing and trying to get everything you want out of any of them it like trying to ballroom dance with a mad horny bull. Whatever you try in the end your getting... well you know.

On the other hand doing it from scratch is also a royal pain as the list of features it always longer than the amount of time anyone has available to complete it all. So it's a rock and a hard place. Maybe if the PGD team hired a contractor to do the work, but that would take some serious donation money so...

AthenaOfDelphi
07-04-2010, 07:17 PM
GameDev.net has this sort of system in place and it seems to work well. I like the idea too. Problems is and I'll be blatantly honest about it, all the CMS software out there suck so bad at ease of implementation that using any one thing and trying to get everything you want out of any of them it like trying to ballroom dance with a mad horny bull. Whatever you try in the end your getting... well you know.

On the other hand doing it from scratch is also a royal pain as the list of features it always longer than the amount of time anyone has available to complete it all. So it's a rock and a hard place. Maybe if the PGD team hired a contractor to do the work, but that would take some serious donation money so...


Surely, we could get by with a vBulletin installation couple with MediaWiki for the library. No fancy theme customisation as it's a pain in the ass for upgrades. The only problem then is porting content to the library. That way, we would only have to maintain a vBulletin licence.

Traveler
07-04-2010, 07:44 PM
TBH, I don't feel much going through yet another website migration.

Putting news on is not all that much work. Unfortunately its not possible to select a topic in the forum and just 'promote' it to a news item, but a simple copy/paste with some minor moderation does the trick well.

IMO, what we need is a few people willing to help out in this particular area.

WILL
08-04-2010, 05:18 AM
How much would it cost to hire a web design team/professional to make a site that has all the features needed? I'm talking no more pre-made CMS stuff that takes forever to adapt what the community needs into it. I'm talking going to a *professional* web designer and saying I need a very visually exciting site that has X,Y,Z features and will be easy to maintain and add content to. How much?

I can have a Donate button on this site tomorrow and start collecting money to do this. Or even to help out in other ways. We don't always have to do things the hard way you know. :)

Traveler
08-04-2010, 08:56 AM
A few thousand I guess. I'm not sure what the rates are in various countries, but if you hire a freelancer here in Holland (one who knows his stuff) you're looking at 65-85 euro an hour.

I understand what you're suggesting, but really it's not the way to go. If we had a community of a few hundred active member to back it up, maybe, but with the way things are going now... The reality is that over the past couple of years we've lost many active members, and with active I mean those that really contribute to the community with screenshots of their games, tutorials, answering questions on a regular basis, sharing videos, that kind of thing. 4 or 5 years ago that was happening all the time, but now?

Perhaps we have to start realizing that the glory days are over. We're now living in a time where games are made for iphones, the XBox360 (and soon even more mobile platforms). Yes, I know it is possible with a couple tricks to do that with Pascal, but the new guy simply doesn't care. He uses C# or Java, or one of the very capable tools like Unity3D or whatever it is to get his game done.

Don't get wrong, I still love the language and I know what it can do, but the number of people that actively support that is declining each year. Throwing in a couple thousand just to get a website that is easy to maintain is, in my humble opinion, a waste of time and money.

AthenaOfDelphi
08-04-2010, 09:10 AM
If we really have to upgrade the site software, I would really suggest that you avoid custom solutions for a site like this. For one, a custom solution is likely to ever only have a couple of people look at the code, and it will only ever be installed on one site. An off the shelf solution such as vBulletin and DokuWiki is a far more secure solution, especially when the features we really need are a forum and a wiki. Plug vBAdavanced into that for a portal and you have everything you need. vBAdvanced has a bunch of nice features, like automatic placement of new items from a forum on the front page.

I would also suggest we avoid heavy customisation, because the more customisation you do, the trickier it becomes to upgrade when software updates are available. The site has suffered directly because of this in the past, and I speak from personal experience of maintaining highly customised sites in the past (I eventually removed all customisations for an easier life).

Having a contractor do this would cost a not insignificant amount of cash... cash that could be better spent on competition prizes for example. I appreciate having a contractor do it would relieve staff from handling it, but we could also end up in a situation where our only choice for maintenance is to go back to the contractor as we won't know all the details of how the system works... not a good scenario.

I also agree with Traveler but for different reasons. Migrating the site is not really the answer as it won't solve the real problems which are a lack of time on the part of the admins and a decline in popularity of the language. No matter how easy you make it to post stuff, if people don't have the time, it won't happen. I've spent a month in Belfast and I have a bunch of posts I want to write for my blog about my time there, but finding the time to do it... unless I sit down and set aside some time, it's not going to happen and at the moment, I have a bunch of more important stuff to do. Delphi isn't as popular these days, which is hurting us too, but it isn't dead. At work, we've managed to convince our bosses that rewriting everything in .net isn't always the right thing to do and the job market for Delphi is starting to pick up again. Pascal is still used as a teaching tool so people are still being exposed to it. But, it isn't always peoples tool of choice and that is the real problem. We need to convince people that it is a viable choice for writing games... unfortunately, the lack of final entries in the last competition hasn't done a lot to help with that. There also aren't that many great eyepopping projects being posted about (probably due to a lack of time/interest)... changing forum software won't help with that.

In short, if we are going to change site software, we should go with off the shelf tools (vBulletin, vBAdvanced and DokuWiki... the only one of these that cost money is vBulletin), stick to their default styles and customise as little as possible to make maintaining the site easy. We should also try and encourage the community to help with some of this stuff. If someone drops me a mail with news, I'll post it, but I don't have the time to go hunting for news myself. No one has written any new stuff for the library for ages... there are more people visit this site than just the admins, so come on people... this is a community site... if you want content, help us... write stuff, send us news, post some nice eye popping screenies of your projects. And this now feels like a serious case of deja vu... take a step back a few years and this is exactly the same discussions that were going on... people complaining about the site theming... lack of content... lack of news... and funnily, I think I said exactly the same back then.

PGD revolves around the community and if that community is shrinking, it is inevitable that the site will shrink in response. But, there will always be the die hards who love the language and what it can do who will always use it as their first choice for developing stuff (I put myself in this category)... I'll always want the site and the resources it provides.

WILL
08-04-2010, 12:16 PM
Alright well I recommend that we get vBulletin then. I've seen some of the screenshots and I like some of it's features. It actually looks like something you'd want to have for the PGD site. I assume that it's a one time fee for the site software (unless you want to upgrade to a new version later) so the amount we are looking for is a mere $285 USD. Which I'm sure the tired PGD community can muster (I'll put in a good chunk myself for crying out loud.) to make life easier for all. The feature I like most is that other community members can add content in a fun and interesting way. Hate to say it but the current PGD site just isn't fun to add to right now. (Save for the forums which aren't too bad, but I think thats because of the nice posting menus that have seem to become standard of late.) And it's more work if anybody does add content to it for the admins. ie. the current PGD Library.

I say lets get ahead of the struggle, put up a Donate button, collect the cash, get vBulletin for PGD, hold another competition (because I think we're due again, no?) and then probably get back to work as I'm sure we will probably be busy again at that point. Come back next day and see how cool PGD is again. :)

Seriously though the Donate button works. It not for that for other things. Advertising, etc, etc, etc... Someone give me a second [vote]...?

WILL
08-04-2010, 12:20 PM
Oh and here is what vBulletin looks like:

http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/CMS_home.png
http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/article_inline.png
http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/member_profile.png
http://files.vbulletin.com/images/cart/screenshots/forum_main.png

and here is the site that hosts it so you can see all the other features:

http://www.vbulletin.com/

I'll go one better and throw in to help customize it all and do some maintenance when possible.

Traveler
08-04-2010, 02:03 PM
Uhm well, before Im going to express my view on whats been suggested. I would very much like to know about opinions from people other than the pgd admins.

Brainer
08-04-2010, 02:14 PM
Personally, I agree completely with Athena. We don't really need any new forum software. I don't really think there's a wiki needed, either. We already have a news system, but the problem is that no one ever cares to post anything new there. I think the main problem is that most of the people around here are busy with everyday life and treat programming only as a hobby. We'd need someone who can take their time and keep the website active.

Let's not switch to any other software, but rather we should think how to attract others here.

Stoney
08-04-2010, 03:31 PM
I am for some changes, but I don't think a new forum software is necessary. What about Wordpress (with a theme from ElegantThemes (http://www.elegantthemes.com/)) as a portal with blog posts as the news, a link to the forums and a link to a DokuWiki page? (Of course you should be able to use one login for DokuWiki, Wordpress and the forums.)

About the popularity problem. These are my thoughts:

There is no free version of Delphi currently available. Delphi is still the most mature Pascal-IDE in my opinion, even if it is not (yet) cross-platform
Embercadero is not promoting Delphi as a viable option for game development
There is no really-easy-to-use game development option for Pascal (we would need something like Unity but with Pascal, I personally think GLScene has that potential, but GLScene does not always work out-of-the-box, well at least for me)
I do find more and more disadvantages when thinking of DelphiX, but DelphiX was something that brought tons of new Delphi users (A similar concept for Lazarus: A control widget, a timer and an image list and you are ready to go. That may have the similar effect for Lazarus which DelphiX had for Delphi)
If you look for Unity or XNA tutorials on Youtube, you will find more than you can count, now look for FreePascal/Lazarus game development tutorials. Yeah, I didn't find any either
Developing for Mac OS X, XBox 360, iPhone with Pascal is really easy, but there are too little tutorials/how-tos on those topics


I am actually against more liberal approach to open up the forums to Unity/C#/etc. We might then be labelled as just a clone of TIGSource (http://www.tigsource.com).

arthurprs
08-04-2010, 09:01 PM
try hiring someone on www.rentacoder.com

don't forget the donate button, also a donators list (topic) is a good idea.

Stoney
09-04-2010, 02:42 AM
I have just donated 25 CAD through PayPal. If there is any other way I can help such as looking for news, writing tutorials/how-tos and/or video tutorials, please let me know. :)

WILL
09-04-2010, 07:59 AM
I have just donated 25 CAD through PayPal. If there is any other way I can help such as looking for news, writing tutorials/how-tos and/or video tutorials, please let me know. :)

Thanks so much! Every little bit does go a long way for us.

The biggest thing we can ask from you is to just participate post cool stuff you're doing. Make mention of whats going on out there if I hasn't been posted here. Make a cool game, etc anything so long as you get involved. :)

You you may or may not have seen on the front page of the site, yes I have put up a Donate button for giving donations to the PGD Website Staff for use in improving the community through various means. (And for some reason my web browser couldn't load the PGD site after making a couple of edits. Irony it seems. ??? )

You can access this page at http://www.pascalgamer.com/pgd_donations.php

Any amount can be put in and it doesn't matter if it's 25 cents or $100. Every little bit helps.

I'd post the button but thats what got me into trouble in the first place and well the site just won't let me. :(

Oh and I've also created a new topic so that everyone from the site got a copy of this announcement. Click here for it! (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?topic=6210.0)

AthenaOfDelphi
09-04-2010, 10:37 AM
You you may or may not have seen on the front page of the site, yes I have put up a Donate button for giving donations to the PGD Website Staff for use in improving the community through various means. (And for some reason my web browser couldn't load the PGD site after making a couple of edits. Irony it seems. ??? )

I'd post the button but thats what got me into trouble in the first place and well the site just won't let me. :(


Did the button use PHP? Because last night, the server went into meltdown for some reason. I saw it once, then when I refreshed the page a short while later your article wouldn't display. Upon investigating the error it transpired there was a problem in one of the scripts relating to the handling of templates. After that the server went into super slowmo mode and wouldn't respond to anything, not even cPanel requests.

Send me the code for the button and I'll see if I can get the button working directly on the site.

AthenaOfDelphi
09-04-2010, 10:43 AM
WILL... did you send an announcement email last night? If so, I'm wondering whether it was that that killed the server.

Pyrogine
09-04-2010, 02:10 PM
TBH, I don't feel much going through yet another website migration.

Putting news on is not all that much work. Unfortunately its not possible to select a topic in the forum and just 'promote' it to a news item, but a simple copy/paste with some minor moderation does the trick well.

IMO, what we need is a few people willing to help out in this particular area.

What I'm currently doing on my site is using Simple Portal (http://simpleportal.net) which has a feature that will allow you to select a board of which it's topics will appear in the portal. For PGD you can setup a moderated board for user submitted news and once its approved it will show up on the front page, ala GameDev.net and DevMaster.net.

All the MODs used on the site are free with the exception of:
SMF Store ($89US)
Newsletter Pro ($45)
Twitter and Facebook Publisher copyright removal ($15US)
MF Advanced Topic Prefix ($10US)

I too had lots of trouble with customized themes and eventually gave up and just starting using the new curve default theme (SMF 2.0).

dazappa
09-04-2010, 02:50 PM
As for the site:
I would heavily suggest going with something like what pyrogine suggested. There are mods out there that take messages from a board and post it on the front page. If not, message me and I'll code something up for you. SMF has this handy little file "SSI.php" which allows you to access a ton of the boards features easily enough.

I don't think the forum software should change. It's pointless. All you'd be doing is paying for something you already have, and looking for mods that have the functionality you already have.

As for content:
While my knowledge in certain areas is rather limited, I'd love to contribute tutorials, but I cannot contribute video tutorials any longer as CamStudio seems to hate Vista. (Worked perfectly under XP). I could still make some basic intro to Lazarus/FPC tutorials, and I could write up some stuff on Andorra 2D.

I'm not sure how well having an announcements board would work though. People might spam random stuff. Possibly you could add permissions to users to use the board once they've proven they're trustworthy? Until then, copy/move posts into the board.

AthenaOfDelphi
09-04-2010, 03:01 PM
The point is... vB4 provides all the features we need... things like member blogs, the ability to turn a post into an article etc. The ability for you guys to write content without having to use wiki markup or another set of login credentials. Having started porting my forums to it, I can safely say it kicks the ass of what we have now. It's a beast yes, with a lot of options... it has it's gnarly side which can be frustrating trying to find the option you want in the admin panel, but it does everything we want to do straight out of the box... no modules, no customisation... nothing... just install, setup your content and import the existing forums (it should be that easy). And for users... it's a pretty nice experience.

This makes it very appealing from an admin perspective because you don't have to worry about compatibility between modules during an upgrade. This has presented us with problems in the past and has resulted in upgrades not being done (the old boards got hacked because of this very issue), so anything we can do to prevent this situation occurring again is a bonus.

We (the admins) are discussing what we're going to do about this now. vB4 is in the running in a big way because of what it provides as standard.

JSoftware
09-04-2010, 03:23 PM
This is the same forum as Lazarus uses, isn't it? Doesn't it already have the functionality? There posts in the announcment subforum will be on the frontpage

WILL
09-04-2010, 04:38 PM
WILL... did you send an announcement email last night? If so, I'm wondering whether it was that that killed the server.

Sorry yes I sent and announcement email (via the forums), BUT that was after the server freaked out or melted down. I was switching modes to try to get the HTML in for the button. I think I even switched to php mode shortly after yup, it died. Doesn't speak very well of the news posting software does it? :)

But I'm quite sure it was the news/article posting feature of the site that killed the server last night. Very frustrating...

I'll PM you the button code so you can put the actual button up. Thanks.

dazappa
10-04-2010, 12:00 AM
The point is... vB4 provides all the features we need... things like member blogs, the ability to turn a post into an article etc. The ability for you guys to write content without having to use wiki markup or another set of login credentials. Having started porting my forums to it, I can safely say it kicks the ass of what we have now. It's a beast yes, with a lot of options... it has it's gnarly side which can be frustrating trying to find the option you want in the admin panel, but it does everything we want to do straight out of the box... no modules, no customisation... nothing... just install, setup your content and import the existing forums (it should be that easy). And for users... it's a pretty nice experience.

This makes it very appealing from an admin perspective because you don't have to worry about compatibility between modules during an upgrade. This has presented us with problems in the past and has resulted in upgrades not being done (the old boards got hacked because of this very issue), so anything we can do to prevent this situation occurring again is a bonus.

We (the admins) are discussing what we're going to do about this now. vB4 is in the running in a big way because of what it provides as standard.

If you guys really want to go with a paid forum, then yes, I would suggest going with vB and nothing else. (I didn't know it had that functionality right out of the box either)