I'm Back

[WILL]

Hey everyone, just wanted to let everyone know that I have re-assumed the position of Site/Staff Manager here at PGD. I hope that you will all enjoy my return and that I can help make things more exciting around here. If you have any ideas or what to help out drop me a line and I will discuss your ideas here or via PM.

*sigh* It's nice to be back. :)

[arthurprs]

best wishes :)

[code_glitch]

Yea, same here. Time to get PGD rolling again right?

[paul_nicholls]

Hey everyone, just wanted to let everyone know that I have re-assumed the position of Site/Staff Manager here at PGD. I hope that you will all enjoy my return and that I can help make things more exciting around here. If you have any ideas or what to help out drop me a line and I will discuss your ideas here or via PM.

*sigh* It's nice to be back. :)


Welcome back Jason! Woo Hoo!

cheers,
Paul

[chronozphere]

Great! We need you here. ;)

[farcodev]

Welcome back WILL ! :)

[Ñuño Martínez]

Welcome back!

[WILL]

A year to date since I came back to run PGD. How do you all think I'm doing so far? :)

I plan on doing more, don't worry. I've been very busy with work lately so I've been a bit quieter than usual. I have managed to add a few new things to the community as well as bring back much of what made this place so great in the first place. I'm usually better at lists so here we are...

Stuff I brought back:


Front page News posting with comments
Regularly posted news post about whats going on out there
Community written Tutorials
Community competitions
Closer ties with the makers of Delphi (sort of)
RSS Feeds so you can keep up-to-date on all things P, G and D!


New things I've added:


Nice new site layout (bug-free)
Social network announcements (hear about us on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/PascalGameDev), Twitter (http://twitter.com/#%21/jkamcmillen) & Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_170041353008050))
PGD community based Blogging
New mini competitions via PGD Challenge
Video Tutorials section
Interviews section (just started)
AJAX-based chat system (testing)
Our German and Russian counter-parts have never been closer to us than now with their included participation
Students are getting excited and posting here on PGD now thanks to Dr. Norman Morrison and my own personal interests in getting young people interested in learning Pascal again.
Other new affiliates which we only recently started pursuing better ties with this last year.


Well those are my lists. I hope that you all have been appreciating all the hard work I've been putting into getting PGD back up on it's feet like before. I know that between the long lull and all the site changes it's been difficult to keep tied to PGD like before for some, but like I said last year when I cam back, we are only moving forward and so far I think it's been a very productive year.

Despite all of the ups and downs of the Delphi tools we;ve been here for a long time and we will continue to be here until the last man stops using any kind of Pascal language to make games. :)

Feedback, as always, warmly welcomed. (Even the bad stuff. ;))

[Traveler]

I think you're doing more than we could ever ask for. I'm pretty sure PGD's state would be far worse if you weren't behind the wheel.

[Ingemar]

New mini competitions via PGD Challenge

I was very happy about that, not least to keep is fairly tight (so you don't have to use the whole summer to stand a chance) and with a theme.


Students are getting excited and posting here on PGD now thanks to Dr. Norman Morrison and my own personal interests in getting young people interested in learning Pascal again.

This is particularly important. We have the right tools, we only need someone to tell the students about them. I would like to teach Pascal here but nobody seems to remember it and nobody knows how good it is. I know, but my courses are 3rd year and up and I don't have time to introduce a new language in such courses. They do teach Ada at lower grades but nobody seem to follow that up.

And of course those of us who are veterans need some patience with the newbies so they feel welcome. I think the community is pretty good at that.

Bad stuff? None that I can think of, really. It would be good with a bit more traffic, but you are definitely doing the right things to encourage that. (I am here much more often than before, that can be a positive sign.) I need more Mac/iOS people here to get more people doing things I do but there is some iOS interest so that isn't too bad.

[phibermon]

I think that from what I've seen, you're doing an awesome job. since I've joined the community I've seen this site go from strength to strength to become an excellent resource for *all* programmers. OOP can be read and understood by anyone who codes and the techniques and discussions here are useful on all kinds of levels.

There are all kinds of skill sets and lots of great ideas and the community is growing in strength!

All kinds of exciting developments in the OOP world will bring an influx of new coders. XE2 will see many new people picking up the language and Firemonkey will see many of them realize that graphics is not the impossible topic they imagine! thanks to the hard work of people such as Dr. Norman Morrison (http://pp4s.co.uk/index.html) more and more institutions will adopt and re-adopt OOP as the learning language of choice. It really is the best, here in the UK Pascal was the main educational language for a long time and there's very good reasons for that! OOP teaches you far better than C or Java, how to think about your code in a generic manner. An OOP coder will always have an easier time picking up a new language than someone that started elsewhere. It was designed by a genius for that very reason!

Umm, sorry getting off topic :)

So yes! I think you're doing an excellent job, this place has become a big part of my recreational life as it has for many others and it's thanks to your hard work that the community shines as it does :)

The age of PGD is upon us! *insert age of empires soundtrack here*

[WILL]

Thanks guys, it's nice to hear my efforts do have an impact.

Well attracting new Pascal programmers is the thing isn't it? I'd like to get more schools on-board with Dr. Morrison's PP4S project. I was even considering a paid set of courses on getting started in game development with object pascal that we could offer to those interested in really learning how to get started. It would be really low cost and not certified or anything, but it could be something fun that PGD newbies could do to get started making games with Object Pascal.

Mac is another thing I'm trying to help cultivate (heck I bought one last year) but at the same time I don't want to make Windows users feel less important here. PGD is and always has been an "all inclusive" club for Pascal (any dialect) programmers (and other game designers/artists/musicians) who want a community to be able to share ideas and learn about making games. (and other tools that help make them too)

[code_glitch]

Over the holidays, I got the chance to meet some family and friends - some of which are over at Uni doing various PhDs. I also came across something interesting: Pascal is heard of, but from their perspective a pascal programmer that uses OpenGl etc... Is like a mystical guru of the deep that has a big white beard and makes magic happen. Once I pointed out it was the founding father of Delphi and related to Ada and etc, I think we may see a troop of new converts for various reasons - just doing my 'propaganda' distribution for the community ;)

[chronozphere]

Thanks guys, it's nice to hear my efforts do have an impact.

They absolutely do! There wouldn't be much of a community left, if you weren't doing things like the news wrap-ups and the pascal gamer mag. ;)



All kinds of exciting developments in the OOP world will bring an influx of new coders. XE2 will see many new people picking up the language and Firemonkey will see many of them realize that graphics is not the impossible topic they imagine! thanks to the hard work of people such as Dr. Norman Morrison (http://pp4s.co.uk/index.html) more and more institutions will adopt and re-adopt OOP as the learning language of choice. It really is the best, here in the UK Pascal was the main educational language for a long time and there's very good reasons for that! OOP teaches you far better than C or Java, how to think about your code in a generic manner. An OOP coder will always have an easier time picking up a new language than someone that started elsewhere. It was designed by a genius for that very reason!


To be honest, I don't entirely get this part. You're talking about it as if OOP is a language, while it's a paradigm. So how does OOP teach you better than C/Java? I'd say that C has nothing to do with OOP and is usefull in totally different areas, while learning java is almost the same thing. Java is one of the most Object oriented languages I've seen until now.

Overall I agree with you that OOP gives developers a very comfortable and easy-to-use approach creating good software. If I were to create a software product, 99% chance I'd use an OOP language. That being said, I think it's worth it to look in other directions. For example, the functional programming paradigm. Langauges like OCaml or Haskell are harder to learn/use, but the programming model has some very interesting properties that normal OOP doesn't have (Like high reliability, easily parallelizable etc). ;)

[Murmandamus]

I think he meant Object Pascal, not Object-Oriented Programming. OP instead of OOP :P

[Chesso]

The way to attract or convert people to OP in general (or in my case Delphi), I know of only one.

They need to be shown from the beginning what ridiculously amazing things you can do with it, making games being probably the top attraction. I have been trying to get family members and friends interested, even in just programming or scripting in general but to not much success.

My brother is still fiddling with that darn object/scripting engine thing you get through steam (not sure what it's called), but the language looks reasonably complex and he is good at it, it's just a matter of getting him interested in building something from scratch instead of playing with someone else's toy lol.

[SilverWarior]

My brother is still fiddling with that darn object/scripting engine thing you get through steam (not sure what it's called), but the language looks reasonably complex and he is good at it, it's just a matter of getting him interested in building something from scratch instead of playing with someone else's toy lol.

Building something from scratch is a lot more dificult than just using some good scripting language. IMagine that you need to build a game with only the basic units (no graphics engine, no sound engine, etc.). Even thou you are a skiled programer it wouldn't be an easy job for you. No imagine how dificult it would be for a beginner.
I myself hasn't tried convincing my friends to begin programing, becouse most of them aren't much in computer and use them only for web surfing any maybe to write a document using Word. And that is about it.
But there is one friend wich showed a litle interest in programing. So I showed him a few basic functions (conditional clauses, loops, events). In about an hour I managed to teach him enough to build a small program where he was changing color off different controls, resizing them, moving them aound the form, etc. But unfortunatly he lost interest soon afther that when we tried to go on more difficult tasks. Well I don't blame him. He is 55years old guy who has never done any programing before, who actualy started using computers only after he bought one for his son.
The rate of how quickly he gasped the basics shows how good OOP laguages are.
The biggest advantage of OOP programing language is easy understandable logic that it uses. And why is it so easy understandable? Becouse it is very similar to the logics that we use in real life all the time (if you want a chair to be on different location you need to move it, the same logic aplies to changing positions of some objects in OOP).

@Chesso
As for your brother, don't try to force him too much, becouse you might just achive an oposite effect. Maybe it would be better if you guys try to join your knowledge and build something similar that your brother uses. Maybe your brother can even help you build better one becouse he would probably like to have some more function implemented. Eventualy he might get interested in object pascal becouse he would like to extend the capability of ypur project by himself.
Yes I know that making something like this is way from easy to do but in the end it might pay off big time.

[Murmandamus]

I've been watching CodeRage 6 this week. I was thinking about how cool it would be to do a webinar for FP/Lazarus and have language demonstrations, middleware presentations, and application demos, including games.

[WILL]

I've been watching CodeRage 6 this week. I was thinking about how cool it would be to do a webinar for FP/Lazarus and have language demonstrations, middleware presentations, and application demos, including games.

Something like this could be achieved if enough people are interested and willing to contribute. Doing a live presentation might not happen to be honest, but I can't see why an online series of talks on game development and Object Pascal tools and libraries couldn't be put together. I know people in different areas that could contribute and present different topics ranging from language-specific to game design to working with or showing off a series of development tools that can be used.

[Ingemar]

I've been watching CodeRage 6 this week. I was thinking about how cool it would be to do a webinar for FP/Lazarus and have language demonstrations, middleware presentations, and application demos, including games.
I considered arranging something similar for the Mac Pascal community a year ago, but I didn't get around to it, fearing that the community was a bit too small and not quite likely enough to care. Maybe I was unnecessarily pessimistic. Anyway, this community could be a better place for such projects.

Because I think it is a good thing. We need to communicate what we are doing, and too much lands only as small bits and pieces, and you never really know if a certain package is worth the time. With good presentations, one could get brief, to the point introductions that might actually provide the information needed to pick the packages that suits ones needs.

[WILL]

There is talks about a webinar style event similar to CodeRage happening for the PGD community. If you are interested in doing a "talk" on a specific topic, you might get your opportunity to do one eventually. :)