What is everyone working on? Break your silence!

[WILL]

Hey everybody, I've noticed a trend in the past few months or even that last year. People have seemed to have gone into hiding and are making their games in secret lately. What is the point of that? What gratification do you get by hiding your talents?

Sure everyone wants to have that secret project that they'll one day release and make their first million selling, but lets be honest. How long will that last? You have to motivate yourself and others that making games with Pascal is a passion. So what are you actually working on?

Tools and libraries, ok I can see there isn't much visual glamor to be had, but have had quite a few posts about tools. I'm not worried for the amount of tools we have to work with, those are great. What I miss is the lack of project and game project postings. Show your stuff fellas. What are you working on, what ideas do you have?

This community is based off of the concept of sharing and getting feedback from what you show off to others. You'll get out of it what you put into it, so why not go that extra step and post something that you've done recently or are planning for your next project. Such as the story, game play mechanics or design ideas. Lets get the floodgates back open and start sharing those ideas again. :)

[Traveler]

Agreed, it's too quiet projects-wise. But I suppose I'm guilty of keeping it that way too.
I'm still working on my unnamed project (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?5761-Unnamed-Project). The focus is currently on gameplay and a prototype and much less on graphics. If I had to post a screenshot, this is what you would see.
http://www.gameprogrammer.net/pics/outside/tempgameshot.jpg It's mostly lines, but everything works like a typical platformer. You can jump onto (moving) platforms, shoot stuff (in this case the green ball), die because a beam hit you, and reach the end of the level.

All very basic stuff really.

[Andru]

I have no game projects for now... I get fun with low system API's and so on for now, maybe sometimes later I will start game project and will share my super-duper ideas and screenshots :D

[chronozphere]

I'm mainly working on paid non-pascal stuff and my studies. I want to do some work on my engine too, but right now, cleaning my room and doing paperwork has priority. If I don't work on it today, I will tomorrow. :)

[Sascha Willems]

As usual I'm still working on my "swansong", aka "Phase 2". If I'm not mistaken I've been working on Projekt "W" for about 6 or 7 years now (with pauses, one public release of "Phase 1" and some other projects done in between) and progress is not as fast as I want it to be, but even small steps towards a final release count. I'm not posting much news on it though because for the last weeks and months I mainly did stuff under the hood, i.e. additions and changes to the gameplay. And in addition to that, posting news about a project also takes it's time, and if you don't have much time to spend for working on your project, posting news about it becomes a luxury.

But I also did a rework of the UI and recently also moved the regional view from a separate window in the the new GUI, with the backgrounds of regions fading nicely between different settings (the mountains and sky you see in the first screenshot behind a region is different depending on it's location, e.g. snowy, lush green or desert).

So here are some exclusive screenshots I haven't posted anywhere, click on the thumbnails for a 1280x720 screenshot :

http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/t_2011_03_02_01.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/2011_03_02_01.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/t_2011_03_02_02.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/2011_03_02_02.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/t_2011_03_02_03.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/2011_03_02_03.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/t_2011_03_02_04.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/2011_03_02_04.jpg)

[Legolas]

ATM I'm working on freepascal porting for Wii and doing mainly maintenance stuff on freepascal for NDS/GBA.
In the meanwhile, I have joined the Dream.Build.Play 2011 Challenge (http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Default.aspx) because it seems funny and it should be a good opportunity to learn a little bit of C# :)

[paul_nicholls]

I'm working on a few projects at once to be honest and I just can't seem to stay focussed on any single one of them...I'm jumping around like a flea on a hot griddle!

My projects:

The Probe (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?5877-The-Probe) - my Boulder Dash inspired game. I'm re-working the physics in a simple prototype and creating a separate probe engine that I should be able to plug back into the main game.

pas2c64 (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?6660-Pas2C64) - a simple Pascal -> c64 assembly compiler.

ebnf2pas - This is my attempt to see if I can parse a ebnf grammar (done), and generate some Pascal parser code that will parse a program which matches the grammar (not done yet LOL). I don't have a project thread for this ATM...


cheers,
Paul

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Been saving up for a mac mini to do some iOS development and working on a mini/portfolio game with some old friends since half januari. It will have 20 to 30 minutes of gameplay. The setting is an old castle somewhere in the dark ages where you have to steal an artifect and assassinate a lord. The gameplay will be fps stealth and cunning like hitman/thieve with mayby some simple physics puzzles.

We currently are with 3 people. A modeller/animator and a texture artist/level designer and me. When the engine/tools and game concept is a bit more evolved we will be looking for a sound artist and gameplay coder.

I develop the Engine and toolset. The base of the engine is a rewrite of my old Genesis Device Engine. Its current features are:

- Basic stuff like timing, math, logging, console, memory management etc
- Loaders for Obj, MD5Mesh, MD5Anim, Tga, Jpg, Bmp, Dds.
- Multithreaded resource loader.
- Deffered rendering
- Custom material system.
- SSAO and Bloom post process effects
- Basic Model and Mesh animation system
- Dynamic Octree with streaming loading of the world.
- Basic Editor framework

Of course written in delphi:)

Here are 2 screens and a little video:

http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/7356/demo2011030222283731.th.jpg (http://img846.imageshack.us/i/demo2011030222283731.jpg/)

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/9206/demo2011030222282605.th.jpg (http://img687.imageshack.us/i/demo2011030222282605.jpg/)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_t24vqVs4Q
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_t24vqVs4Q/)

[mobilus]

Below is a screenshot of the engine with a sample scene.
Soon I will show a video from the game :)

http://www.gamecask.com/forum/root/resources/3D_Gamecask_Engine6.jpg

[arthurprs]

I was mostly freelancing and studying on the last one and a half year, so, unfortunately no projects :/

begin offtopic
At this time I'm working my way for a scholarship in France. Anyone from France?
end offtopic

[WILL]

Sweet! Now that's more like it. ;)

It's also always nice to see screenshots, even the debugging and programmer art looks great from a technical stand-point. We are programmers afterall right?

@Sascha wow man, I love how you have this sense of detail in all your projects. Looks great!

@Luuk I love those games. Will be fun to play on my Mac. Will the game look as good as it does in your video? :D

@Traveler I've been waiting to try out your game for a bit. You seem to have some good ideas about the old 2D platform genre.

[WILL]

At this time I'm working my way for a scholarship in France. Anyone from France?

Momor is from France. :)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

@Will

It should since the material system currently only has support for a diffuse layer and no normalmapping or parralax mapping etc:D

[JSoftware]

I'm not really working on anything game related currently. More embedded stuff

I tinker a bit trying to get fpc working on avr32 and avr at the moment. It should work on avr32 but I haven't tested it :) FPK made a lot of additions in the avr branch lately. It could be fun to write object pascal on an avr :)

[code_glitch]

arthurps: Not in france ATM but I'm french. going back when the house is built ;) brittany rules. except there is no net where I am ::)

Anyways, I've been working on a 2d Engine which led onto Prometheus (Audio, Video, Core and Utils) and then I guess there is that Pong tutorial (ongoing) which I have about 10 bugs to fix in before I finalize it ;) because at the moment there are LOTS of issues. Playable but you would want to, starting running my own webserver 24/7 this year (what a pain: dynamic IP grrrr), fiddling with touch interfaces and more importantly multi-touch on my tablet, getting to grips with ubuntu and KDE...

Don't know if all of those classify as seperate projects but I'd say it's a pretty good summary. Oh, and did I mention I'm doing exams and have to tidy my room? Ok, thats cheating but hey. :)

[virtual]

so this is What everyone working on now , nice stuff
right now i am learning blender (i like the node editor )

[wagenheimer]

Well...

Right now I'm finishing my new match 3 game, Dreams of a Geisha! It is almost finished, and I hope to send it to publishers very soon!

http://greensaucegames.com/geisha_logo_v2.jpg

I'm also using the Match3 Engine I made to the Dreams of Geisha Game, and converting my another Match3 game, Druids - Battle of Magic to Mac!

I'm almost finishing my engine to Hidden Object+Adventure games and I'm making the Mac port of a new HO game (Originally made by another company using Multimedia Fusion) that will be revealed soon!

I also have some others games starting right now! Soon I will post more info and some screenshots! =)

[Murmandamus]

Well, I have a LOT of irons in the fire, but not all of them are actual software projects. Basically, I'm doing the manager, administrator, and developer work to get our game company started. Paying the lawyers, researching equipment and development tools, organizing developers, etc. At the same time, trying to actively develop some organizational and development tools/engines/middleware/etc and run an IT service business until the game company gets going good enough to totally shift focus over to it.

As for projects, I can't really say too much just yet; not simply because of any proprietary reason, but because of a personal rule I have regarding talking about things before they are even "in the oven", so-to-speak. Suffice it to say I am working on development tools, some middleware projects, and have a couple of game projects we're getting ready to jump into this year. As they become realized, I'll be happy to talk about them more. :)

[dazappa]

Non-Pascal:
http://i.imgur.com/oDwqI.png
^ This is an extremely simple matching game I'm making in java with the help of libgdx for Android deployment. Gotta start somewhere, I figure this is an easy project to get out the door. Also almost done with a PHP URL shortening script.

On the Pascal front, I've been working on porting my Andorra-powered Isolated Empire to ZenGL, after which I'll work on adding more gameplay. I've also been converting a Java TCP server over to Pascal with LNet, which is taking quite some time. Past month has been crazy with midterms and other schoolwork. (There aren't really any screenshots to post here, because the server is just a terminal output and Isolated Empire will look basically the same as in the old screenshots, because only the back has changed)

[chronozphere]

I've managed to do some work on my engine yesterday. Hope I can gain some momentum this month, because I really need that. :)

[de_jean_7777]

Currently I'm reworking my oX engine. It's the product of 4 years of (lazy) development, and some segments were overcomplex (unnecessary complications) so I'm removing what's not needed and making a better foundation, which will take some time. Also, it now works on Android (there are still things left to do), and with a friend (artist/graphics designer) we will try to make a commercial game, and if successful make an iPhone port (once we can afford the appropriate equipment).

[wagenheimer]

de_jean

How did you make your engine run on Android? Are you using Lazarus?

[de_jean_7777]

de_jean

How did you make your engine run on Android? Are you using Lazarus?

The engine and game is compiled as a shared library. I had to modify parts of the engine to work with GLES. A small bit is written in Java, to load the shared library, setup OpenGL (this cannot be done natively) and pass events (such as key and touch) to the engine. Since the goal is to run on a wide range of Android devices, I cannot build completely native applications, since this would require Android 2.3.3, hence the Java part. However, the Java part is a relatively small set of classes.

I've also had some difficulty building a crosscompiler, since there were a few fpc bugs (these were resolved in trunk, except one, but there's a simple fix).

I do use Lazarus, but only as an IDE.

[WILL]

Android huh? Well then I guess you are pretty excited to have heard about Cooper then huh?

[Chesso]

Working on a pokie/slot machine software, intended for fun and because I feel like making it (desktop game of this
sort isn't really suited for commercial use).

I attached an image (it re-sized to be pretty small though), graphics are simple and made in Photoshop, 4 of them taken straight from Google searches and modified (I have the same problem as Will, no graphical talent what so ever).

Normal game works, reels spin, sounds of reel hit backs, scatter (detonator) sound, feature uses a virtual map for free spin/sub and wild selection and works (actual graphical part of the feature not done, just the functioning).

So far aside from the virtual mapping and other stuff it is very basic, only use UnDelphiX 1.0.9 and DXImageList.Items[N].Draw().

If all goes well eventually, I am considering a port to iOS4 (probably not Android as I do not have an Android device) using Flash (bit 50-50 on that one) or AirPlay SDK.

[code_glitch]

Nice stuff Chesso, all I can say is graphics truly are a royal pain... But to be honest, I have found mine improving greatly lately due to software changes and input methods changing (yay)... I really suck like hell with a mouse and photoshop. But give me a touch screen and InkScape or Alchemy and life is soo easy. Don't know about the iPad though since I doubt it runs inkscape or krita (two of my favorite after PDN).

About porting, I would port to android first since it is linux and thus you don't need a mac or many changes (depending on how OS dependant code is) then once that works towards iOS last. Just some food for thought.

[de_jean_7777]

Android huh? Well then I guess you are pretty excited to have heard about Cooper then huh?

No, not really. One of the reasons I've started using FPC for Android is to create truly native programs (compiled for ARM), and not Java run-time. Better performance and lower memory use. Also, I don't think I'll be able to afford any software for a long time (life is not going well).

[WILL]

If all goes well eventually, I am considering a port to iOS4 (probably not Android as I do not have an Android device) using Flash (bit 50-50 on that one) or AirPlay SDK.

Cool! iOS seems to be the cool platform to move to these days. Such an attractive and new platform to play with. But I wouldn't go the Flash route for Apple stuff... iOS doesn't support Flash after all so it wouldn't run. :P

You can do .NET using Delphi Prism though, you'd have to also learn MonoTouch as well, but it does work and there are lots of Delphi-big-wig level conferences about how to do it. The other option is SDL which you only have to pay for a single license for it. I'm not sure on the price yet, but you can check out the www.libsdl.org (http://www.libsdl.org) site to look it up yourself. It takes a little cash to get onto the iOS platform and App Store, but considering the advantage of all the exposure and ease of distribution, it's way worth it.


No, not really. One of the reasons I've started using FPC for Android is to create truly native programs (compiled for ARM), and not Java run-time. Better performance and lower memory use. Also, I don't think I'll be able to afford any software for a long time (life is not going well).

I hear ya. I prefer native myself too. The new Java runtime engines are a bit better then the old Sun Microsystems one, but I'd much rather do native any day. I'm hoping the Delphi XE 2 for Mac will at least pump out native apps and not some sort of managed run-time system. That would be disappointing. At least there are more options though right? Better than option A & B and nothing else like a few years ago.

[Chesso]

Yeah I always prefer as native as possible, java and flash have their place though.

Actually Flash CS5 compiles native iOS programs (does not use JIT), however I would imagine due to the work flow of Flash in general, you would see less performance compared to a more native (xCode) solution, and of course there are some
restrictions on what you can use as far as ActionScript 3 goes, but there are a number of games and apps already in the apple store made in flash and compiled as a native app.

I actually had not considered Android until I saw it mentioned here several times, I wouldn't mind trying to port to both even if just for the fun of it.

[Ingemar]

Well...

Right now I'm finishing my new match 3 game, Dreams of a Geisha! It is almost finished, and I hope to send it to publishers very soon!

Dreams of a Geisha... and a nice picture. You know, you should try selling that game to Fazer (finnish chocolate producer). Geisha is one of their biggest brands.

http://www.fazer.se/Varumarken/Geisha/

Well, maybe not. But the name was kind of right for a chocolate brand.

Now, speaking of projects... I have a whole bunch of parallel projects. Among them, some slow running game programming ones, including my OpenGL rewrite of my old 2D game programming framework. It works, and I have made example games with it, but I am not artist enough to make really good-looking games.

But I am also working on another game related project, which is about adapting an embedded parallel processor for game programming. This is quite fascinating, writing in parallel assembly language for a hardware that doesn't exist yet. If we are successful, this can become a processor for use in future mobile phones, a kind of portable PS3. And the whole question of making it useable for games depends on my work! We recently submitted two papers to a conference, and I have a third accepted to a journal. We do polygon rendering, texture compression and distance mapping in those papers.

[deathshadow]

After my recent pac-man clone for the original 4.77mhz 8088 PC (http://my.opera.com/deathshadow/blog/index.dml/tag/paku), I'm moving on to another game using the "undocumented" 160x100 cga/ega/vga graphics mode (http://my.opera.com/deathshadow/blog/2011/01/09/cga-160x100x16-graphics-explained) that's going to be a port of the old TRS-80 "Defense command (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIxmbjAq_lM)" of sorts. The old DOS game "moonbugs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMxxatXx9ZE)" is similiar in concept and uses the same video mode I am, but their code wasn't as efficient resulting in a bit less smooth a gameplay. Even explosions in moonbugs can drag an XT class PC to it's knees. (you can see that in the video).

I'm playing with the idea of a particle engine for the game to give the exploding bits a 'raining down' physics... I may make a simpler invaders type game akin to "round42 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96iUp45XqTE)" first as a stepping stone to the more advanced game. Most of my time has been spent trying to wring every ounce of optimization possible out of the 160x100 semigraphics since I'd like to get at least three times as many sprites moving on-screen as I did for paku paku... which is already running pretty lean on a 4.77mhz PC.

All I really have to show right now is some of the sprites I've been drawing. (zoomed in 4x)
http://www.cutcodedown.com/retroGames/dev/defense.png

As you can tell, many of them are based on the famed "TRS-Invaders" used in many old TRS-80 games.
http://www.cutcodedown.com/retroGames/dev/trsinvaders.png

I've really been enjoying getting back down into the 'guts' of code again -- with SDL, OpenGL, etc, so much is already done for you, or you can simply say "Oh well, just up the system requirements". Focusing on such a small target system (256k 4.77mhz 8088 with a CGA card) is really challenging and can make one have to think in different directions on solutions to the problems.

I am also working on a SDL API so I can compile my games with FPC on modern systems... though that's low priority since they run just fine under DosBox.

[paul_nicholls]

Very nice! Keep em coming :)

cheers,
Paul