I was looking around the vast internet looking for a new and exciting news piece to put up on the front page when I stumbled across this guy's blog. "Delphi Hater's Blog" Well wouldn't you know it, I just HAD to read it.

It's just under a year old, but considering that he paints us in a bad light and we haven't really had much of a chance to tell our side of things, I think it's still only fair that we bring it up. Do keep in mind that this person is obviously very opinionated about Embarcadero's Delphi and programming in general. Any arguments you post in comments may lead to an argument or long debate. Just to warn you ahead of time. Though, he does seem to have a keen interest in all things Delphi, why else post about it over and over. One can only guess.

Needless to say he did try to rip us apart, stating that we didn't have any completed game engines or libraries, which I believe is fairly open to debate. There are a lot of in-progress projects, however there are many completed games out there too. I wouldn't take too much of what this blogger has to say to heart, he seems to be looking for something rather than being objective in his focus while writing. He often concludes early without much more than a skimming knowledge of what he is writing about.

To summarize his blog, he pretty much attacks a small collection of game libraries Apparently Asphyre is not complete due to a lack of demos of "good collision engine, " for example. He also targeted a program called SpriteCraft, Andorra 2D, Jaro Barnes's continued UnDelphiX project and the long time discontinued GLXTreem. I'm almost surprised he didn't start talking about Turbo Pascal.

He also continues to talk about looking for a "good solid game engine" not being very specific as to what features and functionality he was really looking for. He could have meant something like the Quake 2 Delphi conversion project for all we know. He didn't seem too happy with Game Maker but you're not really programming in Pascal with it anyways so he may have had a point there, except that it actually is a completed game engine where you can make games with it.

Unfortunately, what he didn't mention was the other many new and mature game libraries and projects such as the Jarrod Davis' Hadron Game Engine (known as PyroGine back then), Phoenix, JEDI-SDL, CAST II, Allegro.pas, Dage, or any of the DirectX, OpenGL or OpenAL headers. I guess he was too busy looking for failure and once he filled up, he didn't have time for any of the more current trends going on here at PGD.

From there it just gets sad; talking about Torque and DarkBasic and tells everyone you can only play around with Delphi for game development. I guess he should have stuck around this "quiet site" longer to read about some of the various success stories of successful developers using Pascal to make games. Alas, his blog made me laugh. Now feel free to let him have a blast of reality.

You can read his interesting blog post 'Delphi: Playing games' at delphihaters.blogspot.com.

NOTE: I would advise any new members to PGD take this individuals posts as 'toung-in-cheek' venting about what his own frustrations are. The reality of the state of Pascal development is not as desperate and desolate as he makes it sound. If anything in some ways Pascal game developers are far less volatile as many other C-type communities. There are lots of exciting projects and opportunities to make fun and successful games given a little bit of effort and time to look for something you want to use.