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  • PGD News Round-up for Jan 2011

    Hello folks and welcome to my first news round-up. I've decided to try something new this year on PGD. Each month I'll try to do a little 'News Round-up' of all the recent on-goings that have been happening with the community and our partners. Please leave comments and feedback if you like this new feature of the site. Should we receive enough positive feedback, we may eventually enhance these monthly 'News Round-ups' into podcasts that you can download and listen/watch in the future.



    Power of RSS

    Thanks to AthenaOfDelphi's handy tweaks about a week ago, we now have RSS feed capability on the site. You can now get all of the latest news via RSS feed right to your own RSS syndication applications. Just look up the page you want such as the news, forums or blogs and click on the orange RSS icon for further syndication information.

    Here is a list of some of the RSS feeds we think you'd like most:



    Check out the Forum section for more RSS feeds that you'd be interested in!

    Partner Sites and distant Cousins

    GameDev.net has just relaunched with a whole new design. Not too dissimilar from their old layout, the site is now a bit cleaner, with a few new features, and it seems to have all the older ones too. Check it out at www.gamedev.net!

    I've been talking with educator, Dr. Norman Morrison (Co-founder of the Pascal Programming for Schools website project) about adapting some of my tutorials for his computer science classes he teaches. So far he has been interested in taking my Artillery Game tutorial series and using it to teach his kids how to use SDL to make games using Pascal. I've shown him Matthias' very useful and informative Free Pascal meets SDL website (site ink) as an option for his kids to learn more about SDL.

    Just today he emailed me telling me how one of his students was using one of my own units and had used material from both my Artillery Game tutorial and the Free Pascal meets SDL site make a game where space ships shoot down rocks. Thank you so much for the exciting news!

    Check out Pascal Programming for Schools' newest tutorial for Game Development which is quite extensive and informative. Lots of great information for a beginner to making games with Pascal!

    Chatting with the Oracle of Delphi

    Yes, Delphi for Mac should be coming some time this year. In fact this first quarter, as told to me by Embarcadero Chief Evangelist, David I. in a chat we had sometime in late 2010. I recently messaged him to see if there was any updates to the new ports of Delphi and it seems that before we get a taste of Delphi for Mac, we will first see Delphi for 64-bit. Something I think most people have been been looking forward too since before 64-bit processing, along with multi-core, became mainstream.

    Nothing official has been announced, but David told me that once they are ready, Embarcadero will be sure to let everyone know about it. Read blogs from Embarcadero at blogs.embarcadero.com!

    Lazarus still Rising

    Time to tell about the other side of the coin, as the next version of Lazarus is about ready to be finalized. Lazarus version 0.9.30 is coming close to it's release as developers are now focusing on eliminating remaining bugs so that it can be considered stable. On-going development for new features for the next version will be now sunk into 0.9.31 available from their SVN server.

    Be up-to-date on the most popular open source Object Pascal development environment at their website lazarus.freepascal.org or read their development blog at lazarus-dev.blogspot.com to see just want goes into making Lazarus the tool that it is.


    2011 PGD Annual

    Yes, we are! We do in fact plan on starting a competition event this year. Although, we can't give any details just yet, we are planning things out a bit more than we have in previous years. So for now just tell all your friends that a big game programming competition event will be happening this year and tell them where they can find out more about it. That especially goes for all of your out there that have already participated in one of our past events. If you enjoy making games and winning prizes, you'll want to be a part of this event.

    Once we get a bit more organized and things start to move along plan on seeing news pop up both here and at www.pgdannual.com, the official PGD Annual competition event website.


    That's it for the January edition of the PGD News Round-up. Thanks for visiting the Pascal Game Development community and reading the latest happenings in the Pascal game making world. You can read more from me in the Blogs section of the PGD website where I talk about community events and my own personal projects.

    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Comments 4 Comments
    1. arthurprs's Avatar
      arthurprs -
      Another must read http://www.delphifeeds.com/
    1. paul_nicholls's Avatar
      paul_nicholls -
      It all sounds exciting
    1. Matthias's Avatar
      Matthias -
      That are great news for several reasons! Thanks for this .

      I like the news round-up idea. Hope to see more of this series.
    1. WILL's Avatar
      WILL -
      Thanks guys. I'm planning another this February.