• Recent Tutorials

  • PGD News Round-up for April 2011

    Welcome to another edition of the PGD News Round-up for April 2011. This has been a productive month for the Pascal game development world as a whole. There are quite a few things to show you in this round-up so put aside enough time to read it all or save the page somewhere and come back to finish the read.





    New to Object Pascal?

    We've added a new Video Tutorial 'Free Pascal & Lazarus Tutorial: 14 - Records For Role Playing Games' from SchoolFreeware LLC to the Programming (Beginners) section and are planning to add a few more that will get those of you who are just getting started in game programming.

    Go check out the Video Tutorials section for more Video Tutorials.

    The Road to Mac OS X and iOS

    Well it seems that the only way that us poor Object Pascal programmers will be making the leap over to iOS any time soon will be through the efforts of the FPC Team and the good graces of Apple via their Xcode SDK. Thankfully however due to the exciting efforts of Andru, who continues to develop the ZenGL game framework, it might be getting a bit more accessible soon.

    You can read about his efforts in his own forum thread on PGD found here. Also he has posted about ZenGL and iOS development on his wiki at www.zengl.org.




    Outside of that there seems to be a lot of new material popping up about using Free Pascal with Xcode to produce Objective Pascal code. Phil Hess, who brought us the 'Mac Cross-Platform Challenges' series, has just made an update; Part 9: Dashcode - the "other" IDE. Also Mr. Hess has also created a new series of articles called 'Developing with Objective Pascal'. You can read parts 1 through 3 so far which cover the basics such as Xcode 4, Cocoa, OS X and the iOS Simulator.

    Check out these series of articles here:


    Looking for other material about Objective Pascal? Check out this site at www.objectivepascal.com.


    Kotai Game Projects

    Kotai has been working steadily on a couple of his latest projects since late last year. Both Castlevania Online and Bubble Bobble Online have received some updates along with one of his originals Nemesis Online. Check out some of the cool video footage posted on YouTube of Castlevania Online's network play.


    Multiplayer Video of Castlevania Online

    Also check out this new footage of a newer level of Nemesis Online's Valhalla Redux stage.


    Nemesis Online Gameplay Video of Valhalla Redux Stage

    Unfortunately there isn't any new footage of Bubble Bobble Online, but it has been updated to version 0.2a with 19 new stages on top of the original 40. Castlevania Online is at version 0.14a with 11 stages and Nemesis Online is now at version 0.51b with over 80 levels by various designers. All maps and stages for these games are made using Kotai's own editors released for fans of these games to submit their own levels to the site.

    Check out all of Kotai's fan-based games at www.remakesonline.com.


    Object Pascal Standard Revisited

    Jon Lennart Aasenden talks about the growing variations of Object Pascal syntax among the growing number of compilers and the lack of a clear and concise single standard of which they would otherwise all derive from for practical coding purposes. Usually the argument goes where on one side you have those that would say there is no point since there are not as many compilers or that the developers of Delphi would set the standard regardless and on the other hand the rest would argue that a unified standard would serve to give creditability to the language from a computer science stand-point and help to make coding from one set of development tools to the next. Whichever side you are on, the argument seems to continue to rage on.

    Read about Mr. Aasenden's thoughts on the matter in his own blog post at delphimax.wordpress.com.


    Great Student Projects

    I've been really happy to see some great student projects coming from the Pascal Programming for Schools site lately. Two such projects were the Pokemon Clone by Max and Space Shooter by Chris by students of Dr. Norman Morrison in the UK. He has said that there is another impressive one to come, but it will have to wait for the next update to his site. We wait anxiously.

    In the meantime check out all the other great content at www.pp4s.co.uk.


    New Book: Start Programming Using Object Pascal

    Motaz Abdel Azeem has translated his book from Arabic to English and plans to eventually have it translated to other languages as well. The book is being distributed in PDF format for free under the creative commons license.

    You can read about his efforts in the Lazarus forums in his thread located at lazarus.freepascal.org.

    You can also get a draft copy of his book in English for free at www.code.sd.


    IGC: Indie Games Channel

    Want to check out more of those indie developer games out there? Gamefly Media has launched a new blog called Indie Games Channel, which seems to operate as an independently ran series of blogs that "highlights the latest and best games from independent developers."

    See what's happening at www.indiegameschannel.com.


    PGD Mobile

    I've been considering acquiring and setting up an app that will run on both iOS and Android that would give you direct access to PGD from your mobile devices. The hope is that it will make PGD more accessible to you and your digital lifestyle while helping to expose Pascal game development to others out there. Anyone interested we encourage you to chirp in and vote at this thread here.


    Lightweight IDE Update

    The Lightweight Pascal IDE, the development environment for Mac OS X by Ingemar Ragnemalm, has been renamed to just Lightweight IDE due to the fact that it now has support for both Pascal and C compilers. It of course uses Free Pascal as a compiler as well as the GBD debugger for debugging Object Pascal, Objective Pascal and C/C++ code too. It also supports GPC, CUDA, Ada and Java, plus shell scripts and make files. It can mix C and Pascal source rather well as of late, although this is not automatic.

    Get the new version of Lightweight IDE at www.ragnemalm.se.


    April News Recap

    We had just mentioned that the PGD Annual Showcase Site was put up to show off all past competitions and the game entries for the purpose of greater exposure and historical records. You can see all the old PGD Annual events at www.pascalgamer.com.

    Newton Game Dynamics version 2.33 was updated and Sascha Willems released an update to his own headers for it. You can get the new Newton Game Dynamics at code.google.com and the headers for it at www.saschawillems.de.

    We found Alasdair Beckett's game 'I Was a Vegas Showgirl' made with the Dage 3D adventure game engine. Download and play it at www.dageport.com.

    Jordi Coll is developing his own physics engine with Object Pascal, called the Thundax Physics Engine. You can learn about this here.

    RemObjects' Cooper Beta 1 is available for testing, learn more at www.remobjects.com. Also Sam Lantinga told us that SDL 1.3 will be now under a the zlib license. You can get more information about that at www.libsdl.org. And last, but not least Embarcadero is starting to accept requests to the 64-bit Delphi Beta, found at www.embarcadero.com.


    Well that's another monthly New Round-up for the month of April 2011. You can get all PGD News announcements via RSS feed right here.

    In the forums it's been less active than usual, but that's just because everyone is hard at work on all their projects instead. As always keep an eye to the main page to see what is really going on out there and all are welcome to chip in and help us find out all of those cool projects out there.
    Comments 4 Comments
    1. Traveler's Avatar
      Traveler -
      A long round-up with some pretty good stuff. I especially liked the Castlevania and Nemesis videos. We need more of such projects on PGD.
    1. paul_nicholls's Avatar
      paul_nicholls -
      Very nice round-up Jason, keep em coming

      cheers,
      Paul
    1. farcodev's Avatar
      farcodev -
      interesting round-up and the vids are really cool
    1. code_glitch's Avatar
      code_glitch -
      One very busy month for pascal, PGD and me (GCSE time of year now) so haven't had time to keep up - just saved a few hours of my life in catching up there WILL so big cheers.