Welcome again to another news round-up for June 2011. This month has been a welcome change from the last, June has been a busy month for Pascal developers. Still in the middle of the PGD Challenge mini competition, everyone seems to be finding the time to release their latest on their own projects. It's nice to see so much has been accomplished lately and we hope that it continues on for the rest of the summer.



Russian Independent Games Developers Contests 69th Wrap-up

The Russian IGDC's 69th competition wraps up it's First Person Shooter themed event. What is the IGDC? It might not be overly accessable to all those non-Russian speakers out there, but it does have quite a calling with 69 individual competitions and more to come in the future. The next PGD Annual promises direct co-operation between the IGDC and the DelphiGL communities to help include all nationalities into our own yearly competition event.

Dan, a member on our forums as well, has made his own entry into the IGDC called Project 69. Hmm inventive. Well I guess the game play will have to speak for it's self. He has created a zombie killing first person shooter which promises to be quite fun. Check it out his posted thread here.

You can learn more about the IGDC community at www.igdc.ru.


1st PGD Challenge Mini Compo Continues

The 1st PGD Challenge mini game development competition rages on with just over 14 people promising entries. Only 10 days left to go until the 10th of July when the competition ends. Are you making a game for this competition? Don't miss out in a chance to show off your stuff and submit your own skills to this fun challenge. Read more about the theme and rules for this challenge here.

Working away on your entry and want to show some of it off or get some feedback? Be sure to make a post in the fourm setup specifically for this event right here!


Delphi Doom is back!

Yes, Jimmy Valavanis has announced a new update to his popular Delphi Doom, C to Object Pascal translated, recreation of the original Doom games by id Software. There are a few added features most notably more OpenGL features, added md2 support, a new high resolution texture pack and speed & performance enhancements. Jimmy has also created translated remakes of Hertic and Hexen which are also available alongside Doom at sourceforge.net.

Read Jimmy's forum post about his latest update beta here.


More Student-Made Games

We are so glad to see the spirit of making games in high school with Pascal is being kept alive by UK student Peter. Continuing his own programming education he has created quite the little platformer in which you control a cow that makes his way through a few challenges until he reaches his end goal. This game was written in Object Pascal, made with Free Pascal using SDL for graphics, controls and sound.

Read more about the amazing Pascal Programming for Schools project website at www.pp4s.co.uk.


Object Pascal in the Game Industry

Sushi's Quest has received another update which now includes the much needed virtual "d-pad" interface. It was released in early June for the iOS and can be played on your iPhone or iPod Touch devices. The game's developers wrote it using the Free Pascal compiler together with Xcode. Should adventure and puzzle games be your thing, you should definitely check this one out at the iTunes App Store at itunes.apple.com.

Also look out for their next planned adventure on the karting race tracks as Sushi Kart Racing's development gets underway. They are currently looking for Object Pascal developers with a skills in physics and mathematics to help them add realism to their kart racing game they hope to release for iOS next. Have a read about their offer in our Resume and Job Posting forum.




Dreams of a Geisha which was also released just this past moth is now available for Mac OS X. Puzzle lovers should check out this beautiful Japanese themed trip into the ancient culture of the Japanese Geisha. It was of course developed by Green Sauce Games using Free Pascal and it also available for Windows and will soon have an iOS version available that is surely in development right now.

You can get this game at www.bigfishgames.com.




Easy Game Scripting with Lua

EGSL is a new interpreter engine written by Markus Mangold in Pascal that allows the scripting of games with the Lua scripting language. The interpreter is written completely in Pascal so you can imbed it into your existing FPC or Lazarus projects. It takes advantage of SDL and some of it's other accompanying libraries along with the Vampyre Imaging Library for graphical asset loading.

In his own words:Some of the nice features include:

• a free (licensed under the zlib license) Lua interpreter with add-ons for game programming
• graphical functions (loadimage, putimage ‚Ķ)
• graphics primitives
• sound and music
• mouse, keyboard and joystick input
• many more useful functions

Check out the EGSL interpreter engine at www.egsl.retrogamecoding.org or read about his latest release as posted in the forums here.


Blaise Pascal Magazine Issue 17

Issue 17 for June 2011 has finally been released of Blaise Pascal. It contains articles about writing new components for Lazarus, calculation of expressions with complex numbers and/or three-dimensional vectors, 64-bit Delphi, Pascal's Triangle revisited, Financial functions in Delphi, more Android development with DataSnap and many other topics.

Get the latest issue of Blaise Pascal Magazine by subscribing at www.blaisepascal.eu.

You can still get the free download of issue 15 which features Delphi XE Starter Edition!


Elysion; Framework or Library?

Johannes Stein, or Stoney as we all know him, and his friend Jesse Klugmann has been working hard on their Elysion game library. Or is it framework? This newly matured game library offers features for working with SDL, OpenGL and a whole bunch of other technologies for making games. It supports the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms. You can use either Delphi, Lazarus or plain ole' Free Pascal to use this versatile library.

Both Ludum Dare competition entries 'Cavern Defense' and 'A Practical Survival Guide for Robots' were developed using previous versions of Elysion. You can try them out here.

Read more about Elysion in the forums here or get the framework/library at www.github.com.




June Recap

Lots of exciting things have happened this month. Here are a few of those that we have reported previously on PGD...
That's it for this month's news round-up. Please keep on coming back to post about your game development and Pascal programming interests and exciting news. This site is here for the community to share and help create your creative and fun ideas. This is your community and it's what you are willing to help make it. Till next month...