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  • PGD News Round-up for July 2011

    Welcome to another, yet exciting, month of news announcements in this PGD News Round-up for July 2011. Quite a lot of stuff has been going on this month including the final submissions of the 1st PGD Challenge mini game development competition, the Lazarus project's new website and a launch date finally announced for Delphi XE 2. Read on below to find out more about these and other awesome things that happened this month.



    David wants more PGD

    A really nice mention from David I. of Embarcadero on his blog about 'Want more games...'. David has been blogging like crazy lately about all kinds of things. One of those things is games and game development. He has listed both the Pascal Game Development community and Pascal Gamer Magazine as good places to start. Also he gave praise to Jordi Coll’s Thundax Physics Engine, Newton Game Dynamics, Cast II Game Engine, Asphyre Sphinx game framework, and JEDI-SDL. He has also been playing with OpenCL in Delphi using Michal Pohanka's OpenCL headers for OpenCL 1.1 for Delphi.

    Read David's blog post on his 'Sip from the Firehose' right here.


    New Lazarus Website

    Well alright, the new site is still very much like the old one, but they have switched the software they use and changed the theme to make it nicer to look at. Much of the same functionality exists, but there are a few exceptions such as a direct image link to the new Lazarus Book and the news page is much cleaner.

    Check out the new Lazarus website at the same location on the web at lazarus.freepascal.org.


    Dreaming in Many Languages

    Cezar Wagenheimer of the new Green Sauce Games has been hard at work adding support for all you European puzzle fans and your local languages in his recently released Dreams of a Geisha game published by Big Fish Games. You can play the game in English, French and Spanish on both Mac and Windows. Planned languages include; German, Dutch, Italians, Swedish, Portugese, Danish and Japanese. Work is also bing done to port Dreams of a Geisha to iOS for iPad users.

    Follow Dream of a Geisha's future development at www.greensaucegames.com.


    The Lion is out of it's cage!

    Well over a year of speculation and rumours about the upcoming update to the Mac OS X operating system, the newest version 'Lion' is now out and available on the Mac App Store and at your nearest Apple Store. Contrairy to the most popular rumour it would seem that for the most part SDL is perfectly fine on the new version of Mac OS X (10.7). There was speculation that due to some dropped support for internal OpenGL functionality within the Xcode tools for Lion that there may be conflicts with Xcode 4 and SDL, however since Mac OS X 10.7 has been released weeks ago, that suspicion has been squashed by a number of FPC users. Worry not future Mac developers, SDL is still a go for all who run Lion!

    Read about Mac OS X 10.7 aka Lion at www.apple.com.


    Delphi 64-bit coming in August

    As announced by Embarcadero, Delphi XE 2 will be launched during Delphi Day 2011 in Buenos Aires, Argentina on the 24th of August. It is said to include the growing in-demand 64-bit support for Windows platforms. Embarcadero and Borland before them took a lot of flak for not including 64-bit all these years, however the wait is now over. Hopefully this will be the start of all that talk from their PR people about Delphi soon to arrive "everywhere." Time will tell, but at least we are getting 64-bit next month as mentioned. One questions remains with this however, will we get a Starter Edition of XE 2?

    Read more about Delphi Day 2011 in Buenos Aires this August here.


    Hassle-Free Development on Mac

    Johannes Stein, aka Stoney, has posted a new tutorial on his Freeze Development blog explaining how we can finally develop much easier natively on Mac OS X. His tutorial includes how you can modify your projects to compile right into OS X App bundles and how you can debug your SDL games right in the Lazarus IDE. This is a must read for all those who are currently or interested in developing for Mac.

    Read this awesome tutorial at www.freeze-development.com.


    PGD Challenge: Total Success

    Well the competition is almost over, at least the development portion is anyway. And even though the results of this new mini competition has not yet be judged tallied and presented, I'd still classify the 1st PGD Challenge a complete success. The purpose of the PGD Challenge mini game development competition was to gauge interest based on advertising using some of the currently used mediums such as Twitter, Facebook, the forums themselves and posting on other sites and inform those key people connected to the community to gather enough people to make a small competition viable.

    This also has proven the worth of such events like the PGD Challenge and the planned PGD Annual this winter. Having tested just a few of the ways we can spread the word about these types of events through the PGD Challenge, I'm going to go further and expand on advertising for the PGD Annual. Hopefully we will have quite the same success on a PGD Annual scale as we have seen before during the 2006 PGD Annual competition.

    Thank you to all who have taken part, both judges & competitors alike as well as those great bloggers, news posters and twitters out there who have helped make this event start off on the right foot. I hope to see you all back at it for the next one, which I am most certain will happen thanks to all of you.


    PP4S: Testing Tutorial

    The Pascal Programming for Schools website has added a new tutorial to their catalog that explains the importance and method of testing your code. Topics include black box testing, white box testing and automated testing. A fine read and good for all those of you who want to get back to your basics of the computer science of programming.

    Read the new tutorial at www.pp4s.co.uk.


    GameDev.net Marketplace

    We announced last month that GameDev.net was bringing back it's Image of the Day feature, well now I'd like to mention another newly added feature to the game development community site, the Marketplace. This new feature allows you guys, the developers, to purchase assets designed for an indie budget from one place for your game prototyping. There are different licences that each piece of work offers and you can shop around. This marketplace store is fairly new so there is not a huge selection yet, but in time it can grow and what is there is pretty nice so far.

    Also if you are an artist (graphics or music) and wish to make a small stream of cash for yourself, feel free to get a GameDev.net account, if you already don't have one and sell some of your own made assets for others to use.

    Get more details about this at www.gamedev.net.

    News Recap for July

    In case you missed it again, here is that link to the Delphi Certification video explaining how you can get yourself your own certified status as a Certified Delphi Developer or go for the big title of Certified Master Delphi Developer. A credential which Embarcadero insists will help you show off your worth to companies looking to hire Delphi-based developers in their companies.



    Don't forget to check out the new Lazarus book available from the publishers of Blaise Pascal Magazine. Here is a video explaining what 'Lazarus: The Complete Guide' is all about. Go to the site where you can buy it here.



    The Free Pascal meets FPC website hit it's 10,000 views this month. This site is a great resource with plenty of tutorials explaining how you can work with SDL to make your own projects while using the Free Pascal compiler. Check out this great site, and one of our affiliates at www.freepascal-meets-sdl.net.

    Last but not least I must mention the latest updates to the following projects; Michalis Kamburelis' Kambi VRML Game Engine, Sascha Willems' Projekt W game, William Cairns' updated S2DL game library and Jarrod Davis' Simvector Games brand SvBasic, SvEngine and SvPascal projects.


    That's if for this month. I hope it was a great month for you too. Keep coming back for more news and announcement for all your Pascal-based game development needs and information. Have a great weekend!
    Comments 4 Comments
    1. paul_nicholls's Avatar
      paul_nicholls -
      This is a really great roundup Jason

      cheers,
      Paul
    1. Traveler's Avatar
      Traveler -
      Yes it was. Nice to see we got some exposure in David's blog, too.
    1. code_glitch's Avatar
      code_glitch -
      Good shirt, great movie, excellent round up - been away from both home and the interwebs so this speeds up my day. A lot. Cheers.
    1. phibermon's Avatar
      phibermon -
      I've informed Mirage that Cast got a mention, he'll be pleased with that