Thank you everyone in the Pascal community especially all of those who make games and tools to make games. It's been an exciting year so far with a lot of new things going on, I'm sure that 2012 will be even more exciting then the past year for game projects and exciting development tools. It's said a lot, but this is really the best time to be a Pascal programmer. I could talk in length about all the col stuff we've seen, but I think that it would be best done in a good old fashioned bullet list. Here it is...
2011 PGD Highlights: (and my own thoughts!)
- Delphi became cross-platform! (sorta!) ...and 64-bit!
- Embarcadero announced FireMonkey (cross-platform framework that's kinda like VCL)
- First Pascal game released on the Android Marketplace (FoembJump) and made open source later on
- A whole tone of commercial Pascal games released on the iTunes App Store! (Sushi's Quest, Dreams of a Geisha, Drawn 2, Mystic Diary)
- Oxygene for Java aka Cooper finally released (second option besides FPC for Android dev)
- RemObjects declares 'Oxygene' as a new language based off of Object Pascal
- There is a new physics engine in town. (Thundax even sounds pretty cool too)
- PGD starts a series of mini competitions (long live the PGD Challenge!)
- SDL will change it's software license (zlib license is good for iOS)
- Kambi VRML Engine changes to Castle Game Engine and hits 3.0 (not too shabby for a PGD Annual contestant!)
- Many game libraries updated to support iOS and Android (ZenGL, Terra, Asphyre and others)
- Steve Jobs died (rest in peace)
- Asphyre Sphinx makes it to 2.0! (oldest running graphics library for Pascal!)
- Pascal Gamer Magazine is now available on iPad! (1st issue, more to follow)
- Great Game Experiment fan site finally closed down. (it was a really neat AJAX-based site)
- Embarcadero gave us a low cost Delphi finally (but we don't get the fancy new cross-platform with it)
- Mac OS X Lion or 10.7.x is released (good? bad? you decide)
- Embarcadero starts handing out Delphi Certifications (well you have to pass the test first)
- Lazarus gets a complete guide! (in English! and a cool video explaining it too!)
- Lua4Delphi is released (the second Lua framework for Pascal so far)
- Terra Game Engine is born! (from the same code as the cool Sushi Quest iOS game)
- PGD Annual finally gets a showcase site (try out past competition entries!)
- PGD reaches out to students and projects for educators. (Dr. Norman Morrison is the man!)
- Newton Game Dynamics (physics engine) went open source
- Delphi developers got to play with the Kinect on Windows (would make such a neat dev tool!)
- TKinect translated headers released for Pascal developers.
- Jason McMillen talks about the PGD community in popular podcast! (it was pretty cool)
- Lazarus greatly improves usage on Mac OS X!
Well that's the year for ya! I may have missed a few minor things, but these are the big boys of the year. I hope that 2011 was good to you all and that 2012 turns out to be great. I'm looking forward to seeing what the community comes up with over the next year and beyond. Happy coding!
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