Hey all you faithful PGD Members!

I'm finally posting another entry in my PGD Blog to tell you all about some of the great stuff that's been going on behind the scenes and what you will soon get to experience in the next few months.


Stayin' Alive & Kickin'

Well some of you might have noticed a little outage of the site just last month. Thanks to the efforts of Dominique Louis (savage), Christina Warne (AthenaOfDelphi) and Benjamin Gregg-Smith (code_glitch) that's as bad as it got while I was away on and off for the last month and a half.

The hosting responsibility of the site will soon be changing hands as savage will no longer manage this part of PGD's operations. I will be taking up the task of managing the financing of the hosting myself by the end of the year. For this, donations via PayPal (there is a button on the front page of the site) will greatly help with the cost of this on-going expense of running PGD. Dispite this change in responsibilities, we will still be providing a professional quality of service here at PGD so don't worry about there being much problems on this front as we change things around.

Big thanks of course to Ben and the other Moderators for helping to keep the spam to a minimum all over the last month or so as well. It just keeps piling up some days and it's a real pain so everyone chipping in to help nuke it all while letting in the honest new members to the site it a huge help. Thanks so much!


Annual or Challenge?

I was originally planning to start the execution of my plans for the 2011 PGD Annual competition, however I'm now considering changing things up. I know everyone loves when we have those big competitions and it's nice to think that we will be doing them every year. Truth is, we haven't had an "annual" competition in years since the PGD Staff that used to run it got a bit smaller. The label of Annual isn't really accurate anymore since we are not capable of actually running it each year at a similar time-frame. So I may just concede and stop trying to brand a yearly competition which doesn't actually happen as scheduled.

Now that I probably disappointed all of you... I am planning on now running a new PGD Challenge instead. With the success of the PGD Challenge as a smaller scale competition that was more accessible to the common crowd as well as students and professionals alike, I was planning on doing more in the future. Well that future might be sooner than I had announced before. With this little change-up, we will be able to actually run more competitions and since they won't be as big, there will be less long-term commitment issues. Plus there will be more opportunities for those who rarely compete, to jump into a new one less than a year down the road.

So with the outting of the huge Annual comes the high frequency of the quicker Challenge.


One More Thing!

In quoting a great pioneer who sadly passed on recently; I would like to discuss an idea that is in the early early planning stages and may very well depend on your own involvement and the involvement of those successful teams and individuals in the Pascal game programming world. There are hopes for a community ran and organized event next year in the form of an online conference right here on PGD. The idea is similar to what Embarcadero is doing with it's CodeRage event and all those neat webinars they like to hold year round.

Our idea would be somewhat different and would be tailored to how this community comes together using it's current resources. The idea would be based around contributing speakers who will conduct recorded briefings/talks on specific topics that they will submit for approval and we could also possibly have Q&A sessions of some kind afterward either live or in a forums style means which we can have the presenter answer them for you.

As I said this is very early in the planning stages and we have only discussed this with those interested in organizing the event a couple of times. I am personally interested in seeing how many individual people would be willing to do a session for the event. Anyone willing to voice out about it this early in the concept?

Considering the amount of volunteers that I have received for writing articles for Pascal Gamer Magazine, I know that there is enough people to present, but how many would be willing to do a video/audio(with slides/demo) recording and how many do we need to make it work? These are good questions to ask and it would be good to start early if we are to garner interest for next year's time-frame.


That's all I've got for now. Keep an eye out for more exciting things going on here at Pascal Game Development!