Pascal Game Development FAQ

Here you can find answers to questions about how the board works. Use the links or search box below to find your way around.

What is PGD?

Pascal Game Development, or PGD for short, is an independent game developer community for programmers and other developers who use Pascal and Object Pascal based software tools for making games and other game development tools.

Sure Object Pascal is not the industry standard programming language in the world right now, but we love the language because of it's ease of use and relatively short learning curve. Since there are so few sites dedicated to the usage of Pascal out there this community here serves as a beacon for everyone who uses either of the languages to come and learn new things in their native programming language of choice.

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A brief history: The beginnings of PGD started with two separate web sites. One a news announcement site called Delphi Gamer ran by Dominique Louis (aka savage) and Dean Ellis (aka technomage) established in 2001. The other was a public forums community site called DGDev ran by Ian (aka BlueCat) established in late 2002. In 2004 both sites had been gaining in popularity and in overall importance to the greater Pascal community of game developers. At this time the Free Pascal compiler and sister Lazarus IDE project had been gaining in kind of dependability, functionality and popularity that only the Delphi compiler and IDE suite had known. Jason McMillen (aka WILL) a member of DGDev and reporter for DelphiGamer for about a year had pitched the idea to merge the two popular sites and make them into a single entity for those seeking to be involved in making games with Delphi and other Pascal and Object Pascal based tools. Community members and site webmasters got excited about the idea and were on board to make this happen. Perpetration were made to create the site under the hands of Jason McMillen, who programmed and Alexander Rosendal, who did the art work for the first PGD website.

PGD 1.0 was launched on the 14th of December 2004 using a modified version of phpBB and would end up being ran by Jason McMillen and Dominique Louis as co-founders. BlueCat is also considered a co-founder of the PGD community, however his participation unfortunately did not carry over to the combined site project. In fact very few Staff members from the original DGDev forums actively participate in the PGD community anymore. Along with the launch of the new site, there was a game developer competition for all site members ran by Dominique Louis called the 'PGD Dogfight Competition.' This was the beginnings of not only the PGD community, but of the 'PGD Annual' yearly game developers' competitions as well. More can be read about the PGD Annual in the FAQ. See this section under PGD General Site Information -> PGD Annual Competitions. Eventually due to career obligations most of the site maintenance and decision control went solely to Jason McMillen.

In early 2007, Jason McMillen, stepped down as Webmaster and Staff Manager of PGD due to work and career obligations, passing the torch on to Christina Warne and Alexander Rosendal as the new Webmasters and Staff Managers. Approximately a year later, due to a plague of security problems the aging phpBB software would be replaced and overhauled in early 2009 with a version of SMF 1.x under Alexander Rosendal with the aid of Christina Warne. This gave the community some stability in the forums, plus added security and functionality which was found lacking with PGD 1.0.

In 2010, Jason McMillen returned to the PGD community to help regain some of the lost enthusiasm that has dwindled over the last few years. With renewed energy and a major plan to migrate the site to a new software, regain some lost interest in the site and increase promotion of the community to new members, perpetration were made to reboot the PGD website creating a PGD 3.0 using the vBulletin 4.x software. The move would bring a huge technology upgrade adding many new features and allow for future plans to do some exciting things not previously done in the community.

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