Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[WILL]

I will still say that with Free Pascal and/or Lazarus you have next to the best portability for your code though.

And even if you can't figure out how to rig your game for the App Stores on Mac, there is still gamer communities like Steam where I'm sure publishing doesn't require Apple's more strict validation process. You can also release the game under both Mac and Windows in parallel there too which would be easier to manage having only one distribution system to deal with.

[SilverWarior]

Desura http://www.desura.com/ alows distribution of games for Windows, Mac and even Linux platform.
As far as I know they don't have such strict rules for validation as their primal goal is also to distribute games which are still under development (great for indie comunity).
Their validation proces is mostly used only to prevent spreading of malicious software (viruses and such).
They alow you to publish as many patches for your software as you want and as often as you want. Only drawback of Desura is that their validation process takes sometimes even more than a weak to be finished, so publishing of patches through their platform isn't best as you need to wait for each patch to be validated and therefore wait for response from your gaming community to the latest patch. But even steam has patch validation the only thing is that their validation proces is usually quicker.
Another advantage of Desura (atleast by my opinion) is that while they do offer special software to alow of downloading, installing and keeping your games updated (similar as Steam client) they don't force you to use it. If you wan't you can always go and download a standalone instalation for desired game directly from their webpage.

[Sascha Willems]

I already took a look at desura, and since PJW is already listed at IndieDB I too think that this would be the easiest way to get my game onto a game distribution platform, so i'll definalty take a look at it once it's final. I hope that'll add even more players to the game's audience

And btw (sort of a historic moment) : After throwing out all Delphi XML-stuff (changing thousands of lines of code) and putting some ifdefs here and there I finally got Projekt W to compile with lazarus yesterday! And not only did it compile but it also worked and the game booted into the main menu without any problems. So next step is to remove the few windows releated things and get it to compile with Linux (and later one MacOSX). I hope to get a running linux build to compile this weekend.

And I also noticed that FPC / Laz have made big steps since my first attempts at trying to "port" my game over there some years ago. Linking and compiling is pretty fast and debugging, though not quite as nice as in Delphi is well implemented. With all the problems and limitations Delphi has this combo is getting more and more attractive

[Rodrigo Robles]

Yeah please let me know when the Linux version comes out!

[Sascha Willems]

Will do so, and I'll also announce it over here at PGD, so don't worry

And yesterday I reached a "historical" milestone! After roughly a week of hard work (5~6h each day, after 8h of coding at work) I fnally to the game to compile with FPC / Lazarus :



Most time consuming part of this procedure was replacing all the Delphi XML-stuff. I really like how XML is impelemented in Delphi, but it's based on MS-XML COM, so it's windows only and it differs in terms of coding from the XML-implementation for FPC. And since I had to replace several thousands lines of code I opted for NativeXML, cause it doesn't need external libs, works with Delphi and FPC and should work an all platforms I want to move to. And it's much faster than the Delphi implementation. Other than that I only had to put in a few ifdefs for different unit names or generics definitions and now the game compiles with Delphi and Lazarus (I want to keep all options open, maybe Embarcadero's mobile Studio will allo easy porting to android).

And even better, the game is also fully playable :



There are a few missing text labels and some visual glitches, but nothing that can't be fixed within a few days.

The next step now is to remove all windows specific stuff, and that's not a lot. Creation of render context has to be implemented for the other platforms, but otherwise I don't use OS specific stuff in a lot of places. So I'm pretty confident that I'll have a running Linux version up very soon, hopefully to be followed by a Mac OSX version (problem here : I don't own OSX, and as far as I know I can't compile for it without).

[AirPas]

And it's much faster than the Delphi implementation.

do you mean fpc version is much faster than delphi one ?

[Sascha Willems]

do you mean fpc version is much faster than delphi one ?

That was related to the XML-Implementation of Native XML. XML-Functionality in Delphi is based on MS-XML which is pretty slow. So for the next release, all XML-based stuff will be faster (loading and saving games, startup in general, etc.).

And btw. I finally got Lazarus set up under a current Ubuntu. Actually I hate the Ubuntu user interface (worst UI design I've ever seen) and getting Lazarus installed there almost drove me made (in the end I had to install 10 ! packages), but it's now all set up and I'll soon start getting it to compile there