PGD Dog Fight Competition

[savage]

Appologies for the delay in getting back to everyone, I have been ill the last couple of days,

Balaras : you only need to provide one executable for either win32, OR, Linux OR Mac. If you provide more, that would also be great, but it is not compulsory.

Chris : on your iBook do you have SDL installed? If you do have FPC, SDL and MacOS X, please have a look at the FreePascal forum @ http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...pic.php?t=1768 as I have a question for you.

Sascha : Coding style will not be judged in this competition, maybe next time. The reason being that I would expect most people will write fairly clean code, not necessarily commenting everything meticulously, but at least using descriptive variables and using some nice spacing, with some comments, thus making it at least readable. I believe that writing well structured code helps in the long term in allowing the code to be more maintainable. So it should be standard practise, rather then something that is done only when the "outside world" will see it.
I hope you understand my point.

[lithander]

Hi,

I've still not decided if I take part or not. What causes me problems is the precise meaning of the word "Dogfight" and thus what kind of game-ideas meet the contests topic and what does not.

The in my eyes most fitting translation of a dogfight would be some kind of "aerial engagement between fighter planes" like i read it in an definition. But a topic like that wouldn't leave much room for original ideas!

Another definition I've read was "a fiercly disputed contest" wich would allow almost all kind of games where a player competes with another player or AI.

If anybody could help me with clarifying what kind of games are accepted and what kind of games don't meet the topic, that would be pretty cool!
-lith

[Eriken]

I'll quote something Savage wrote in one of the first posts:

as stated in the rules section the opponents can be anything from bacteria to solar systems, so humans are acceptable.

That should give you some other choices than airplanes
_____
Eriken

[Traveler]

That should give you some other choices than airplanes

True, but the idea basically is kept the same, so Erikens question still stands.
With dogfight I think of two entities chasing eachother, usually in some kind of arena, till one of them is killed or destroyed.

However, in arcade based racing games there usually is dogfight system, where the player tries to stay ahead of a cpu (or a ghost, which is actually the player, but from a earlier game)

I asked a the question earlier, if it would be considered a dogfight when the opponent was not destroyed/killed, but rather too late to reach an objective. This was also allowed.

The term 'objective' however, might be too general. For examples, I doubt, a game in which two players have to build something, say a factory and produce 5 units of product X, is considered a dogfight.

Or is it?

[Eriken]

I think if you really want to, you can read anything into "battle" and "dog fight".. It might mean different things to different people as well.

Battle of wits, 2 opponents in a game of Jeopardy?

I guess the question is what Savage's definition of the term "battle" is.

And then again, you can just create something and if it doesn't fit the rules in the end you'll have accomplished several things anyways:

1. Completed a game
2. Given something to the community in the form of ideas and source-code
3. And maybe had a good time

* Eriken hands the microphone over to Savage

[savage]

Traveller, to me a Dog Fight is intense competition or dueling between 2 things. I have tried to keep it as general as possible, but maybe it is too general. For me there has to be an element of adrenaline involved in playing the game against the competition, be it AI or human. But the intencity can be achieved in many ways either using a twitch type system or using suspense.

If others think the scope it too general, please speak up.

[Huehnerschaender]

OK, here is my interpretation of DogFight.

Two dogs byting each other until one dies :lol:

*Dirk, get more serious please* Ok!

In my overmodest opinion, a dogfight is something like a combat one on one. There are two individuals (Spaceship, airplane, people, animals, bacterials, sperms, whatever you want) who are fighting until one is defeated. So the winners is the last man standing. It has nothing to do with RTS, RPG, Action Adventure, Racing Game etc.

All other thoughts like building up towns, factorys, etc. are fitting in other game categories like RTS or something similar.

I guess the intention of savage was to bring a contest to life which is as simple as possible concerning gameplay ( so there is not too much of programming AI), because then the maximum number of participants will raise from all those unhappy programmers who never finished a project.
And so there are many, many completed game (samples) for other programmers (newbies and advanced) to take a look at the doing and to learn (and maybe to do better in the future). Thats a very good way to keep the PGD alive and to fulfill our all dream -> Delphi is good to develop games!

The Delphi/Pascal community has nearly nothing to present. This contest can change this.

So please, make DogFight games, and don't plan to make your project as big as possible with features no one else might think of etc.
Because then you will not finish your projects until march -> no one will see it / no one wants to take a look at it.... just another unfinished game which will never be finished. We need references.... That's my point of view.

Greetings,
Dirk

PS: I recommend that we (who have already begun with the dogfight-contest) will post things like screenshots etc in the "my projects" forum. Then you can see if you are doing right, see what others think about your work (maybe some graphics are not ok, gameplay sucks, etc), and especially find help for some mind-burning questions.
Don't mind someone could steal your idea! The game will be open sourced anyway

-> Wow, I think if we all work together, everyone doing his best, we could finally find out the specialties of each other and so we could work as a big "PGD-Team". One is good at graphics, one has knowledge about AI, one about OpenGL one about bla bla bla... We could and would really help each other!

EDIT:
Somewhere in this forum I found something like: "Shhhh, don't tell him the solution of his problem, otherwise he will win the contest!'"
Ok, this statement is meant as fun, I know
But we all should help each other because we all have the same intention. Making games in Delphi which will be successful. We will never make Halflife 3 or Doom 4 but maybe we can make games which are loved by the commonality.

[LP]

I actually agree with Huehnerschaender and would like to suggest that games stick to the original idea of dog-fight and well, keep things as small and compact as possible. The idea is not to have a massive multiplayer game here that runs distributed across several networks with hardcore 3D graphics, etc. (it's an exaregation to show my point ). I think there are infinite number of possibilites to make a game in Dog-Fight theme. With enough creativity and few lines of code you can make a good game which is *fun* to play. Believe me or not, when a person starts playing a video game which is not fun, no matter how good the special effects or the features of the game are, I can assure you that this game won't last on that person's hard-drive. It's like a Delphi2005 which with all its great features quickly disappoints you loading for like 10 minutes and then "Access violation in dcc90.dll..." message when you point your mouse at "class" keyword. (j/k yet, too bad I bought D2005 so quickly...)
Even though I wanted it to be more a technical challange (size limit, graphics , time limit), this contest, in my opinion, has a very wide range of possibilities and I think we should help each other here so that all contest entries will work as an example for PGD Maybe even forming teams would be nice idea... (I see a plenty of programmers in here... working in a team is much more fun than doing on your own, you know )

Cheers,
Lifepower

[WILL]

Alot of what you have just said Huehnerschaender, is not that far off, in fact most of it is right on the money. The whole idea of the contest was to bring a greater interest in developing games in Pascal by way of friendly competition. cuz... I know, Dom told me.

We will never make Halflife 3 or Doom 4 but maybe we can make games which are loved by the commonality.

Now, now! This is not entirely true. It is possible just not all that probable. Afterall Mr. Carmack himself is considering releasing the source to Quake 3... The community translated 2 why not 3. One day... one day. :twisted:

[LP]

Err, didn't see this one...

We will never make Halflife 3 or Doom 4...

We won't, because these names are probably their own trademarks.

Mr. Carmack himself is considering releasing the source to Quake 3

And what's so special about it? I mean, if Microsoft decides to release the full source code of Windows, it'll be news... forgive my skeptism, but besides 3D engine I don't see any other thing we could learn from Quake3 source code (and talking about 3D engines, I've seen either on FlipCode, GameDev or elsewhere hobbyist people making 3D engines you have never dreamt of). Can we beat HL2 or UT2004? I believe we can and we will