View Poll Results: What tools are you currently using to write your games with?

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  • Delphi

    13 37.14%
  • Free Pascal

    18 51.43%
  • Lazarus

    19 54.29%
  • Delphi Prism / Oxygene for .NET

    0 0%
  • Oxygene for Java

    3 8.57%
  • Oxygene for Mac/iOS (Nougat Beta)

    0 0%
  • Smart Mobile Studio

    2 5.71%
  • Other (Tell us please...)

    6 17.14%
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Thread: What tools are you currently using to makes games with these days? - 2013

  1. #11
    it is quite amusing to see fpc with 9 votes and lazarus with 10. how does one use lazarus without fpc?=)
    btw I use fpc + lazarus for all my cross platform development and smart mobile studio for htm5.
    Last edited by Dan; 27-02-2013 at 10:59 AM.

  2. #12
    I didn't choose both, because i know there are people that use Free Pascal but not Lazarus for games. But it's harder to make multiselect poll with exclusive choices

  3. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
    Have you checked out Udacity yet? They have an HTML5 Game Dev course on there. It's basically free university education, online style. It's pretty cool I've started a CS 101 course with them to try it out. Fairly decent.
    Oh, that looks amazingly interesting. I'll definitely take a closer look.
    Best regards,
    Cybermonkey

  4. #14
    I`m currently switching from Delphi to Lazarus since I got single window mode working properly in Windows as well as Ubuntu. Thats the only thing I always hated about Lazarus, the Delphi 7 interface. Delphi XE lite which I have been using for the last few years work fine but is of course not exactly legal

  5. #15
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Freepascal + Lazarus. I much prefer Lazarus's old Delphi 7 style interface to the newer Delphi interfaces but then I also love the classic GIMP layout I use NetBeans for all other languages I code in (other than of course .NET development which is VS)

    I'll also add that I still use Hisoft Pascal on my Amiga now and then to write various tools.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  6. #16
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Well at only 23 members voting, the results are seeming to reflect what I've suspected. More FPC/Lazarus than Delphi and a small uptake on Oxygene and Smart. Throw in a few oddities too.

    BTW I didn't mean to include other non-code tools into this poll. I just wanted to see where all the current ones stood to-date for making games.

    In my opinion, Delphi is a business tool not a game development suite anymore. Maybe before, but money has changed hands and the product has been morphed into more of a business application environment than an all-round general software tool. Not to say it couldn't be used as such and it can continue to be used just as it was, but why would you pay the cost a large business would pay for all those extras you just don't need in game development.

    FPC/Lazarus seem to be the new default and Oxygene is slowly catching up in the game dev arena --most likely due to it's new compiler technology initiatives.
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  7. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
    FPC/Lazarus seem to be the new default and Oxygene is slowly catching up in the game dev arena --most likely due to it's new compiler technology initiatives.
    Speaking of Oxygene, is it possible to use the free command line compiler with Java game engines? I think you mentioned that you are currently using libgdx with Oxygene, but I don't know if you're using the IDE or the command line compiler.
    Best regards,
    Cybermonkey

  8. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
    In my opinion, Delphi is a business tool not a game development suite anymore. Maybe before, but money has changed hands and the product has been morphed into more of a business application environment than an all-round general software tool. Not to say it couldn't be used as such and it can continue to be used just as it was, but why would you pay the cost a large business would pay for all those extras you just don't need in game development.
    I would say this is true for desktop. However, desktop is losing its market share now to mobiles and huge piracy don't make it a very good development platform. Add Windows 8 fiasco to that, discontinuation of XNA, and new Microsoft policies forcing to buy expensive Visual Studio to allow running DX debugging tools (with the recent Platform Update, you cannot use PIX) - it's a dying market. I think only Macs at this moment are stable, but still, I think they'll be giving terrain to mobiles continuously, with desktop/laptop becoming an elite only / developer-only tools.

    On mobile front, Oxygene and Smart Studios are non-native and forgive me for saying that, they are no more useful than any other Java or HTML5 tools out there, even worse because they are not-native to non-native conversion tools (i.e. they are intermediaries). This is the same as Oxygene for .NET: you'd better use C# instead, as it is also a very good language. If I would develop games on non-native, I'd pursue HTML5 directly, but there are only a very limited kind of games you can make with that due to performance limitations, especially on mobile. For that, you *need* to go for XCode. FreePascal barely works on Android and iOS, albeit with RTL bugs and it's a pain in the ass to configure, not to mention that you need to develop everything from scratch, starting from keyboard input to window management, etc.

    On a positive side, the incoming Mobile Studio with Delphi for iOS, I think, would be the only native Pascal compiler that can be used in practice for making games on iOS and later for Android (by the way, there is a beta program where you can already try it). I'm not saying that because I'm working with EMBT (in fact, this is a minus, as it's *very* difficult!), but because you can take existing Pascal code, press F9 and see it running on device in less than 2 minutes, and it's *native*. To do the same with FreePascal, it took me 8 hours (the whole day!) to make it work with iOS 6.0 (and forget even about 6.1.2!), and still only a handful of APIs were available, while you're stuck in XCode editor or even console compilation. This is why I've been with EMBT for more than a year now, as without Delphi for Mobiles, I think Pascal has no future there, I myself would abandon it.

  9. #19
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
    I would say this is true for desktop. However, desktop is losing its market share now to mobiles and huge piracy don't make it a very good development platform. Add Windows 8 fiasco to that, discontinuation of XNA, and new Microsoft policies forcing to buy expensive Visual Studio to allow running DX debugging tools (with the recent Platform Update, you cannot use PIX) - it's a dying market. I think only Macs at this moment are stable, but still, I think they'll be giving terrain to mobiles continuously, with desktop/laptop becoming an elite only / developer-only tools.

    On mobile front, Oxygene and Smart Studios are non-native and forgive me for saying that, they are no more useful than any other Java or HTML5 tools out there, even worse because they are not-native to non-native conversion tools (i.e. they are intermediaries). This is the same as Oxygene for .NET: you'd better use C# instead, as it is also a very good language. If I would develop games on non-native, I'd pursue HTML5 directly, but there are only a very limited kind of games you can make with that due to performance limitations, especially on mobile. For that, you *need* to go for XCode. FreePascal barely works on Android and iOS, albeit with RTL bugs and it's a pain in the ass to configure, not to mention that you need to develop everything from scratch, starting from keyboard input to window management, etc.

    On a positive side, the incoming Mobile Studio with Delphi for iOS, I think, would be the only native Pascal compiler that can be used in practice for making games on iOS and later for Android (by the way, there is a beta program where you can already try it). I'm not saying that because I'm working with EMBT (in fact, this is a minus, as it's *very* difficult!), but because you can take existing Pascal code, press F9 and see it running on device in less than 2 minutes, and it's *native*. To do the same with FreePascal, it took me 8 hours (the whole day!) to make it work with iOS 6.0 (and forget even about 6.1.2!), and still only a handful of APIs were available, while you're stuck in XCode editor or even console compilation. This is why I've been with EMBT for more than a year now, as without Delphi for Mobiles, I think Pascal has no future there, I myself would abandon it.
    I'm afraid you're quite wrong. The desktop space has actually shown nearly a 4% increase on last year in bulk sales to business (and increasing in home as well, it's not like people like us are replacing our PCs with tablets, it's idiots who would never of bought a PC that are now buying tablets) all of this idiot lantern stuff in the media about the desktops days being numbered is payed for by tablet manufactures. They want people to believe that tablets are the future but they're simply not, a keyboard and a mouse will give any worker higher productivity in their daily tasks than a virtual keyboard (that covers up screen real estate, what a retarded idea) and fingertips, which having a usable contact area of half a centimeter results in large clunky interfaces where you can barely fit anything on the screen. All business know this, you'll never be in a job where everybody is glaring down at a tablet (without a docking station, which arguably results in a desktop PC, so all you've really done is replace a powerful desktop operating system with some over simplistic childrens toy) and if you ever do, leave straight away because that company prefers shiny things to say, sound business sence.

    Tablets are for mobile use, light browsing etc they will *never* replace desktops, they will only complement them and be web devices for people that wouldn't of bought a PC. Only a technology that offers higher productivity would replace PCs. Tablets are a step backwards in terms of technology and productivity. They are far slower than desktops, totally none upgradable, pretty much impossible to repair and are engineered to be simple enough for a child to use. Which is great for children but not very appealing if you have a PhD in computer science.

    The concept of the tablet replacing the PC is exactly like all those 1950's TV programs saying we'll all have a bipedal robot doing our cooking by the 1980's. The reality is that they they fill a neich that laptops once had, now laptops are for people that need a PC on the move to do work, tablets are for people that are bored on the move.

    And as for Freepascal, again, I'm afraid you're wrong. there are plenty of IOS pascal games and engines. It supports tons more platforms than delphi does, including the 64bit power-pc architecture on the PS3. And don't forget that if you're compiling your apps for IOS with delphi, guess what? it's using a custom version of FPC to compile for ARM! and the FPC core development team includes some highly talented people that have worked on numerous compilers, they are just as talented if not more so than anybody EMBT have working for them and they easily outnumber the EMBT compiler team which I'd be surprised if it consisted of any more than one person.

    Delphi is totally inappropriate for making games now, you're paying for the business components, the compiler is the thing that gets the *least* attention. If what you payed for was the compiler, then how come after so many many years have they only recently supported IOS/Mac and STILL don't support Linux.

    Not supporting Linux for games development? with Steam and the upcoming Steambox and Android? (which is linux with a custom X11 replacement).

    And yes, with FPC you do have to do more work to get your games working cross platform but that's true of C++ too. But it's not like you've got to do it over and over again, just a few days and you can have a framework working on all the major OSes and from then on, the idea of paying for somthing like Delphi is utterly laughable.

    And to top it all off, Delphi = Lazarus. The fact that delphi has a compiler is a mute point, FPC is a full blown cross platform compiler that can work independantly of Lazarus and has a full build system comparable to how it's done in the GNU toolchain. FPC is like the GNU C++ compiler, it's like LLVM+Clang. it's a serious peice of kit for Posix style development, Delphi is more like visual studio, it's a propietory tech for developing desktop style applications and I wouldn't use it ever again for the same reasons I avoid all propietory tech - it's future is not guaranteed. FPC? even if I'm the only person working on it, I know it will always have a future. My hard work and investment would not be lost just because a company decided to sell up.

    I mean just look at all those poor XNA sods, all those years perfecting their knowledge of the API and now it's all useless, total waste of effort. Same with silverlight and a dozen other dead techs.

    Edit : sorry one more thing Macs are stable? you do know that OSX is going to be replaced with IOS on their desktops in the very near future? and they're not microsoft, these are the people that switch architectures and drop Carbon. They did that to force devs onto Cocoa in order to make the transition to IOS. They care even less about backwards compatibilty than Sony!
    Last edited by phibermon; 02-03-2013 at 05:32 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  10. #20
    Phibermon, I know that some people are often resistant to change, but mobile devices are the current trend. For instance, my partner has got Samsung tablet, connected USB hub, then keyboard and mouse - you get desktop experience. Just imagine, you go to work, take your powerful quad-core mobile device, connect it to display and have your own PC whenever you go. The hardware on these mobiles is becoming ridiculously powerful. My wife, for instance, for finances and other stuff, uses iPad exclusively - her laptop haven't been turned on for months now. As soon as I get Office and development tools on a mobile, I'm going to switch completely too.

    Yes, I got insanely powerful desktop, which I use for work, but I wouldn't mind connecting some powerful phone to my two monitors, keyboard and mouse. I've already been using my Macbook Air, which was very comfortable to bring on the plane and is pretty light, yet has Ivy Bridge Core i7 on it. If they could fit that thing into a smaller phone - that would be great.

    I don't think desktops are going to disappear, but I do think their market share will continue to shrink, same as with laptops. Whether I'm wrong or not - we'll find out soon enough.

    Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
    It supports tons more platforms than delphi does, including the 64bit power-pc architecture on the PS3.
    There is a popular saying: Jack of all trades, master of none.

    Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
    And don't forget that if you're compiling your apps for IOS with delphi, guess what? it's using a custom version of FPC to compile for ARM!
    Delphi in Mobile Studio is not using FPC.
    Last edited by LP; 02-03-2013 at 09:16 PM. Reason: fixed url :-/

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