What is the deal with PGD?

[czar]

I think PGD has got itself into a vicious circle. There are two things

1. Because there are only a handful of people posting it means that for an outsider it looks intimidating. So people don't bother posting. It makes the forum come across a bit elitist.

2. Following on from it being a bit elitist is that the interests in the forum of the hardcore posters tend to be a bit far removed from what the average punter is up to. I would hazard a guess that the majority of people programming in pascal are in fact using Delphi and that most are working with Windows and using easier to use wrappers like DelphiX, Asphyre and Omega etc. So they get here and people are going on about OpenGL, lazarus, free pascal and linux. I believe that puts off lots of prospective people. I have seen the following appear quite often as a reply to a newbie posting: "Great demo when are you porting it to Lazarus, linux or whatever?"

Anyway that is my rant. I would be interested to hear what people have to say...

BTW no offense intended

[lief]

agreed. delphi game development is small enough let alone the free pascal and linux and whatever. i get put off by that myself... im here to post about pascal code in general, and the 'standard' packages... follows on from my comment on the categorizing. that said, there is a place for almost any question on anything to do with delphi & pascal game dev with any package on any level, just because there aren't any questions doesn't mean there are any answers.

[Paulius]

I don?¢_~t think it?¢_~s an elitism thing, just somehow there are very few people over here that actually use these packages, it?¢_Ts not just for simpler packages (check GLScene forum), I believe that?¢_Ts the same reason cairnswm got no feedback on his GLXTreem articles, no active members seem to use it.

[lief]

like i said, there is a place here for nearly any question. 'just because there are no questions does not mean there are no answers.'

i know that I come here looking for a more meta-delphi-game-dev experience, rather than specific package help. I more likely to search the appropriate forum for such things eg. www.afterwarp.com is where I go for my asphyre questions (theres only about 13 topics in forum so far, and they answered two of my queries).

my reason for saying it may be offputting is that looking at a last post date of '1 Feb, 2003' (which is an exaggeration) can lead someone to believe that is no help available or not much activity in those areas.

combining certain groups together would create more active threads which in turn seem to lead to more posts. this has been covered however, and is out of the question.

in the meantime i'll post to whatever topics i have knowledge of, which rules out most specific packages (excepting delphix and asphyre), openGL, freepascal, gba, linux and mac questions. which leaves delphi, sound, art, music, ai, offtopic and projects.

I posted a message in a dead AI thread hoping for a discussion, but it seems as the question was answered it is considered dead? is this against this forum's etiquette (necropostilism )

to tell you the truth - this is an active thread so i am posting...

i am an active delphi game developer, but as this forum is fairly quiet since I've been here I have had not much call to post (excepting my projects). I'm a following poster, not a leading poster.

[Traveler]

You've got some good points there lief. Especially your last sentence

I'm a following poster, not a leading poster

sounds very familiar, as I consider myself to be in that category as well. Perhaps more people are like that.

'just because there are no questions does not mean there are no answers.'

That is true, but at the moment we don't seem to be having much questions at all. And the questions we do get are of an above average level. With that in mind, the idea stated by czar that this forum is becoming for the elite is not that far off, IMO.

I also agree with the idea posted by czar that most 'gameprogrammers' are still using the 'simple' packages DelphiX or Omega (not so sure about Asphyre). With the exception of DelphiX, Omega has a very good forum (click). So I can see why users there aren't going to post their questions here, because the chance to get an answer there is so much bigger.

I'm not really sure what we look like to the outside world. Could it really be that we scare off newcomers with our (Free)Pascal instead of Delphi? Our discussions about conversion to Linux instead of just for Windows?

[technomage]

Hi everyone

This place is pretty much the only site I visit regularly when I get time to go online. The number of posts have dropped off, but perhaps that's because it's summer :?: I know allot of people who only tend to be active online in the cold winter months. Personally I get to spend maybe 20 - 30 minutes on the site most evenings, the site is blocked from my work place so I post when I can.

I can understand the lack of feedback from articles cairnswm and WILL are probably the only ones who commented on the ones that I wrote. The work on part 3 has stopped as a result. But that said , I haven't commented on any articles either.....

The point about the libraries people use is a good one. It would be interesting to see which library was the most popular out of the members we have :idea:. I did some work on porting the A3D nGine to SDL a while back, and that project seems to have died, infact I think that last post in that forum was in 2003..

That all said I don't know where we go from here

Dean

[technomage]

Mmmmm

Could it really be that we scare off newcomers with our (Free)Pascal instead of Delphi? Our discussions about conversion to Linux instead of just for Windows?

That is a good point. Given that the most popular game platform on the PC is windows perhaps linux talk is scaring people off, or they are just not intersted in cross platform development..... food for thought....

[BlueCat]

Hey! :shock: Anyone remember me? :twisted:

Just wanted to let you all know I'm still around :salute:

I might start a poll, "Who remembers BlueCat?" :lol:

Been a while, just been so busy. I do miss the old days :cry: Just kidding

I think PGD is a great site and have decided to make the time (not sure how yet) to start posting again as much as I can, if you'll have me back that is :mrgreen:

[Traveler]

Now that's what I call a surprise!!

Welcome back BlueCat!

if you'll have me back that is

Are you kidding? You just made my day

[Paulius]

It's so great to see a returning face