Open discussion: What game devs need from Delphi

[Sascha Willems]

First and foremost they need a free version of Delphi to get a foot into the game development community. Many people (including me) that did their game development with Delphi have moved over (at least partially) to Lazarus and FPC or other languages. Most of the stuff that makes Delphi great for application develeopment (which I'm earning my living with) is pretty useless for game development. I'd say you could remove 90% of the VCL-components for such a version. No need for database stuff, reporting tools, fancy VCL-styles and such.

For developing games you need direct access to a rendering API like OpenGL on all supported platforms. I've offered CodeGear / Embarcadero to include our headers several times without any real interest from them. The OpenGL headers included are like ten years old, miss all the current OpenGL stuff and are partially erratic, so including up-to-date headers for at least OpenGL would be the first step in the right direction. And someday we may get to a point where a group of us could develop an OpenGL (ES) based UI that could ship with delphi and be used for creating UIs in games.

As far as FireMonkey goes they should just drop it (at least for the free / game dev Delphi version). FM doesn't have a good reputation and isn't native at all. As a game developer with multiple targets in mind I want to use native API calls to create and manage my windows, and not some layer between like FM is.

And one really important thing (especially for Indies) are multiple platforms. They need to at least add native platform support for Mac OSX and Linux (Android would be great too, wonder how their announced implementation for that with XE5 looks like).

Along with that they need native ports of the IDE to those platforms too. The need to have two operating systems (one real, one a VM) and remote debugging to actually see and test your app on e.g. Mac OSX or Linux (if that'll ever get added) is cumbersome.

These are my initial thought's on this, and right now I think they'll have a hard time to compete with Lazarus/FPC on the game development front. I've evaluated XE4 and even made some Mac OSX apps with it, and compared to Lazarus they still have a long way to go, and since I moved over to multiple platforms I'm still baffled at how great this works with a free (open source) IDE and a free (open source) compiler, and how far Delphi is lagging (even down to the compiler and language features).

[Dan]

I have to agree with Sascha on several points. Even if Delphi was free it cannot compete with fpc/lazarus in terms of features valued by game developers. The first and the most important is a powerful cross platform compiler and delphi does not have that yet. So imo they should really concentrate on the compiler.

[LP]

The first and the most important is a powerful cross platform compiler and delphi does not have that yet. So imo they should really concentrate on the compiler.

Can you please elaborate more on that? What you feel needs to be improved? Are you talking about Intel x86, x64 or iOS/Android LLVM compiler?

[laggyluk]

When I look at Embarcadero's Delphi I see a nice but pricey tool for corporate/business use. For game dev we don't need all the vcl components but if we strip them then what's left? Lazarus is already ahead of Delphi when it comes to 'multiplatforming' so I don't know if it's worth the time to talk to Embarcadero. It would be nice to have cheap Delphi edition but since Lazarus is already here then do we really need it?

[phibermon]

I'm having a very long think about this one. The continual existence of Delphi in the commercial space is a positive thing for the language (which is what I *really* care about). It's in the languages best interests and therefore mine that Embarcaderos experience with Delphi in the marketplace stays well above the level of economic viability, preferably in the maniacal laughter profit range.

I will express my opinion in a more comprehensive manner when I've got my angle nailed down but what I'm thinking in a hypothetical conversation with 'the man' is basically this :

Rip out all the visual form stuff, components, the whole works. Forget a visual RAD tool, just an IDE is all we need (like codeblocks)

Have a template system along with updated headers etc for popular cross platform APIs, SDL, Native+OpenGL, SDL+OpenGL etc (like codeblocks)

The IDE must work native on Linux, Windows, Mac. The *free* competition doesn't have any issues with this or platforms that we'd not even expect. That is totally unacceptable, compiling on Windows for OSX, IOS etc is just a big messy cop out and you should be very ashamed. Same again for lack of Linux support. That's damn near commercial suicide. I mean, Delphi is pushed as the perfect tool for database style applications and it really is! so why on earth would you cut off a large portion of the market? especially in places like Call centers etc the people that roll out installations to large number of machines, more and more are switching to Linux to lower costs, governments across the world are doing the same, even to the extent of banning windows etc in some places. This is a large part of your primary market right? rapidly evolving database clients? ignore Linux support at your peril!

So basically, we need the code window (preferably with code completion etc) compiler, debugger, and community contributed or regularly maintained headers / interfaces for common APIs.

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Just don't let anybody in marketing get involved, they'll ruin it. They'll just try and cripple the product into an advertising platform for the more expensive versions. No doubt why cross platform support was removed from the previous basic versions of Delphi. This decision alone has made me personally highly resistant to even testing your new products. That cross platform support can be removed and stated as a 'feature' for more expensive versions? if you think that's acceptable then may I also suggest you charge extra for distribution DVDs that don't melt in the drive? perhaps you'd like to charge a subscription for the 'begin' and 'end' keywords? You get my point.

Edit : That's a little harsh, just don't remove cross platform from any version, it's not an additional feature, it's a basic fundamental expectation of any compiler + standard library/runtime etc. You *certainly* can't remove it when the free alternative not only has it but does it far better.

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On an unrelated note, replace your compiler with FPC or open source yours. you're playing a game of catchup that you'll never win and if you'd switched before now you'd already have Delphi on all the platforms and saved yourself a ton of money. For a product where the compiler takes a back-seat to the component features, I don't understand why you're so adamant about wasting money on your in-house compiler when you could of contributed to FPC instead (like Apple and all those really rich companies do with things like Linux + LLVM) and have your main selling points reaching the maximum potential market. I mean if the Delphi compiler so much better, how come it doesn't work on Linux? or PowerPC? or in fact all the sqillions of things that FPC works with? Yes I can appreciate that the design might be superior, cleaner etc but Betamax lost to VHS didn't it? just how much money will you have to spend on your compiler to reach FPC as it is now? and when you finally reach it, just how far ahead will FPC still be?

It's Lazarus you're loosing customers to, not FPC.

Adding users to the language in general creates more customers for you. Contribute to FPC, make it utterly awesome. Be Apple to LLVM and thou shall dominate. If you love some aspect of your compiler so much that it's preventing you from making this leap, then fork FPC or contribute it to FPC. You could have a large force of talented developers working on your compiler *for free* (plus your in-house devs), more pascal users in general due to excellent tools, more market reached by Delphi due to the vast platform support plus your marketing guys can harp on about the whole Open Source aspect in the blurb. It works for Apple, Google etc

[Dan]

Yes, Lifepower I am talking about the ios, and the non existent linux/android compiler.

[WILL]

Free isn't an option. They tried it and it wasn't sustainable. Judging from the conversations I've had with David over a year ago and Jim more recently, they pretty much told me that this is not something that they can do if they want to stay in business. And frankly why not pay for something of high value like developer tools if it improves the quality. So buying a set of good developer tools, I don't have a big problem with. (Considering that a lot of free versions of dev tools, esp. those from big companies are crap.)

Lazarus is a great exception for game development. If you love to make GUI-based applications with the form designer and you love your databases and crystal reports then Delphi is all skippy, where as Lazarus (though I recall they have a really stable form designer now) is still not complete and doesn't have the components community that EMBT has. However for game dev we don't need all that fluff, as I keep saying.

Embarcadero does have a new compiler (than the one we've seen for years that only does Windows) that's where all these new cross-compiler and mobile projects are coming from. David I. and I have discussed it over a year ago when he told me that the EMBT R&D guys were working on it. Well I guess it's good enough to start releasing products with now?

Here is a link to their Mobile Roadmap: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/42544

The question is how good is it? And how capable? Will the compiler it's self run ON Mac or Linux? Are they bringing out an IDE for either or will they allow something like Eclipse to hook into it? (I'd mention Lazarus IDE, but this would require asking them to support it as a new feature so it's not viable as a commercial solution.) And will things like the Android compiler (which is due out soon!) output into Java Byte code so that it can take advantage of native Android APIs and the environment it's self? I know a set of tools that already do this of course.

So far I've only seen demos and literature explaining the new Delphi cross-compiling roadmap as a better way to make business/GUI-based apps on mobile and across the desktop world. Which we can all give a flying monkey about. (Pun intended! ) What we want is to get into our APIs and game libraries without having to do brain surgery trying to take out crap that EMBT puts in our way. I would like to see some kind of OpenGL graphics demo running on all their targeting platforms from the same Delphi source that performs extremely well considering the target platforms. That would be a start, however I'm not sure that this can be done using their existing tools without a lot of leg work and hacking in exceptions all over the place. At least to be able to do this with 2 platforms would be great. Or at the very least among ALL the top 3 desktop platforms.

My concept of a game dev friendly bundle:

• cross-compiler
• debugger
• Code Editor (IDE)
• RTL + DOM + basic Delphi language stuff
• maybe: some up to date OpenGL and DirectX(or whatever MS is doing) headers

That's it! That's what we need. Want more than that then by all means go get their business stuff. This is the core of game development. We don't want to avoid the code, we need the code. ("The code speaks to us and tells all."--ok I couldn't resist. ) so other than cheating to make use of the GUI stuff to make a quick and dirty editor tool for my games, why do we need so much crap stuffed into it? We don't. If they insist that it's what makes Delphi Delphi then ok fine put it in, but keep it to the base components and nothing else. But I don't feel that that's even necessary. We can make editor GUIs using our graphics APIs. Some game libraries even come with a way to make custom OpenGL-based GUIs. Or we are good game developers and we make it all ourselves!

I agree with most of you guys that Delphi isn't the best game dev tool and it's far from being geared towards game development anymore. (New markets and platforms!) However since someone from EMBT actually reached out to me and suggested that we could maybe make Delphi better for game developers (no promises) I feel that that in it's self is a rare opportunity to tell them what they need to know.

And if they don't want to listen then well there is still Lazarus, FPC (Pure) and Oxygene (and even Smart Mobile Studio for JavaScript type games) that are all great for game development and getting better.

[Darkhog]

Free isn't an option. They tried it and it wasn't sustainable. Judging from the conversations I've had with David over a year ago and Jim more recently, they pretty much told me that this is not something that they can do if they want to stay in business.

Somehow Borland has done this for years and stayed in business (the reason they had to sell delphi was because major f-up Turbo Delphi was).

[JimMcKeeth]

While there are some free to cheap game development tools, many of them are quite expensive. While Unity 3D offers a free version, their full price edition is $4500 if you want to reach iOS & Android. Their offering a free edition is a loss leader to get people to upgrade to the full edition. The full PRO edition offers features to game developers over the free version. A free version of Delphi for game development doesn't have an upgrade path to the full version for game developers, so it doesn't make sense from a business point of view.

You can get a 30 day free trial, and the Starter edition is really reasonably priced at $199. I used to be a big lobby for a free edition of Delphi until I realized they wouldn't be able to pay the fabulous developers who worked on it.

Delphi is a good general purpose tool that is heavily focused on line of business applications. It has always had good database access and other features that make it a good business application development tool. I've always liked it for utility application development too. A lot of people like it for game development. That is the beauty of a general purpose development tool. What I was wondering if there were some simple changes that could be made that would make it more suitable for the people who like it for game development. Reinventing Delphi to be just like FPC or Unity doesn't do anyone any good.

[hwnd]

Im too lazy atm too read whole topic fully, but i agree with some opinions here about free Delphi version.
Why they killed Turbo's? Im thinking about buying starter edition but many people say its a cr*p, what to do then?
I would use Lazarus, but there are too many components yet which do not work in Lazarus.
I use D7 Personal, but im lucky, since i dont mess with DB, so personal is fine for me.
I have the license for it.

But this is OT already.