PGD - Some thoughts about the future

[User137]

I'll start with the competition question

• Short. Rather have them more often, than one big one once a year. Also the longer the time is the bigger the quality difference per entrees can become, depending on how much they dedicate time on it.
• Kudos. Even potential idea of claiming such prices sounds like trouble to me
• Themed or freestyle, i guess we can have all kinds of. Mainly themed i think, some might even come with ready code and art base to start from. I guess we are just looking for ways to spend time in a fun way, not here to make a selling game title in each competition.
• Many ways to go about this. How about community can give each entry 1 or 2 thumbs up, but no down?

Engine is always interesting topic, i likely would want to participate in community engine if we decided to do so. I have to admit i haven't tried all the previous engines even though started nxPascal. I started programming with DelphiX at young age and it got me far. As time went by i felt limited by it though, as the needs for more GPU power came up and DelphiX was slow at that. At that time i tried what i could to look into DirectX and even made a small 3D tetris with DelphiX of that time. But it was still giving me various restrictions, and so i stumbled upon OpenGL.

That's where i first got the graphical engine freedom i was looking for, and so GLEngine was born. It is the predecessor of nxPascal, a bit like DelphiX. Had a Delphi IDE components similar to DXScene and DXTimer, and i got some nice demos done with it. But it had to end aswell... I learned alot of Pascal doing all that, and the whole structure of GLEngine seemed lacking and bad. I felt that IDE components for game engine are actually not needed. Especially with Lazarus it brings all kinds of complications to it, such as needs to rebuild the whole Lazarus.exe when adding components. Also if i wanted to support both Delphi and Lazarus, there could definitely be differences in that code, even if just between many different Delphi versions. So i completely dropped the idea of IDE integration and i have not regretted that. It actually gives me much more detailed control of the program flow too, and still being quite simple at it. In some level nxPascal was supposed to be kind of community engine, it just never got any other interested developers to make it grow. The potential is still there, and being very modular it is not restricted by anything. But i don't mind if you want to start a new one from scratch.

[SilverWarior]

When thinking about competition I think there are two sorts of pepole.
Those who prefer short competitions, as it alows them to quickly output an idea without the need to worry to much about details.
And there are those who would like to have bigger time frame either due the fact that their knowledge might not be good enough to quickly turn some idea into code or due the fact that many pepole are quite limited with their time.

So after giving it some thought next thing came to me:
Where does it say that we need to have only one competition running at one time?
Why not runn more than one competition? Why not have anual competition with longer timeframe and a series of mini competitions?
And if we chose theme for mini competitions right finishing them might help pepole finish anual competition aswel. This might be a win-win solution for most of the pepole.

[code_glitch]

I think what user137 said about using given assets sounds like a good idea. Something like "heres a resource pack - go make" or "heres some code/script/thing - integrate/implement" could be quite fun as we'd get a lot of very similar but very different entries. As far as a community engine, I wouldn't be a main contributor (due to lack of skill and experience more than time) but would definitely be willing to help out.

As for my experience in pascal - I learnt in pascal and sort of stuck with it and its derivatives ever since unless a project almost explicity required some other language (and I couldn't just write a .dll loader for a pascal program ).

[AthenaOfDelphi]

due to lack of skill and experience more than time

I think this sentiment may be felt many many of us (myself included). I look at some of the engines that people have produced (the one that springs to mind immediately is Phibermon's - sorry, I can't remember the name) and I feel like I'm some insignificant programming peon. Some of the stuff that has come out of some of the members here has been truly amazing.

But... they started somewhere... and if they are willing to chip in, provide guidance, and just generally help, then well... we will all benefit and if you feel that you lack the skill at the start, being involved seems like a good way to change that.

Improving my skills would be one thing I would definitely want out of participating in something like a community engine.

[Super Vegeta]

As for competitions - I think it would actually do more good, instead of launching our own, to encourage people to take part in other events. For example, there's yet another Ludum Dare this weekend - go and join! Maybe if your game is awesome enough, some people will actually grow curious as to how were you able to implement it in Pascal.
Unfortunately I can't participate this time, since I have classes at my weekend uni.

Either way, if organising game competitions, I think one week is best - longer than a single weekend, so you don't have to rush, yet short enough not to discourage with a vision of having to write a lot of code because people will expect a large game.
I also think it could be interesting to have a non-gamedev contest - say, implement an algorithm, or maybe create some kind of game AI in .dll/.so which will then compete against each other. code_glitches ideas also seem interesting.

As for a community project, I don't know how my experience will look compared to others, but it's sure worth a try. Could be a good opportunity to learn something new.

[SilverWarior]

I also think it could be interesting to have a non-gamedev contest - say, implement an algorithm, or maybe create some kind of game AI in .dll/.so which will then compete against each other. code_glitches ideas also seem interesting.

I was thinking about something similar but maybe not even in form of a competition.
My idea is something like this:
A comunity member creates a game related programming problem. For instance implementing some algorithm like you sad.
Also this same comunity member provides a posible solution to that problem.
The goal of the rest of the comunity is to go and try to provide as many different ways to solve the given problem.
In the end we can compare the solution, discuss and find benefits/weakneses of each of the provided solutions and maybe even ways of how to improve them in the end.

So what we would get from this is lots of different solutions (code snipects) which other pepole could use in their projects when needed. And since certain solution may not necessary the best solution for someone, pepole could go and chose that one solution which would be most suitable for them since they would have many ones to chose.
At the same time this would provide some kind of a joint knowledge of the whole comunity in one place.
Maybe some members might go even to the point of using that gathered knowledge and making a full blown tutorials out of it which would provide other members to gain that knowledge even more easily.

[Rodrigo Robles]

Instead of make our own competitions, should be good if we compete more seriously in competitions like Ludum Dare and even Global Game Jam. This way we put more Pascal games in this compos that are dominated by new tools like unity, construct and javascript.
We can compete to see who gets the better position for a Pascal game in the Ludum Dare.

OBS - I'm still hard working in my pascal unfinishable game - almost finishing

[SilverWarior]

This way we put more Pascal games in this compos that are dominated by new tools like unity, construct and javascript.

I think that the main problem is that we pascal developers have to do much more work to finish any of our entries into these competitions. That is mostly becouse there isn't any Unity like game engine for pascal.
You see there is a big difference when creating a game with Unity worshop becouse unity has integrated resource managing, most comon algorithms etc. or when you have to go and implement all teese by yourself and thus write many thousands of lines of code.
If I only check my code that I have written for ingame Supply and Demmand economic system I was working I see that it has over 100K lines of code and it is still not finished entirely.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong I'm not discouraging anyone from participating in those compos. If I find out the theme of one of them to be interesting enough I also might go and try. But I do realize that I have much harder task at hand.

[Andru]

Funny coincidence, just few days ago I thought about returning to development "just for fun", and here we are - topic on PGD about something like resurrecting community, hmmm...