PGD - Some thoughts about the future

[pitfiend]

Very interesting topic. Something I think about, is that I spend a lot of time building comercial apps. I have skills building database and GUI stuff. But when it comes to games, I feel to be 10 steps behind anyone in this community. Of course learning is The Option, it takes time and worth it absolutely. Time is a Villain.

The propose to create our own game engine, is something I look with hope, but we must think that we can also create wrappers for popular game engines. Is there an obligation to do everything in Pascal? Why? Of course pride feels good, but we are reinventing the wheel. It's round and it works fine, use it, period.

About the engines build by members, some are amazing, but have one thing in common: they are not truly game engines, most of them are more graphic engines with extra features. Please don't take me wrong, and don't be blinded by your own proud, you deserve more recognition for what you have done. On the other hand, these amazing frameworks have a big lack of documentation. To be honest, having an HTML/RTF/DOC/whatever file describing one or more class structures is far away from documentation, neither "self documented" is an option.

We are a bunch of experts programmers with deep knowledge on many development areas, we don't have a clear goal... unless we take on that proposed community project as a whole team, not just as talented programmers contributing on spare time. Maybe I'm asking to much, I suppose that all of you have daytime jobs, just as myself.

So, to compete, we need to invest (not money, but knowledge, skills, time, responsability), to cooperate, to define objectives, and then we will be ready to take on any competition!

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Everyone who has replied... thank you for your comments. In (I think) the last 60 days, there have been 71 active people on the boards... if you're one of them and you've not posted... please do.

I want to get as many peoples views on the subject of competitions and a community project as possible.

I think I've already said this, but if you're in contact with a member of the site and they don't visit, poke them... get them to pop along if they still actively use Pascal. I'd like to try and find out why they don't visit so often, what would make them regular visitors again and all that kind of stuff. Was it the lack of a community project that put them off? Why do so few people compete in competitions?

Competitions is interesting... for the same reason (lack of time) I get the feeling prefer short or long competitions depending on who you are As for entering competitions that are shorter... I think SilverWarior has summed it up best... at the moment we have a big overhead to even get on a level with Unity out of the box. I'd like that to change and I'd like for more of us to enter more competitions... not just our own, but others too. Either using our engine or as a team where the rules permit

It's also quite clear from this thread and from a number of chats I've had that there are those who want to learn, want to improve and a community project that includes some good quality talent (that we have here) is an excellent vehicle for doing that.

Anyhow, I want to leave this thread open a while longer to capture more comments etc. from those who don't visit regularly.

[Andru]

Does that maybe mean that you are concidering to resume working on ZenGL?

Yep. Over the past time I upgraded my PC, so now I have support of new versions of MacOS X(with AMD it was hell developing for this OS and iOS using virtual machines...), got some experience with Direct3D 11 at work(but using C++), thought a lot about architecture and other things, new people start to use ZenGL and others continue... Also there are some improvements going on with FreePascal in trunk. So, all this something like a base for "new start", or just new episode after "to be continued..." But still understanding bad situation with FPC/Delphi performance, some moments in syntax which I hate(e.g. case insensitive), some language limits(e.g. my hack with PByteArray, which is bad for debugging... Lazarus just stops debugging because GDB can't allocate memory), and very bad support of mobile platforms are holding me. By "bad support of mobile platforms" I mean Xcode mess for FPC and no debugging for Android, what about Delphi - too expensive and I don't believe it at all as stable solution, but maybe I'm wrong, because I didn't try it and only read some info in internet.

[Rodrigo Robles]

I have participated in some recent Global Game Jam and Ludum Dare. In GGJ I tried Construct and in the Ludum Dare I used Javascript. I wanted to test some new tools and my Object Pascal tools are not sharpened enough to rapid development (I thought...).

I made the games, but I think I could make it better if I did have used Object Pascal:

GGJ Construct game: http://www.cek.com.br/ggj/drink_or_die03/

Ludum Dare javascript game: http://www.futurosistemas.net/gettheseconds/

After testing another tools, my conclusions are: Object Pascal can compete and overrun the other tools. The best games I saw in this competitions were made by skilled developers in several kinds of development platforms.

So, be not afraid to use Object Pascal in this competition. To make a good game you need a good programmer, not a level editor. If you doubt you can ask about it to Jordan Mechner or John Carmack.

[Super Vegeta]

Having made a game for LD in ObjPas, I'd say that the main problem in game jams is pre-existing codebase. Although the goal is to create a game "from scratch", it's obvious that reinventing the wheel is not the point - people are allowed to use existing libraries, and many competitions (including Ludum Dare) also allow for some personal, pre-existing codebase, as long as it's publicly available. Putting it otherwise: if you want to create a game completely "from scratch", jumping on bare SDL / Allegro, then yeah, fitting in the 48h limit can be tough. But if you have some rendering tools, data structures et cetera ready to get plugged in and put to work, a rapid start becomes much easier.

[Ñuño Martínez]

I didn't read every messages here, but as I see I agree with most of you.

I'm not active lately. My Allegro.pas port and KOFFE engine stand still, and I don't have a lot of time. So sad.

Anyway, I have some stuff that may be you (we) can use in the game engine.

I'm working in a VM to be used in my current job. The "ASM" language used is FORTH-like but the idea is to build "compilers" from different languages (C-like, BASIC-like...). The VM will be too simple, but will be open-sourced, extensible and written in Object Pascal (we were wondering if a C port would be necessary, but we decided to wait until complete the Object Pascal implementation and then decide).

Also I have a fully functional state machine, inspired by "Writting Game AI by Example".