Quote Originally Posted by masonwheeler View Post
And there's definitely still plenty of fun work to be done on the TURBU project.
Don't take me wrong, but your engine is to focused for our plans. As we told you, we plan to have an open engine without a specific focus to avoid extreme hackery. The purpose of the framework is to bring tools to develop games as you build a vcl or firemonkey app, obviously we are not planning to use visual components but classes, just to not follow the path of glscene, that I consider a complete mess and I think it's abandoned right now (correct me if I'm wrong).

Why? I'm trying to understand the underlying value system here. What are you valuing, and what are you prioritizing, that makes consciously ignoring existing solutions and building something from scratch (generally considered a Thing You Should Never Do) not only acceptable but The Preferred Solution?

My core priority here is "build something that people will use and enjoy using." The payoff for me isn't fun developing it; it's seeing people make cool stuff with this tool I designed. And so the priorities are "get it finished up quickly" and "get people using it." And those are two completely independent tasks. Even if you get an amazing engine set up, you still need a user base. I've got a ready-made solution to that: appropriate the (still large and healthy) user base of a different, abandoned tool by providing a better option to them. What's the strategy for building a user base for something built from scratch?
Of course we can reuse previously tested and functional code, but you must understand and accept the fact that we are dealing with some kind of license, then if that code exists under a license uncompatible with ours (not yet fully defined), unfortunately we can not use it as it is, some rewrite will be needed, unless the coder donate it to the community changing it's license. The main reason we are working from scratch. And this applies to anyone who wants to contribute with their code, not just you.

Of course. And it's definitely possible to do that. Check out Zero Base sometime: it's an R Type-style shooter built in RPG Maker 2003. Doesn't look anything at all like an RPG. But the scripting that makes it run is a horrendous mess of hackery, because RPG Maker's scripting system is way too restrictive.

Ditto The Tiamat Sacrament. It's a pretty standard console RPG... right up until you start hitting the turn-based strategy minigames! The scripting to those is downright scary, but it exists and it works.
This is the kind of things we don't want to happen. The framework must be friendly enough for any kind of project you want to do. Here comes the modularity we want to implement, the one that allows you to add certain features you need for the project, it could be anything, from multimedia, HUD/GUI/window system, network, database, local/cloud storage, scripting, to anything else your heart calls because the design will allow you to create your own classes based on our API. Even the render system is planned to be modular, so you can choose DirectX, OpenGL (for instance the prefered), SDL or GDI+ if you want.

I'd like to be, and I don't want to come across as unreasonable or anything, but I know how much work and effort can go into something like this, and I won't throw away years of my life on a project that is doomed to failure before it even starts. Convince me that this one isn't, and I'm with you.
We are putting all of our efforts and knowledge to build a solid framework as a team, that's why we are taking some time to define standards and design based on our experience. In the meantime, we also learn from what is been building in the framework. As you may know, many here have build their one engine/framework, with some success or failure, but as a solo coder. And we all agree that at some point many promising projects go on hold, because it happens that one coder is not enough to complete the project, some times the lack of knowledge to progress or the most common thing, we run out of motivation. Then to avoid wasting that talent, we decide to create a team to finaly build the ultimate game framework for pascal developers, well documented and able to compete pear-to-pear with comercial engines.