About the goal of this engine

[Relfos]

I think that the lack of proper documentation is the main reason why ypur game engine isn't popular. Nobody wants to use game engine where you have to gues what certain methods doe, how to implement certain feature and why your code doesen't work as intended. Almost imposible to track such bugs since you don't know if it is a bug in the engine, a bug in your yode or you just used wrong implementation.

Of course, without documentation there's point in trying to use an engine, but was I said, there was documentation before, in a wiki I wrote, I had to delete it because I got hit by spammers that made the wiki grow to 200mb or something and exceeded my host disk quote :\
Anyway, it is way faster to write documentation for an engine already made that it is to write a new engine from scratch, no?

Why there wouldn't be? As long as there are pascal game developers there will be need for pascal based engines.
Now you may say there are existing game engines which aren't necessarily written in pascal but can be used with it. So why don't we use those?
Sorry for my answer to be the question but: Why did you make your own game engine instead of using one of existing ones?

What I mean is, the market/userbase for something like this in 2014 is very small, especially now that such things as Unity and UDK exist.
I'm pretty sure that right now we have a infinitely smaller number of newbie pascal game developers compared to like 5 or 6 years ago.
To tell the truth, if I was starting right now and wanted to make games I would not use Pascal or C++ or whatever, would just go with one of those solutions. I even have a old prototype of my MMORPG game done in Unity, I just went back to my engine because I needed lots of features only available with the pro license and I was not interested in paying 2000$ for the iOS + Android pro licenses when my engine already had those features (networking, render targets, dynamic shadows and other stuff).

About your question, theres was two points in time when I decided to develop my engine.
First one, the first version when it was still called LEAF, it was because I tried to use GLScene and found lots of limitations with it and I think it was not compatible with FPC (and of course, I wanted to learn about graphics programming myself). At that time there were few engines available even for other languages, there was Torque, maybe Ogre, possibly others still in an early stage.
Then the second point was some years later, I went back to it because I wanted to make mobile games with pascal and there was not a single 3d engine that could be used for phones. Even Ogre had barely functional mobile support :\

Are you underestimating pascal game developers?
Are you implying that pascal game developers aren't capable of making games which will require much more powerfull game engine?

Not understimating pascal developers, but the truth is, the pascal community is very small, and the chance some pascal developer has the means, money, time etc to make a game that requires a powerful engine is very small.
I don't remember for how long this forum exist, but I've frequented it for a very very long time.
How many big pascal games were released before?
I think the number is very very small, what is because such a powerful engine not exist?
I think that at least 3 "powerful" pascal engines do exist, and I also think that all of them are free to use, if people really wanted to use pascal to make a big game, they could just use one of the existent engines no?
If the problem with them is lack of documentation, as long as the developers did not disappear from the face of the earth, it would be trivial to ask them. In my case I still have the documentation saved somewhere in my old disk, would be just a matter of updating it to the current features.
Also making a wrapper for a C++ engine is something that can be done in a week, if people really need to use something like Ogre.

If it is so why is there bunch of individual Indie developers who are making 3D based games using Unity game engine which isn't even for free or some similar engines?
Belive it or not but assets for 2D game can also be quite expensive and I know few games where their developers spent over 5k on game assets.

Of course I know it, I've done 2D games for clientes before and I've been evolved in the Unity community, one of my jobs two years ago was being a Unity game developer.
True that there are people that spend such money on a indie game there, but this is a small number, there a huge number of Unity devs who just play around with stuff from the Asset store. The ones that do spend more than a few hundred are either small companies, teams that somehow got funding, or in some cases guys like me who saved some money to invest on a game.

[QUOTE=SilverWarior;146036][QUOTE=Relfos;146032]Finally, my plans for my current engine was to forget about the "pascal" part, since I concluded the market was too small and I had decided to start distributing the engine as a precompiled dll for users of other languages. This will be probably what I will do.

Bare in mind that doing so you might alienate even more pascal game developers.

Not really, my plans is to stop adversting the game as a "pascal engine" and provide a engine with bindings for most common languages, to try to get users from other languages. Pascal users could still use it, no problem at all.

Any help will be apreatiated. Even if you only share your expirience that you gathered during development of your engine it will come in handy to us.

Sure, I can help discussing stuff etc. Trust me that I have lots of experience in this area, I'm not just an hobbyist. I've been working as graphics engineer for many years in various companies and have developed not only this pascal game engine, but also a C++ graphics engine and currenty working on a Javascript/WebGL engine for another company.

Also I'm not sure about what skills you guys have. I'm pretty that most of you are excelent pascal developers, and maybe some have worked on their own engines. However I've been seeing people refer to this project with the goal of making powerful engine, using latest APIs/tech, etc. Let me say that one thing is to make a "graphics engine" that can load and displays textured 3d models, another is making a engine that supports all current expected graphical features, eg: - a proper shadowmapping that actually works for any general scene and light setup
- a very powerful material/shader language (working on raw glsl/hlsl shaders is not scalable, only suitable for small projects/demos)
- a flexible mesh animation system (just implementing a ms3d loader was enough 5 years ago, today a developer expects much more, auto-armatures, animation blending/trees etc)
- proper text rendering (bitmap fonts are ok only for demos!)
- etc etc

Things have advanced quite a lot since some years ago, and some of this advanced stuff is quite hard to implement even separaterely, and much more to make it all work together.

I know that there are some Pascal developers who developed some advanced graphic engines some time ago, I talked with some of them, I remember one who had a very impressive engine in terms of graphic features, sadly I don't remember his nickname. If you one of those developers is willing to participate in the development of this engine it would very good, especially if they can reuse some of their code etc.
Otherwise if there's no one with enough experience and people will only work on this in their free time I would say to forget the idea of making a powerful engine and focus on making a functional project, otherwise by the time stuff is done, the tech would be obsolete. Remember that engines like Ogre took years to get to the current state and I'm pretty sure it is easier to find C++ devs than pascal devs.

To end this post, and resuming my opinion.
Making a pascal/delphi engine in 2014, when stuff like Unity exists and is free, and no way a small team can compete in terms of quality with them, well, I think it is not a really good idea. Note that when I started my engine the situation was very diferent, indie games barely existed and the tech available to make them was either rudimentar or cost money that many people did not have.

Finally, I would estimate the time to get something usable to make a "real" game would be around a year, if everything is made from scratch and no one works on it full time, or possibly more, depending if everyone continues working on it or if some people quit (very common to happen).

[Dennis]

The TERRA Engine is quite nice, we've worked with it 2 years ago and even tried to port to XE2 (you may remember that or even find that branch ;-) but because the code didn't match our (to be honest quite high) code standard - if you compiled the engine you'd end up with a lot of "warnings" (despite the compiled engine worked well) we have switched over to unity *cough*.
We would be very happy to see it coming "back" with a proper code base - and if you'd just take a look a the complexity of the engine, Relfos is just right: it does need a lot of more than implementing a 3d engine to be a game engine....

Btw: Relfos, congrats for your Minimon 3D game!

[Relfos]

The TERRA Engine is quite nice, we've worked with it 2 years ago and even tried to port to XE2 (you may remember that or even find that branch ;-) but because the code didn't match our (to be honest quite high) code standard - if you compiled the engine you'd end up with a lot of "warnings" (despite the compiled engine worked well) we have switched over to unity *cough*.

Hi Dennis, I remember you yes, that was a long time ago!
If buying the Unity pro license was not problem or the free version was enough, then yeah, moving to Unity is actually a very good move, mine engine (and all other open source engines) are nothing compared to it, they have a quite huge and capable team always improving it. Just a pity that they did not yet release a proper GUI system and people still have to do their own solution or buy a third party GUI system :\

Btw: Relfos, congrats for your Minimon 3D game!

Thanks, I'm working on the final details now, improving the graphic and stuff, once I release it I will announce

By the way, now I found something that got me even more puzzled about this community project!
I decided to go to google and search to see what kind of engines are there for pascal, because I've been out of loop for a while, and new things could have appeared.
And in the first page of results, there was this...

http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/

Now I look at the page, I see an engine that seems to be in advanced state, and totally free to use.
No only that, it seems to have lots of documentation, as that seems the problem most people were talking about mine.
Seems to be done by a single developer, I look at the forums, well, they are a bit dead.
So why people are not using it?

This engine did not exist some years ago, I think, at least I never knew about it.
It seems to me that this engine is in quite good state to be improved upon, might lack some features that mine was, but in the other hand seems to have lots of documentation, which would help a lot to get people into it.

So why would anyone reinvent the wheel when they could just team up and help this dev?
I'm pretty sure he would be happy if people offered to help develop his engine, did anyone contact him?