Steamworks pascal headers

[SilverWarior]

Supported compilers:
Right now I only tested the pascal unit with Delphi 7 and FPC.
Might work with Delphi XE, if anyone can try it tell me.

Note:
You can only use this if you are a registered Steamworks developer, because otherwise the API won't initialize correctly.

What takes for someone to become Steamworks developer? Do you have to pay anything?
I'm asking this becouse I myself curently I'm not a Steamworks Developer but I do have access to Delphi 7 and all Delphi versions ranging from Delphi XE2 to Delphi XE7 so I could eventually test the headers with all of them.

Anywhay after a quick look at the source code I think that the only change that might be required to the code is replace String types with AnsiString types becouse in Delpbi 2009 and newer the string type is an Unicode String. But other than that I don't think there should be any problems in compiling this with newer versions of Delphi.

[Relfos]

Yes, true, probably the only change would be String to AnsiString. But in fact, I think I only used string in some constants, and correctly used PAnsiChar in the others
I'll change those constants though.

To become a Steamworks developer, right now it is a bit difficult. You have to pay 100$ to be able to put your game in Greenlight, that is basically a voting area for Steam players. The games with more votes are selected to go into Steam, and then you get an oficial invitation from Valve to become a partner.

However there are rumors that soon (possibly next year) this will change and possibly the process will be easier allowing more people to get in.
I think they will remove the voting system and replace it with something else.

[phibermon]

What the *hell* is unicode??

[SilverWarior]

What the *hell* is unicode??

Unicode is a modern computing industry standard for the consistant handling of texts (strings) that is not dependant on localized character sets as it contains one universal character set which contails over 110,000 different characters.
The most common implementation of unicode standard used is UTF-8 where each character can use up to 5 bytes of data to represent each of its characters instead of one byte per character that is used in ansi strings.
This makes both string types to be incompatible with each other.

You can read some general thing about Unocde here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
To read about some basics about using unicode support in delphi check the article below:
http://delphi.about.com/od/objectpas...-in-delphi.htm
And to read how unicode is used in FPC with which you are more familiar check the next page:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_Unicode_support

[SilverWarior]

To become a Steamworks developer, right now it is a bit difficult. You have to pay 100$ to be able to put your game in Greenlight, that is basically a voting area for Steam players. The games with more votes are selected to go into Steam, and then you get an oficial invitation from Valve to become a partner.

Based on that I gues that becoming a Steamworks developer for me is out of the question. I don't have any game yet that I could try to port to steam platform and proabably won't have for some time as development is going rather verry slow (still in early development or maybe I should say planning stage for a few ideas of mine).
But if you build a test case a small aplication soley build to test the API I can try to compile it with never versions of Delphi and then send you the compiled binaries to test. But that would mean there would be no real means of proper debuging of these.

[Relfos]

Well, I think it should fine on XE, since I'm using PAnsiChar everywhere.
There are some String consts, but after checking it seems they are not used anywhere, it seems.

[shihonage]

My FPC game was Greenlit as well.

I am looking forward to trying your headers!

[Relfos]

Congratulations, what is your game?

[shihonage]

Thanks.

It's a 2D ASCII shooter with scripted sequences and voiceovers, which was reskinned to have graphics. This didn't work too well, because people don't understand why you only shoot in 8 directions and need to line up with enemies, so for Steam version I'm going to polish the ASCII mode and make it default.