So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[Rodrigo Robles]

Sorry for the late response, I can't read all the messages from all the forum sections, even a small amount that we have today requires more time than I can get. But I assume that is a reality that we should face as a natural things nowadays, with a lot of social networks and infinite messages.

First about the community engine: I never offered my help to the engine because my OpenGL knowledge is about 1.0 version, and for me OpenGL still is the API of preference. I could help more as a user or tester when the first versions come out.

For the guys that pointed that the homemade engines can't face the big commercial ones. Nowadays I believe it's true. But free software tends to overcame commercial software sooner or later, and we are plenty of examples like Linux overcoming windows (now in all arenas except desktop), Firefox/Chromium/Chrome overcoming IE and so on. In the game engine arena OGRE can be still weaker than Unity, but the history shows that some free software can overcome the proprietary software sooner or later.

SilverWarrior said "my current job is draining almost all of my energy from me". Welcome to the capitalism, my friend! I don't want to divert the conversation for economical or political models, but it is a valuable pointed. Athena pointed something similar, and I can say the same. Our actual political/economical model is built do extract the most of the energy from us to continue enrich that 1% of guys that keep the capital. So we work like slaves and have few time to do any kind of community work.

I'm participating of several communities, including techies like PGD and Free Software and others less techie and more local. In all the communities we are facing the problem of low contribution and people sucked for the work. And we aren't even talking about all that people that is just alienated that not realize how communities are important to the society.

And the bad news is I can see nowhere providing an easy solution for this problem. The solution we are working in many communities is to share knowledge about how communities are important to the society and how people can work together to build a better life. But is a long-term solution. There is no short-term solution.

I believe that being a member of a community is a two-hand way, every people contribute with something that builts into a larger whole. What I expect from the community is to exchange knowlege with others. I like to talk about technical questions and to read about the game projects.

At last I want to say that I really respect the efforts of Athena to keep up the community. The real heroes are the people that fight for their people, not vain people of industry that fight for profits and fame. When you need help funding for the hosting or any other thing please call me.

You're right to feel bad in the corporative workspace. I feel like that. Many corporations (not all, but the majority) can't manage their workers correcty, building a toxic environment of stress and harassment.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Well, from a stress perspective I'm much better these days. I've just spent 5 days house bashing, rewiring a kitchen ready for the installation of the accessories once the kitchen is fitted, later in the week I'll be moving some more light switches and a socket outlet in the same property Far more satisfying than being sat at a desk all day

[Akira13]

Kinda reviving this thread here, but I've spent some serious time browsing through the PGDCE sources over the last couple of days and man, it sure seems like it's basically just Cast Engine 3.0. Was there any particular reason why George/Mirage had such a relatively "heavier" influence on the engine than everyone else? It's not a bad codebase overall at all, though. Certainly could be continued/improved upon/picked up from where it was left off pretty easily, I'd say. One thing I would definitely do immediately (if it was up to me) is completely scrap all use of that nightmarish fake-generics "template" library. Talk about include-file hell! There is no logical reason for anyone to be using anything other than Generics.Collections for their container classes these days, whether on Delphi or FPC/Lazarus. (The FPC version is actually better, BTW.)

[AthenaOfDelphi]

The reason it was heavily influenced by Mirage is because he was the only one who really contributed any code.

What's really come out of this is that the vast majority of the site users don't have much to say about the site and seem to have even less interest in generating useful content and such like. I've received a small handful of offers of help, one of which I still have to review, but other than that... nothing.

Which does beg the question, why bother?

Well because looking at the forums there is a steady flow of new posts, but it is really quite depressing that so few people are willing to give a little bit of their time back to help improve the community they probably benefit from. I have no idea how to change that.

[Akira13]

I posted a project in the tutorial forum just a couple of days ago, if that's any consolation!

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Thanks

And do you mind me asking how long it took to put it together and get it posted? What I'm getting at is they don't have to be epic monsters, just useful

[Akira13]

Thanks

And do you mind me asking how long it took to put it together and get it posted? What I'm getting at is they don't have to be epic monsters, just useful

Only around three hours or so

[pitfiend]

...One thing I would definitely do immediately (if it was up to me) is completely scrap all use of that nightmarish fake-generics "template" library. Talk about include-file hell! There is no logical reason for anyone to be using anything other than Generics.Collections for their container classes these days, whether on Delphi or FPC/Lazarus. (The FPC version is actually better, BTW.)

This was a topic of very deep debate, we decided to drop generics, because there are differences between Delphi and FPC on how they tackle them. So, as we wanted to provide an engine for everybody, there are some sacrifices to do and some requirements to meet.

[Akira13]

This was a topic of very deep debate, we decided to drop generics, because there are differences between Delphi and FPC on how they tackle them. So, as we wanted to provide an engine for everybody, there are some sacrifices to do and some requirements to meet.

FPC is 100% compatible with Delphi-style generics when you use the {$mode Delphi} define though, which you guys did in fact have set for FPC in "PGDCE.inc". So you could have just used the Delphi syntax and not had any issues on either compiler.

[pitfiend]

FPC is 100% compatible with Delphi-style generics when you use the {$mode Delphi} define though, which you guys did in fact have set for FPC in "PGDCE.inc". So you could have just used the Delphi syntax and not had any issues on either compiler.

we decided to drop generics because we planned to bring the engine to developers on older delphi with no generics.