3rd Annual PGD Competition due to start Feb 1st...

[WILL]

It is unfair to the lesser experienced to expect them to compete against someone who uses his own premade engine.
Because where the latter can spend his time creating content and perfecting gameplay, the new guy worries about why his sprites aren't moving like they should (no offense Wizard).

Before you learn how to cook a fish you must first learn how to catch a fish.

If the experienced have an edge, at least let them start on equal ground.

Thats just the thing, they're not. This is life. So instead of trying to pull down the more experienced guys [size=9px](frustrating them more than anything)[/size] to make everyone equal is doing more harm than good.

This is the way things are done in all areas of game development. I see no reason why the PGD Annual has to be different. You still learn from taking part and talking about your entries and your problems with them in the forums either way.


Truth is, all the teams are not going to be completely balanced or equal no matter what we try. So we should choose the less invasive solution.

[grudzio]

I think that banning pre made engines is not a good idea. It would give an advantage to people using engines like GLscene, Asphyre or NecroEngine. So if engines are to be banned then all should be banned pre made and existing ones.

Personally I am against banning.

Firstly, advanced game engines tend to be game specific, so depending on competition theme having such engine might not be an advantage.

Secondly, I think that all experienced programmers (if they dont use existing engines) have some kind of framework for things like loading and displaying graphisc, fonts etc. The less experienced ones tend to use existing engines anyway. So chances are even.

And thirdly, we want to show those C++ people something to remember, don't we?

Just my two cents.

[LP]

I'm quite surprised some people want to "ban existing engines" in the competition. First, a concept of engine is subjective to those who post here.

For instance, some mentioned Asphyre (Note to jdarling: it's AsphYre, not AsphEre) being an engine. As a developer, I don't consider it being an engine and I formally define it as a game development framework. On a similar note, if you call Asphyre an engine, you may call D3DX interface an engine as well and if you extend the senseless meaning of the word, you would call DirectX an engine too!

IMHO, all that is nonsense. For an example of a real game engine, look at Unreal Engine.

Now, let's assume we keep with this senseless "engine" thing and talk about "pre-made engines". What are "pre-made engines"? Let's suppose you define Asphyre or DelphiX as a pre-made engine. Since I am the author of Asphyre, I can relicense it for myself under proprietary license and under contest rules it will no longer be considered "pre-made" engine, while I will still be able to use it (you will have a difficulty proving in court when I have written the code). The solution would be also banning the authors of these "pre-made" engines, which is simple personal discrimination (although even this can be circumvented by using intermediators or using some kind of anonymous approach).

IMHO, you will never be able to have complete equality of team participants's capabilities (some call it "fairness", which I think is wrong term) - it's not only about engines, you know. For instance, a person who has a very high-end system with dual-view, 10 years of programming experience and a certain talent will obviously have some edge in productivity over a novice developer working on a home low-end PC. In this case, will you ban the usage of high-end developer workstations as well and people with long curriculum vitae?

I bet those who want to ban pre-made engines and stuff like that simply have envy for other more resourceful developers. My suggestion to these people: stop whining and go read some books and train yourself; when you get more competitive, you won't need to limit/restrict other people to make your life "fair".

[Robert Kosek]

The idea of an engine ban is, in my opinion, foolhardy in the extreme. As Yuriy stated rather thoroughly, what constitutes an engine is highly debatable. But let me share my experience.

These are engines:

• A6
• Unreal Engine
• LithTech
• Irrlicht
• Reality Factory

These are libraries or rendering packages, not engines:

• Asphyre
• DelphiX
• DanJetX
• OpenGL

The reason is simple, the engines are self-contained. Anything you could want, from scripting to networking and graphics, is bundled in and you don't even need a compiler per se! That is subjective as potentially you could get source access to these or write your own "engine" that qualifies.

Even the best engine cannot make the worst game fun, nor generosity a kind person makes. I am generous in my distribution of lead in FPS games, but that doesn't make me kind; remember that. So you can make a game off the dumbest idea with the Unreal5 and fail utterly, just like Petroglyph did with SW:EaW ... arguably the worst strategy game I have ever played in my entire life. Moddability is nothing if I don't enjoy the game in the first place.

This should be about the game and not what powers it. It should promote interesting concepts and unique uses of industry "standard" elements. I was considering joining the competition this year. But if it will degrade to this you can forget it!

[WILL]

Just to add some food for thought and to take a way a bit from the thoroughly covered engine debate;

When game creation gets farther along and those developers and designers get more experienced, they do tend to think farther and in bigger scopes of graphics, sound APIs and other devices that make up a game. And as they get really advanced, or the few that go on to make really big games with full blown story and dialogs and such, engines and APIs are really just menial details.

Depending on what type of game you're making, games in most cases are about 40% programming 60% design. Of course this all pertains to what genre your focusing on and the gameplay elements you want to include. Generall though I've heard that the more story in your game, the longer the development. But I would have to assume that it's really just the quantity of content and variety of it that creates the amount of work.

This is something to develop a greater understanding of and develop ourselves on besides the programming, which does hold the greatest focus, granted.

[WILL]

Hey guys, just a heads up!

I've placed the pre-event version of the PGD Annual poster on the front page to start visualizing things for the competition. Please note however the end date is only my best ball-park figure. It is not official!

I just didn't have the time to make any changes yet. So this is subject to change, but the start date is still on for the 1st of Feb.

Thanks.

[jasonf]

Oh... looks like I missed the Pre-made engine discussion, Doh!..

Here's my 0.02GBP

I've been a member of the Torque gamedev community for a while now and had a few decent stabs at writing a game and even though Torque is a very very powerful engine with lots of community support, it's still a lot of hard work to make a decent and original game out of it. The engine is a true engine in that it takes care of everything, input, sound, music, level loading, networking, physics.. etc.. but it's still a gargantuan task.
Some people would believe that making a game with a complete engine should be very easy, surely just a matter of plugging in a few graphics and adding some scripts.. NOOooo.. not at all, the job is actually made harder BECAUSE it's a pre-made engine. You've got to completely understand someone else's way of thinking if you want to modify the engine (if you're given the source code). You end up fighting the engine to do something which you believe should be simple because you don't know the reasons why the problem was solved in a certain way. Why do my object fall to the ground? How can I make things fly? How do I add shields?...

It's true that if you know the engine inside out, you can get a good game idea fleshed out in a couple of weeks, this game would then need polishing but it would be basically functional. But the same can be said for the users of a general Framework. If you know what the framework does and doesn't do, if you're experienced, you can pull in other technologies to solve other problems.. The framework doesn't supply a physics implementation?.. fine, add in Newton. The sprite engine doesn't exist as such so it's easier to pull in and get working than to replace an existing engine's physics system after you've experimented with it and decided that it's not quite good enough.

If people want to ban existing engines in an attempt to level the playing field, and I do appreciate the sentement behind the idea and it's a very noble one.. I would also like to ask that only people in full time employment are allowed to compete too as it would be unfair as those without jobs are able to spend much more quality time on their project than those who work all day.. Now I AM joking here, but you can see where I'm going.. we could also say, "No Single people.. only those married with at least 2 children" or "Noone with more than 5 years experience". By leveling the playing field in this way, there would only be 2 or 3 people on the whole site who qualify to compete.

I say, leave it open to all regardless of engine choice, experience or available time and let's get something really cool written and promote Pascal as a bloody goodlanguage for writing cross platform games.

[Traveler]

I was considering joining the competition this year. But if it will degrade to this you can forget it!

That would be our loss then.

As Dean wrote

I think that that fact that all the competitors help each other out in the competitions shows what a great community this is.

Surely, for that alone you'll want to be part of it.

It's not that I envy more resourceful developers, Yuri. In fact I salute them for having come that far already.
I was merely afraid people would not join because of the thought that other competitors would use engines and thus have a head start. (and yes, I was referring to engines such as the ones you wrote Robert. Not the various libraries).

If people want to ban existing engines in an attempt to level the playing field, and I do appreciate the sentement behind the idea and it's a very noble one.. I would also like to ask that only people in full time employment are allowed to compete too as it would be unfair as those without jobs are able to spend much more quality time on their project than those who work all day.. Now I AM joking here, but you can see where I'm going.. we could also say, "No Single people.. only those married with at least 2 children" or "Noone with more than 5 years experience". By leveling the playing field in this way, there would only be 2 or 3 people on the whole site who qualify to compete.

I was wrong to start the argument

[cairnswm]

In the local game dev contest they had a prize for the best new comer entry. So anyone that had previously entered a contest or anyone that was considered a regular and knowledgable member of the community was excluded from winning the prize.

Its easy to add a prize like this (newcomer as defined by the judges) to the prize pool to attrach complete beginners.

[jasonf]

I was wrong to start the argument

Not at all, you made a very valid point.