I finally got a new working build. Phew. I almost went nuts trying to track down one very illusive bug. Ok here is what I’ve got:

1. You download the build here: http://www.softbeat.net/temp/gvsdk2007.zip

2. The compiler can work stand alone or within and editor/IDE such as PSPad ( http://www.pspad.com ). I have been using PSPad to test with and you will find a project file in the archive for this editor. See PROJECT.PPR

3. The compiler uses a simple .INI project file. See PROJECT.INI for details.

4. To make things work from within the editor/IDE, the compiler needs to be called from a batch file. See GVC.BAT and COMPILE.BAT. You should not touch GVC.BAT, but compile.bat is an example of how you setup your batch file for your own project.

5. When you run COMPILE.BAT it will compile the project and if there are any compiler/runtime errors they will be written to a log file and displayed in the console window. If you compile from the editor/IDE you can click on an error line in the log window and it will jump to this line in the editor.

6. GVAPI.PAS is the import unit for the exported API routines and GVSCLASSES.PAS shows all the declarations available from compiled script.

7. See TESTBED.DPR for an example of how to use the API to compile and run a script.

8. It should now run on those OSes that reported a problem. Please let me if you still have problems.

Hopefully by the next build things will be more organized and streamlined to start to include some docs and more examples. There are just so many things in flux at the moment. Since last time there has been such a major effort to get the project to a good and stable point. There is still much work yet to do, but I am most happy with my progress.

At this point you can compile an Object Pascal file to a standalone executable and using the API can do the same thing from within your own code. In fact the compiler EXE was written using the API routines. If you add a unit to the uses statement and this unit has not been registered already in code it will attempt to load the unit from disk. The nice thing about this is that you only need one main source file and you can just have a simple .INI project file. See the OnCompileUseUnitProc callback in TESTBED.DPR. You will notice in the project.ini file you can specify version info and an icon for your executable. GVSClasses.pas shows all the classes, routines and types that are currently available from compiled screen. As you can see there are already an extensive number of classes that allow for some powerful and robust game development.

I hope to release an official public beta in the coming weeks.