I've been a game programmer off and on for about five years, but never really completed a game. After fiddling around with QBasic, Visual Basic, C++, and Pascal, I've decided that Pascal might be the best language for me to use. Yes, C++ is a very good language, but there is too much overhead. I find that worrying about window behavior is tedious. QBasic was a good starting language, but it is very limited. Sure, there were ways to obtain more direct access to the hardware, but it is still limited. Plus, QBasic doesn't work on WinME nor WinXP. Visual Basic was much better when M$ released DX support for it. So I worked with Visual Basic for a while, creating two unfinished RPGs and an unfinished space shooter. Then shortly after the turn of the Millennium, I learn more and more about M$'s bad behavior, and decided to explore Linux. Soon after, Kylix was released. As I was learning about SDL in Linux, I learned about JEDI-SDL, and have been following it ever since. Later on, I downloaded Delphi Personal Edition for cross-platform development. I find that using Delphi/Kylix with SDL is a wonderful game development environment.

However, getting into Delphi game development, I noticed that there wasn't a large community devoted to it. This kinda surprised me as it really beats VB and QB for game development, and is as good as C/C++. Before the explosive growth of the Internet, QB wasn't much a platform for game development. However, once QB programmers began to hook up, a huge community formed around it. Hell, the QB game programming community is still large today, and programmers have hacked QB to its limits, even developing a 3D library for it!! As I started getting into DirectX, Microsoft was on the verge of releasing DirectX7 with VB support, so I quickly jumped on that bandwagon. It was very nice to use. A large community has sprung up around Visual Basic for this, with many nice games being developed with it.

Getting into Linux development, I noted that there weren't many games outside of hobbyist games. So I decided to try that. With the release of Kylix and subsequently JEDI-SDL, I decided to switch to this and Delphi. However, the Delphi game development community seems tiny compared to those of QB and VB. Of course, we all know that this is mainly because Microsoft does not release native Delphi support with DirectX; some third party has to create the tools. But with good DirectX, OpenGL, and SDL support, as well as the fact that Delphi Personal Edition can be gotten for a relatively low price of $99.

I think that we need to try to improve this situation, to make the community much larger. The more people there are using Delphi for game development, the more support there will be for it, the more articles there will be, and the more people will try to push it to the limits. How about an Unreal Tournament clone written in Delphi/Kylix?

What can be done to increase the size of the community?