Hadron Game Engine

[Hadron Games]

Hi folks

Over the months I've been gearing up for the commercial side of my business efforts and the legal entity from which I will conduct my commercial business will be Hadron Games so I've consolidated all existing game related units under this label going forward. Games & GameDev will be under Hadron Games and my hosting business will be under the Hadron Hosting label.

The web hosting is a business unit mainly for developers needing a cost effective hosting solution for their projects. I'm currently promoting the hosting business so I will offer a few free accounts. I can do:[*]yourname.hadrongames.com (free subdomain)[*]yourname.[ext] (you can register a domain with me or use or own)
Hit me up and we can make arrangements.

PyroGine (from now on known as Hadron Game Engine) has been enhanced so that it should work with any version of 32 bit Delphi as well as Lazarus/FreePascal. The new procedural API (same API format) even makes it possible to work with additional language bindings. C++ bindings are included. Road map includes cross-platform support starting with 2.0. I would like to get some feedback on the Pascal side to make sure different versions of Delphi and Lazarus/FreePascal are covered. It has been tested with Delphi 5 and 2010 and Lazarus v0.9.28.2/FreePascal 2.2.4.

OVERVIEW
Hadron Game Engine™ (HGE) an advanced 2D game engine for PC's running Microsoft Windows® and uses Direct3D® for hardware accelerated rendering. It's robust, designed for easy use and suitable for making all types of 2D games and other graphic simulations.

HGE has support for use from multiple programming languages and you access the features from a simple and intuitive procedural API to allow you to rapidly and efficiently develop your graphics simulations. There is support for surfaces, textures, sprites, audio, streams, archives, configuration files, render targets, swap chains, databases and much more.

HGE comes standard with language bindings for Pascal (Delphi, Lazarus/FreePascal) and standard C++. For Pascal, simply add HGE.pas to the project uses section and for C++ add HGE.h and HGE.cpp to you project. The bindings will dynamically load and bind to the exported routines from the HGE.dll.

There is also a thin object oriented layer (optimized for each supported language binding) for fast and efficient object management. Features include Actors, Actor Lists, Actor Scene, AI, Entities and Game Management. You can create an actor, drop it on a list it will be updated and rendered automatically for example. There is enough to provide a foundation to build your own higher level object management system from this.


DOWNLOAD
Hadron Game Engine

Thanks for your continued support.

[czar]

Is there a market for 2d games installed on a PC? Not meaning to be rude but your business plan seems to reply on the fact that there are pascal developers who are wanting to put out 2d games that other people pay for. I would have thought that the flash development would have killed that concept. 2d games would seem to be firmly the domain of webbased tech.

Having recently bought an ipad I would love to create games for it - the best solution that I can see would be ones based on javascript.

[Hadron Games]

@czar
No worries, I'm open to different and contrasting points of view. Feel free to bring perspective to the table. All of us can benefit from such discussions.

Things have certainly changed in the past 5 years, that is for sure. As much as I love Pascal the hard fact is that most developers will use C/C++ for game development in general. I use Delphi for 99% of all my development, and want to do my part in providing the Pascal community options for game development. Most of the money made from engine sales will most likely be from the C/C++ crowd and that is why I modified things to work "out of the box" for C/C++. Even in the current build the C/C++ bindings are in sync with the Pascal ones. It took a bit of time to get that working (I don't really like C++ honestly, but it's a necessary evil in this case). I just have to get the examples done.

With all of that said, my overall goal will be game development. I made what has become HGE for my own game development needs. If others can benefit then great, it will only enhance the overall robustness of the engine. You can use it free of charge for your freeware projects and will be just a small indie friendly fee for use in commercial projects. The more people using it, the more feedback I get and that can go back into improving and making it more robust. What I get is real-world feedback for the 5011 different PC configurations out there and one of the things that make game development on the PC such a HUGE task. It's a win/win situation. I win because I now have info, feedback and improvements, and you win because you have an ready made engine that you can do your entire project with and/or for prototyping.

Is there a market for 2d games installed on a PC? Sure there is. The other platforms are very important too so HGE will eventually find it's way to them. Apple is being tight-fisted with 3rd party development tools so I have to watch this closely to see how that plays out. But for Linux and MacOS, I plan to be there soon. Once I get the API solid on Windows then I can explore other platforms. By this time a version of Delphi should be released that will make it a lot easier for me to move over the bulk of my existing code. However, a structure rewrite will be necessary since I will have to take advantage of OpenGL for acceleration on those platforms. The original design did not have cross platform in mind so, a rewrite has to be done. This is on the roadmap.

2D is still cool and lots of great things can be done with it on the PC with the right development tools and imagination. Having great tools that gives you power, choice and options is a must and, if I may say so, HGE has a rich feature set giving you lots of great features while not getting too much in the way. It consists mostly of a procedural API with a thin OOP layer on top that you may or may not use, it's up to you. This will give me a great jump start building my game projects, as I now can concentrate on making the game, fixing bugs, and adding features as needed.

If you have some time, check out HGE and let me know if the examples compile and run on your configuration. This will be invaluable to me. Explore the HGE unit and see all that it currently offers. If you hate or like HGE, no worries I'm open to feedback and my goal is to make it better, so feel free to comment one way or the other.

[czar]

Thanks for your reply. Very interesting to read.
The business I work for produces educational software for our internal learning centres (spread around the world) and we have done so for 14 years using delphi. We are now starting to think about the next decade or so and trying to decide whether our current model is going to last or if we need to start thinking about producing same stuff but then webbased. I think HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT has much potential.

I will check out your work more carefully soon. As soon as I clear this current lot of work that I am doing.

[Hadron Games]

@czar
Thanking you in advance for your support, your feedback is most appreciated.

What I've noticed is that usually half way into the decade or so, a new wave of opportunity starts to emerge. We have to constantly monitor our industry, looking for these waves. If we can then get in and exploit the market as much as possible, before it becomes saturated, we will therefore have enough momentum to "ride it out" into the next decade. So yes, now would be that time to start thinking about such trends and keeping a close eye on new opportunities. Depending on the situation, one can either create new advancements, which will create totally new markets and/or innovate a current market to create new waves of opportunity.

[dazappa]

@Hadron = Apple is only close-fisted against 3rd party development tools on the iPod/phone.

There is quite a large market for 2d games still, in my opinion. Most of this though is made up in casual games on large portal sites, at least, that's the most visible I've found.

I think I'll fiddle around with this engine some time tonight, but personally I'm really just waiting for SDL 1.3 to be released (because it'll have hardware acceleration without accessing OGL directly), and is already cross platform.

[Hadron Games]

@Hadron = Apple is only close-fisted against 3rd party development tools on the iPod/phone.

Yes I mean to say for iPod/phone development, sorry.

There is quite a large market for 2d games still, in my opinion.

Agreed.

I think I'll fiddle around with this engine some time tonight,

Sweet, thanks... I appreciate the feedback.

but personally I'm really just waiting for SDL 1.3 to be released (because it'll have hardware acceleration without accessing OGL directly), and is already cross platform.

Oooohhh.... thanks for the info. I will look into SDL 1.3.

[DarkBow]

Is there a market for 2d games installed on a PC? Not meaning to be rude but your business plan seems to reply on the fact that there are pascal developers who are wanting to put out 2d games that other people pay for. I would have thought that the flash development would have killed that concept. 2d games would seem to be firmly the domain of webbased tech.

Having recently bought an ipad I would love to create games for it - the best solution that I can see would be ones based on javascript.

Some time ago I would have agreed with you, but not anymore. I firmly believe the future in games lies in game streaming solutions like Gaikai (www.gaikai.com) or OnLive (www.onlive.com) so you will be able to create your game in whatever language you prefer and forget about this-language-does-not-fit-for-this-platform problems. Granted, there is still a long way for this to be mainstream but still...

[User137]

I don't believe a middle-server will never override some very fast paced games or those that send alot of data. Such as Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft or even Counterstrike.

[Colin]

Is there a market for 2d games installed on a PC? Not meaning to be rude but your business plan seems to reply on the fact that there are pascal developers who are wanting to put out 2d games that other people pay for. I would have thought that the flash development would have killed that concept. 2d games would seem to be firmly the domain of webbased tech.

Having recently bought an ipad I would love to create games for it - the best solution that I can see would be ones based on javascript.

flash is 100% no way a web tech, more like a web mess, javascript is far too slow to be considered a useful language for 2d game development, with x86 code and a real engine to back it up, you can made massive 2d games, including online mmorpg, which will be far better than any flash or javascript games. (and dont forget the people that do not have the internet, but still would like to buy some cheap fun games to play on their cr*ppy laptops and computers


note to Hadron Games Member - your website does not work in Opera (only see menu, nothing else)

-Colin