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Thread: PGD - Some thoughts about the future

  1. #1
    PGD Community Manager AthenaOfDelphi's Avatar
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    PGD - Some thoughts about the future

    Hi all,

    Well, I have to say sitting in the management chair for the site brings on a huge mix of emotions for me. The site (or more specifically, the people) has helped me in the past when I've come unstuck with issues so I have a strong desire to keep that going. At the same time I'm acutely aware that the number of active users has declined steadily, pretty much in-line with the decline in popularity of our favourite tool. With the increasing popularity (this is based on job postings and the number of questions and Delphi related posts I'm seeing) I'm hoping that the decline will turn into an increase.

    But, I'm not content with sitting back and just letting it happen around me. I want to try and help the rise and start showing all those nay sayers who believe you can't use Pascal to make games that they are quite frankly wrong

    As a slight aside, if you are in touch with any one who was once an active member and they still use Pascal and they still develop games with it, I'd be interested to hear from them, in particular I'm interested in why they stopped visiting the site. On the flipside if they don't use Pascal for games development, I'd be interested in knowing what they now use and why. And what we could potentially offer as a community to encourage more use of Pascal.

    Since taking over, I've had one or two chats with the active staff and well, there are a couple of things we really like the idea of.

    The first, depending on how long you've been visiting, you may be familiar with... our competitions. So I'd like to ask a few questions about them (I'm happy for private messages if you don't want to air your opinions in public), mainly the questions relate to format.


    • Long or short (months vs. weeks)
    • Prizes (are prizes an important factor or is just getting community kudos enough?)
    • Themed or freestyle
    • Judged by a judging panel or by the other competitors


    I guess really what I'd like to hear is everyone's views on this. I want to run a competition but I want to try and make sure we get plenty of viable entries.

    The other big idea I floated to the staff was this...

    There are some actively developed engines/frameworks at the moment, but nothing like it used to be. Lots of us want to write our own engines, but that can take a lot of time and if you look around there are guys here that have spent a long time writing engines and never seemingly used them in anger to make games with them. I know this is what some people like to do, but doing it solo can be a real drag, and well, at least one of these guys has said they wanted to get involved with a project with other people.

    So the question I have for the community is this... do you think there is any mileage in building a community engine? Just to be clear, it would be open source, built by us for us (and of course anyone else who wants to use it, but primarily it's feature set would be driven by the members of this community). I would aim to support Windows, OSX, iOS and Android (courtesy of Delphi) and of course pretty much anything that can use OpenGL that Free Pascal can build a binary for. If you've got an engine or components already that you'd be willing to throw into the pot, please let me know, also feature requests... I'd like to try and get some sort of list together or the main features the community would want.

    Comments and thoughts on that idea too... again, if you don't want to share your views publicly, please feel free to drop me a PM.

    And finally content...

    One of the biggest issues any community site has is it's content. WILL struggled with it, Traveler and I struggled with it. I'm sure you guys want regular fresh content. Well, you can all create content. You can post news items, write articles and request that they be published, you can blog. Thats a lot of different possibilities right there. If you've got an idea for a tutorial or a series of articles on some tech that's close to your heart but you're not sure whether it's relevant to the site... PM me and we can have a chat about it.

    In fact, I'm happy to take a PM from anyone who wants to discuss pretty much anything about the site.

    And on that note, I'm quite looking forward to what you guys have to say.
    :: AthenaOfDelphi :: My Blog :: My Software ::

  2. #2
    It's a really great idea about a community driven game engine!
    We need 3-4 motivated people for this I think.

    This obviously can help to solve the issues with user activity and content.

    Concerning competitions, at the moment I'd prefer a themed and short one.
    Prizes can be something like a permanent rank in the community, E.g. "winner of 120-th annual competition".
    Probably judging by other competitors is simplier to organize.

  3. #3
    PGDCE Developer de_jean_7777's Avatar
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    I do believe you can create anything with Pascal, not just games And that's after using several languages/frameworks at work for creating "games". Always want to get more involved with PGD, but somehow am always out of it, including my own pascal projects which I rarely get around to.

    As for competitions, I really like them, but not sure I have time for any. Tried to participate twice so far and failed So can't say I have any preferences for them. I like themed ones as they make me try new things.

    As for the engine, I'm developing my own, and it's nothing to brag about (or good or even far from complete) but I don't think I'll quit on it. Starting an open source community one could have success, and I could contribute too with some of the experience I've picked up writing my own. Could possibly even give out the code I have with a very permissive license (bsd) so parts of it my engine can be used, but not sure how much sense that'd make as parts of it are not quality code (I'm in the process of rewriting/adapting a lot of it). There are people here who surely could contribute too, so I do think it's a worthwhile idea.

    Have written one article so far on the site, but I think I should write more.
    Existence is pain

  4. #4
    I'll start with the competition question
    • Short. Rather have them more often, than one big one once a year. Also the longer the time is the bigger the quality difference per entrees can become, depending on how much they dedicate time on it.
    • Kudos. Even potential idea of claiming such prices sounds like trouble to me
    • Themed or freestyle, i guess we can have all kinds of. Mainly themed i think, some might even come with ready code and art base to start from. I guess we are just looking for ways to spend time in a fun way, not here to make a selling game title in each competition.
    • Many ways to go about this. How about community can give each entry 1 or 2 thumbs up, but no down?


    Engine is always interesting topic, i likely would want to participate in community engine if we decided to do so. I have to admit i haven't tried all the previous engines even though started nxPascal. I started programming with DelphiX at young age and it got me far. As time went by i felt limited by it though, as the needs for more GPU power came up and DelphiX was slow at that. At that time i tried what i could to look into DirectX and even made a small 3D tetris with DelphiX of that time. But it was still giving me various restrictions, and so i stumbled upon OpenGL.

    That's where i first got the graphical engine freedom i was looking for, and so GLEngine was born. It is the predecessor of nxPascal, a bit like DelphiX. Had a Delphi IDE components similar to DXScene and DXTimer, and i got some nice demos done with it. But it had to end aswell... I learned alot of Pascal doing all that, and the whole structure of GLEngine seemed lacking and bad. I felt that IDE components for game engine are actually not needed. Especially with Lazarus it brings all kinds of complications to it, such as needs to rebuild the whole Lazarus.exe when adding components. Also if i wanted to support both Delphi and Lazarus, there could definitely be differences in that code, even if just between many different Delphi versions. So i completely dropped the idea of IDE integration and i have not regretted that. It actually gives me much more detailed control of the program flow too, and still being quite simple at it. In some level nxPascal was supposed to be kind of community engine, it just never got any other interested developers to make it grow. The potential is still there, and being very modular it is not restricted by anything. But i don't mind if you want to start a new one from scratch.

  5. #5
    When thinking about competition I think there are two sorts of pepole.
    Those who prefer short competitions, as it alows them to quickly output an idea without the need to worry to much about details.
    And there are those who would like to have bigger time frame either due the fact that their knowledge might not be good enough to quickly turn some idea into code or due the fact that many pepole are quite limited with their time.

    So after giving it some thought next thing came to me:
    Where does it say that we need to have only one competition running at one time?
    Why not runn more than one competition? Why not have anual competition with longer timeframe and a series of mini competitions?
    And if we chose theme for mini competitions right finishing them might help pepole finish anual competition aswel. This might be a win-win solution for most of the pepole.

  6. #6
    PGD Staff code_glitch's Avatar
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    I think what user137 said about using given assets sounds like a good idea. Something like "heres a resource pack - go make" or "heres some code/script/thing - integrate/implement" could be quite fun as we'd get a lot of very similar but very different entries. As far as a community engine, I wouldn't be a main contributor (due to lack of skill and experience more than time) but would definitely be willing to help out.

    As for my experience in pascal - I learnt in pascal and sort of stuck with it and its derivatives ever since unless a project almost explicity required some other language (and I couldn't just write a .dll loader for a pascal program ).
    I once tried to change the world. But they wouldn't give me the source code. Damned evil cunning.

  7. #7
    PGD Community Manager AthenaOfDelphi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by code_glitch View Post
    due to lack of skill and experience more than time
    I think this sentiment may be felt many many of us (myself included). I look at some of the engines that people have produced (the one that springs to mind immediately is Phibermon's - sorry, I can't remember the name) and I feel like I'm some insignificant programming peon. Some of the stuff that has come out of some of the members here has been truly amazing.

    But... they started somewhere... and if they are willing to chip in, provide guidance, and just generally help, then well... we will all benefit and if you feel that you lack the skill at the start, being involved seems like a good way to change that.

    Improving my skills would be one thing I would definitely want out of participating in something like a community engine.
    :: AthenaOfDelphi :: My Blog :: My Software ::

  8. #8
    As for competitions - I think it would actually do more good, instead of launching our own, to encourage people to take part in other events. For example, there's yet another Ludum Dare this weekend - go and join! Maybe if your game is awesome enough, some people will actually grow curious as to how were you able to implement it in Pascal.
    Unfortunately I can't participate this time, since I have classes at my weekend uni.

    Either way, if organising game competitions, I think one week is best - longer than a single weekend, so you don't have to rush, yet short enough not to discourage with a vision of having to write a lot of code because people will expect a large game.
    I also think it could be interesting to have a non-gamedev contest - say, implement an algorithm, or maybe create some kind of game AI in .dll/.so which will then compete against each other. code_glitches ideas also seem interesting.

    As for a community project, I don't know how my experience will look compared to others, but it's sure worth a try. Could be a good opportunity to learn something new.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Super Vegeta View Post
    I also think it could be interesting to have a non-gamedev contest - say, implement an algorithm, or maybe create some kind of game AI in .dll/.so which will then compete against each other. code_glitches ideas also seem interesting.
    I was thinking about something similar but maybe not even in form of a competition.
    My idea is something like this:
    A comunity member creates a game related programming problem. For instance implementing some algorithm like you sad.
    Also this same comunity member provides a posible solution to that problem.
    The goal of the rest of the comunity is to go and try to provide as many different ways to solve the given problem.
    In the end we can compare the solution, discuss and find benefits/weakneses of each of the provided solutions and maybe even ways of how to improve them in the end.

    So what we would get from this is lots of different solutions (code snipects) which other pepole could use in their projects when needed. And since certain solution may not necessary the best solution for someone, pepole could go and chose that one solution which would be most suitable for them since they would have many ones to chose.
    At the same time this would provide some kind of a joint knowledge of the whole comunity in one place.
    Maybe some members might go even to the point of using that gathered knowledge and making a full blown tutorials out of it which would provide other members to gain that knowledge even more easily.

  10. #10
    Instead of make our own competitions, should be good if we compete more seriously in competitions like Ludum Dare and even Global Game Jam. This way we put more Pascal games in this compos that are dominated by new tools like unity, construct and javascript.
    We can compete to see who gets the better position for a Pascal game in the Ludum Dare.

    OBS - I'm still hard working in my pascal unfinishable game - almost finishing

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