PGD - Some thoughts about the future

[SilverWarior]

This way we put more Pascal games in this compos that are dominated by new tools like unity, construct and javascript.

I think that the main problem is that we pascal developers have to do much more work to finish any of our entries into these competitions. That is mostly becouse there isn't any Unity like game engine for pascal.
You see there is a big difference when creating a game with Unity worshop becouse unity has integrated resource managing, most comon algorithms etc. or when you have to go and implement all teese by yourself and thus write many thousands of lines of code.
If I only check my code that I have written for ingame Supply and Demmand economic system I was working I see that it has over 100K lines of code and it is still not finished entirely.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong I'm not discouraging anyone from participating in those compos. If I find out the theme of one of them to be interesting enough I also might go and try. But I do realize that I have much harder task at hand.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

I think that the main problem is that we pascal developers have to do much more work to finish any of our entries into these competitions. That is mostly becouse there isn't any Unity like game engine for pascal.
You see there is a big difference when creating a game with Unity worshop becouse unity has integrated resource managing, most comon algorithms etc. or when you have to go and implement all teese by yourself and thus write many thousands of lines of code.
If I only check my code that I have written for ingame Supply and Demmand economic system I was working I see that it has over 100K lines of code and it is still not finished entirely.

This is one of the factors that kind of puts me off... you use Unity or some other engine of a similar ilk and you have a massive head start... but the rules do allow for the use of publicly available engines and libraries, so theoretically you could use any of the engines we currently have available... or if we create a community engine... that would be open source and from what I read of the rules, acceptable

Get to that stage and we could get everyone who worked on the engine to crash the compy

[SilverWarior]

Get to that stage and we could get everyone who worked on the engine to crash the compy

You mean each of us go and creates its own entry so that even if our entries are not the best we still win becouse if being in great numbers.
Dream come true!

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Well it would certainly be a nice amount of exposure :-)

[Andru]

Funny coincidence, just few days ago I thought about returning to development "just for fun", and here we are - topic on PGD about something like resurrecting community, hmmm...

[SilverWarior]

Funny coincidence, just few days ago I thought about returning to development "just for fun"

Does that maybe mean that you are concidering to resume working on ZenGL?

[code_glitch]

Can I just say that when the thought of a community engine dropped - ZenGL was darn high on my list of things to look at for making it. That work you did on ZenGL was pretty darn good IMHO

That said, I see a recurring theme here when looking at pascal and competition entries - pascal seeming less suitable for rapid competition game development than some of the other alternatives. Thus, would it not make sens to build a "system" (and by that I mean tools/framework/snippets/methodology/engine/thing) that would help make pascal more competitive in this space?

For instance, it could be an early compo of the kind Super Vegeta mentioned (with implementing things AI/algorithms/whatnot) to get the base code set. Or one could establish the base code and then launcch a compo to make use of it - which would provide a good data to develop a game engine on.

In short, what I'm saying is that 1. we have a problem in the game-sphere. Fragmentation of the codebase (how many of us have our own personal frameworks/engines/so on?), a high barrier of entry (pascal is currently seemingly unsuited to the compo game development environment) and that 2. we have a LOT of components and people. I realize how hard making an engine/API is - more so for a robust and stable system. (Hey - my prometheus engine is well known at LD. For all the wrong reasons). and finally: were pascal programmers. Our problems are not boredom, lack of projects and the like. Its lack of time. And as pascal programmers we're practical people who seem to be known for being practical people who are good at making things that work and fixing things so they work.

Just some food for thougt. After all, I tend to get kind of excited when community projects are possibly going to happen because its one of the few instances where I can work on something I couldn't do on my own with my limited abilities and the PGD community has a lot of talent that I sure wouldnt mind to see at work on something that could make everyones lives easier and help cement pascal as something that isnt THAT obsolete teaching toy people seem to think it is when reading about what it once was.

[pitfiend]

Very interesting topic. Something I think about, is that I spend a lot of time building comercial apps. I have skills building database and GUI stuff. But when it comes to games, I feel to be 10 steps behind anyone in this community. Of course learning is The Option, it takes time and worth it absolutely. Time is a Villain.

The propose to create our own game engine, is something I look with hope, but we must think that we can also create wrappers for popular game engines. Is there an obligation to do everything in Pascal? Why? Of course pride feels good, but we are reinventing the wheel. It's round and it works fine, use it, period.

About the engines build by members, some are amazing, but have one thing in common: they are not truly game engines, most of them are more graphic engines with extra features. Please don't take me wrong, and don't be blinded by your own proud, you deserve more recognition for what you have done. On the other hand, these amazing frameworks have a big lack of documentation. To be honest, having an HTML/RTF/DOC/whatever file describing one or more class structures is far away from documentation, neither "self documented" is an option.

We are a bunch of experts programmers with deep knowledge on many development areas, we don't have a clear goal... unless we take on that proposed community project as a whole team, not just as talented programmers contributing on spare time. Maybe I'm asking to much, I suppose that all of you have daytime jobs, just as myself.

So, to compete, we need to invest (not money, but knowledge, skills, time, responsability), to cooperate, to define objectives, and then we will be ready to take on any competition!

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Everyone who has replied... thank you for your comments. In (I think) the last 60 days, there have been 71 active people on the boards... if you're one of them and you've not posted... please do.

I want to get as many peoples views on the subject of competitions and a community project as possible.

I think I've already said this, but if you're in contact with a member of the site and they don't visit, poke them... get them to pop along if they still actively use Pascal. I'd like to try and find out why they don't visit so often, what would make them regular visitors again and all that kind of stuff. Was it the lack of a community project that put them off? Why do so few people compete in competitions?

Competitions is interesting... for the same reason (lack of time) I get the feeling prefer short or long competitions depending on who you are As for entering competitions that are shorter... I think SilverWarior has summed it up best... at the moment we have a big overhead to even get on a level with Unity out of the box. I'd like that to change and I'd like for more of us to enter more competitions... not just our own, but others too. Either using our engine or as a team where the rules permit

It's also quite clear from this thread and from a number of chats I've had that there are those who want to learn, want to improve and a community project that includes some good quality talent (that we have here) is an excellent vehicle for doing that.

Anyhow, I want to leave this thread open a while longer to capture more comments etc. from those who don't visit regularly.

[Andru]

Does that maybe mean that you are concidering to resume working on ZenGL?

Yep. Over the past time I upgraded my PC, so now I have support of new versions of MacOS X(with AMD it was hell developing for this OS and iOS using virtual machines...), got some experience with Direct3D 11 at work(but using C++), thought a lot about architecture and other things, new people start to use ZenGL and others continue... Also there are some improvements going on with FreePascal in trunk. So, all this something like a base for "new start", or just new episode after "to be continued..." But still understanding bad situation with FPC/Delphi performance, some moments in syntax which I hate(e.g. case insensitive), some language limits(e.g. my hack with PByteArray, which is bad for debugging... Lazarus just stops debugging because GDB can't allocate memory), and very bad support of mobile platforms are holding me. By "bad support of mobile platforms" I mean Xcode mess for FPC and no debugging for Android, what about Delphi - too expensive and I don't believe it at all as stable solution, but maybe I'm wrong, because I didn't try it and only read some info in internet.