What tools are you currently using to makes games with these days? - 2013

[phibermon]

I would say this is true for desktop. However, desktop is losing its market share now to mobiles and huge piracy don't make it a very good development platform. Add Windows 8 fiasco to that, discontinuation of XNA, and new Microsoft policies forcing to buy expensive Visual Studio to allow running DX debugging tools (with the recent Platform Update, you cannot use PIX) - it's a dying market. I think only Macs at this moment are stable, but still, I think they'll be giving terrain to mobiles continuously, with desktop/laptop becoming an elite only / developer-only tools.

On mobile front, Oxygene and Smart Studios are non-native and forgive me for saying that, they are no more useful than any other Java or HTML5 tools out there, even worse because they are not-native to non-native conversion tools (i.e. they are intermediaries). This is the same as Oxygene for .NET: you'd better use C# instead, as it is also a very good language. If I would develop games on non-native, I'd pursue HTML5 directly, but there are only a very limited kind of games you can make with that due to performance limitations, especially on mobile. For that, you *need* to go for XCode. FreePascal barely works on Android and iOS, albeit with RTL bugs and it's a pain in the ass to configure, not to mention that you need to develop everything from scratch, starting from keyboard input to window management, etc.

On a positive side, the incoming Mobile Studio with Delphi for iOS, I think, would be the only native Pascal compiler that can be used in practice for making games on iOS and later for Android (by the way, there is a beta program where you can already try it). I'm not saying that because I'm working with EMBT (in fact, this is a minus, as it's *very* difficult!), but because you can take existing Pascal code, press F9 and see it running on device in less than 2 minutes, and it's *native*. To do the same with FreePascal, it took me 8 hours (the whole day!) to make it work with iOS 6.0 (and forget even about 6.1.2!), and still only a handful of APIs were available, while you're stuck in XCode editor or even console compilation. This is why I've been with EMBT for more than a year now, as without Delphi for Mobiles, I think Pascal has no future there, I myself would abandon it.

I'm afraid you're quite wrong. The desktop space has actually shown nearly a 4% increase on last year in bulk sales to business (and increasing in home as well, it's not like people like us are replacing our PCs with tablets, it's idiots who would never of bought a PC that are now buying tablets) all of this idiot lantern stuff in the media about the desktops days being numbered is payed for by tablet manufactures. They want people to believe that tablets are the future but they're simply not, a keyboard and a mouse will give any worker higher productivity in their daily tasks than a virtual keyboard (that covers up screen real estate, what a retarded idea) and fingertips, which having a usable contact area of half a centimeter results in large clunky interfaces where you can barely fit anything on the screen. All business know this, you'll never be in a job where everybody is glaring down at a tablet (without a docking station, which arguably results in a desktop PC, so all you've really done is replace a powerful desktop operating system with some over simplistic childrens toy) and if you ever do, leave straight away because that company prefers shiny things to say, sound business sence.

Tablets are for mobile use, light browsing etc they will *never* replace desktops, they will only complement them and be web devices for people that wouldn't of bought a PC. Only a technology that offers higher productivity would replace PCs. Tablets are a step backwards in terms of technology and productivity. They are far slower than desktops, totally none upgradable, pretty much impossible to repair and are engineered to be simple enough for a child to use. Which is great for children but not very appealing if you have a PhD in computer science.

The concept of the tablet replacing the PC is exactly like all those 1950's TV programs saying we'll all have a bipedal robot doing our cooking by the 1980's. The reality is that they they fill a neich that laptops once had, now laptops are for people that need a PC on the move to do work, tablets are for people that are bored on the move.

And as for Freepascal, again, I'm afraid you're wrong. there are plenty of IOS pascal games and engines. It supports tons more platforms than delphi does, including the 64bit power-pc architecture on the PS3. And don't forget that if you're compiling your apps for IOS with delphi, guess what? it's using a custom version of FPC to compile for ARM! and the FPC core development team includes some highly talented people that have worked on numerous compilers, they are just as talented if not more so than anybody EMBT have working for them and they easily outnumber the EMBT compiler team which I'd be surprised if it consisted of any more than one person.

Delphi is totally inappropriate for making games now, you're paying for the business components, the compiler is the thing that gets the *least* attention. If what you payed for was the compiler, then how come after so many many years have they only recently supported IOS/Mac and STILL don't support Linux.

Not supporting Linux for games development? with Steam and the upcoming Steambox and Android? (which is linux with a custom X11 replacement).

And yes, with FPC you do have to do more work to get your games working cross platform but that's true of C++ too. But it's not like you've got to do it over and over again, just a few days and you can have a framework working on all the major OSes and from then on, the idea of paying for somthing like Delphi is utterly laughable.

And to top it all off, Delphi = Lazarus. The fact that delphi has a compiler is a mute point, FPC is a full blown cross platform compiler that can work independantly of Lazarus and has a full build system comparable to how it's done in the GNU toolchain. FPC is like the GNU C++ compiler, it's like LLVM+Clang. it's a serious peice of kit for Posix style development, Delphi is more like visual studio, it's a propietory tech for developing desktop style applications and I wouldn't use it ever again for the same reasons I avoid all propietory tech - it's future is not guaranteed. FPC? even if I'm the only person working on it, I know it will always have a future. My hard work and investment would not be lost just because a company decided to sell up.

I mean just look at all those poor XNA sods, all those years perfecting their knowledge of the API and now it's all useless, total waste of effort. Same with silverlight and a dozen other dead techs.

Edit : sorry one more thing Macs are stable? you do know that OSX is going to be replaced with IOS on their desktops in the very near future? and they're not microsoft, these are the people that switch architectures and drop Carbon. They did that to force devs onto Cocoa in order to make the transition to IOS. They care even less about backwards compatibilty than Sony!