How much would you pay for this concept for a "Light" Delphi Edition?

[WILL]

Proper public forum etiquette aside; I think we are starting to get into some pretty wild theories here. All I'm asking is if this product is something you would invest in.

Lets try to leave the other stuff out of it for this thread. I want to avoid this poll becoming yet another "big ball of hairy" like all these other Delphi/EMBT discussion seem to go. I'm not challenging your own varied opinions, but lets try to stick to the topic at hand and focus on the product as specified here, it's self. This is indeed for very constructive purposes and not fodder for the witch burners.

"You there! Put that torch out!"

[Murmandamus]

Lets try to leave the other stuff out of it for this thread. I want to avoid this poll becoming yet another "big ball of hairy" like all these other Delphi/EMBT discussion seem to go. I'm not challenging your own varied opinions, but lets try to stick to the topic at hand and focus on the product as specified here, it's self. This is indeed for very constructive purposes and not fodder for the witch burners.

The problem is that plenty of this "other stuff" are legitimate obstacles to successfully creating and marketing such a product. Yeah, sure, let's engage in speculation about what we would like in a "Delphi Game Dev Version", then let's assume that we actually get it. Do you think all of these other issues are also magically going to go away?

Ultimately, the crux of the problem is that Embarcadero doesn't have the Borland community anymore. They simply are not interested in it. Even if you can get them to listen, there is a serious disconnect with how they perceive the Pascal developer community, and until that changes, we can wish and poll and pontificate until the cows come home, but it will all be in vain.

Maybe someone from Embarcadero can come address the issues.

[pitfiend]

...the crux of the problem is that Embarcadero doesn't have the Borland community anymore. They simply are not interested in it. Even if you can get them to listen, there is a serious disconnect with how they perceive the Pascal developer community, and until that changes, we can wish and poll and pontificate until the cows come home, but it will all be in vain.

Maybe someone from Embarcadero can come address the issues.

I absolutely agree with you! They think we are buying luxury, when we really need good tools! In the past, Borland maybe was never a good listener over community needs, but at least they provide us with affordable tools of great quality. We need that back at least!

[phibermon]

I suspect that this question was posed by Em. themselves via our very own illustrious PGD Don and if so then I've looked up from my breakfast cereal in interest.

Assuming such a product would be able to compile for all of the supported platforms then in my personal opinion it would be a great step in the right direction.

The price suggested is competitive, obviously the cheaper the better.

I think Em. at this stage would benefit from publishing performance comparisons between their compiler output and FPC's output in some meaningful way.

FastMM on the windows platform aside (are they still using that?) the Delphi compiler should be producing faster code which for certain CPU heavy games is always desirable and with IOS/Android devices it might even be essential in a small number of cases.

Obviously somebody there thinks their compiler is superiour or it's continual development over a switch to FPC is foolish. So some clean hard facts about why the compiler is better than FPC, performance, stability etc would go a long way to improving the image.

Not really interested in the VCL vs FCL etc as Delphi is obviously superiour on that front (apart from the lack of support for some essential platforms) As much as some people love Lazarus (myself included) - it's free and that makes it's shortcomings easier to live with. It's not a superiour coding experience over Delphi, in fact it's been a bloody pain in the backside for me on many occasions.

With a lean and mean IDE as proposed, cross platform (at the very least Win/OSX and deeply preferable IOS as well) and even marginly superior performance, then I'd say it would make for a good purchase for those developers looking to rake in some cash for their work (and if you're doing so, $200 *is* cheap).

Hobby devs with no commercial plans for their work are still left without much incentive however.

--

As stated, I really want Em. to do well on this front, I will settle for nothing less than the total dominance of Object Pascal in the gaming industry with the secondary objective of crushing C++ into the metaphorical dirt from which it rose. If that fails to happen, I will grudgingly tolerate an acceptance by the gaming industry for OOP as a viable cross platform language - but will still hurl random objects at C++ coders as and when I see them.

In a more serious tone, I do think despite some of our misgivings about Em. and past decisions that some of us resent, we should try to make a more concerted effort to support them, even if it's only providing feedback like we're doing now.

I would one day like to release games for the PS4 and XBox360*2 (or whatever they're called) in a legal way. For various reasons Sony and Microsoft are unlikely to ever allow FPC compiled submissions. Em. are our only hope of having access to platforms like these in the future and indeed as yet unknown platforms with locked in commercial style development pathways.

That's not to say that they would or are even in a position to do so but without strong commercial representation of the language then we will forever be side-lined.