So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[laggyluk]

@phibermon
What I was trying to say is why teaching people of how to initialize OpenGL rendering pipeline, why teaching them how to store textures in video memory, how to apply transformations onto 3D models, applying lighting and shaders, and so on low level if there are already available graphics engines that can do all this for them.
If we go and start teaching this do we also expect that each one of them will be using this knowledge to create his own graphical engine.

Yeah but when someone looks for OpenGL tutorials and all he/she can find are for c++/c# then why would even bother with doing it in pascal?

Dev forums are dying thanks to stackoverflow and this one is no different.

Pascal is obscure choice for making games considering lack of learning resources/user base and imo this can only change if some big company picks it up for their next big publicly accessible game engine. But then, why would anybody do that same reasons considered?

[Rickmeister]

Yeah but when someone looks for OpenGL tutorials and all he/she can find are for c++/c# then why would even bother with doing it in pascal?

Dev forums are dying thanks to stackoverflow and this one is no different.

Pascal is obscure choice for making games considering lack of learning resources/user base and imo this can only change if some big company picks it up for their next big publicly accessible game engine. But then, why would anybody do that same reasons considered?

A quick way to get more 'meat' on this site would be to ask the people over at DelphiGL for permission to translate some of their GL tutorials and move them here?? Or link to them? I don't speak german, and google translate is just awful Not much use to do the good old 'divide and conquer' dance, and they seem to be quite active, at least by the looks of their forums. It would be much easier if you all spoke Swedish, it's way more easy to understand...

[dazappa]

I haven't been here in forever. For me it is all about language and tool popularity. First, where do we go to find news in the first place that we can post on this site? The only other thing really is working on custom projects and posting about them.

I stopped using Pascal for games probably 5 years ago. The tools are weak. The libraries are unmaintained. It just feels like Pascal as a language for game development has faded out of existence. I still like Pascal, and I still use it with Lazarus to create some desktop software. Without any decent momentum behind a project though I find it hard to work with. I would rather make games than engines. At this point, I am more interested in 3d games than 2d games. That's not easy to do with Pascal, especially if you want all these cool new features like PBR and VR (if you guys haven't tried a Vive, you should they're so much fun).

Quick edit: We have amazing tools available as free to use now. Unity 3d and Unreal Engine 4 are stellar. Has anyone tried to make a comparable game in Pascal and compared how long it can take? These large game engines are dominating the game dev scene for a reason. I got tired of dealing with issues, missing features, and lackluster tools.

Anyway. I through you a couple of dollars for hosting Athena. It's not much but hopefully others can chip in as well.

FYI there is a small Linux game jam happening. No prizes or incentive to "win" just for fun. Might be worth entering if anyone uses Lazarus: https://itch.io/jam/linux-jam-2017

[phibermon]

@SilverWarrior - Yes I do see what you mean but Pascal engines currently available as good as many of them are still don't come close to the ease of use and rapid development capable with some of large and free engines that are available in other languages - you're totally right - it's game development, not graphics engine development but due to what's available? if a game developer working in Pascal right now wanted to produce even half of what unreal engine 4 is capable of - they need to write it themselves.

which leads onto :

Quick edit: We have amazing tools available as free to use now. Unity 3d and Unreal Engine 4 are stellar. Has anyone tried to make a comparable game in Pascal and compared how long it can take? These large game engines are dominating the game dev scene for a reason. I got tired of dealing with issues, missing features, and lackluster tools.

A view probably shared by many - certainly anybody looking to choose between Pascal and another language. Many of us have been working hard for a number of years on better and more capable engines but compared to the dozens/hundreds of developers that contribute to something like Ogre3D, unity etc - progress is slow.

Things are changing though and there's some very capable engines out there. There's certainly a lot more capability than people seem to be making use of

[SilverWarior]

@SilverWarrior - Yes I do see what you mean but Pascal engines currently available as good as many of them are still don't come close to the ease of use and rapid development capable with some of large and free engines that are available in other languages

Yes I perfectly agree with you on that. But why is that? Is it because Pascal as a language is not suitable for game development? Or is it because none of the "weaker" Pascal based game engines never remained in development for so long as development of those powerful game engines that were developed in other programming languages have?
Below you are mentioning Unreal 4 game engine. Do you even know how long was Unreal 4 game engine in development? Development of the Unreal 4 engine started in 2003 and it was published in 2012. That is 9 years of development done by experienced team before publishing but its development still hasn't stopped. But we should not forget about Unreal 4 game engine predecessors as they also affected the Unreal 4 game engine development in a way.
First unreal game engine was published in 1998 which is 18 years ago. So this in a way means that there is almost 20 years of development behind Unreal 4 game engine.

So how many Pascal based game engines have seen so long development time? I could come up with only three potential candidates

1. Your unpublished JINK game engine that as you have said has been in development for over 8 years
2. Platform extended which is successor to several popular Asphyre game libraries where the oldest one was releast back in 2007
3. Castle game engine for which I don't have release date of its first iteration

if a game developer working in Pascal right now wanted to produce even half of what unreal engine 4 is capable of - they need to write it themselves.

That is true. But what would be better? For them to start from scratch (all the way from writing OpenGL basics)? Or perhaps by extending one of the above mentioned game engines?
I think that the latter would be better.

Many of us have been working hard for a number of years on better and more capable engines but compared to the dozens/hundreds of developers that contribute to something like Ogre3D, unity etc - progress is slow.

But why is progress so slow?
I guess main reason for this might be the fact that each of the above mentioned game engines is basically being developed by single developers or very small team.
Now you may argue that in the past you offered others to join development of your game engine but there wasn't interest in that. I'm willing to bet that main reason for that is the fact that since you still hasn't published your game engine no one had a chance to see its capabilities and with that also its potential for improvement.
But then looking back at my last sentence I think that the main reason for lack of decent progress with Pascal based game engines is not due the lack of developers but instead lack of users.

So how can we bring more users to these engines?
Is it by teaching them basics of OpenGL which would potentially allow them to start creating one of their own game engines?
Or by teaching them topics that I recommended which would allow them to use one of the existing engines and actually start making games with it and maybe even join developers of these existing game engines with goal of adding additional features to them in order to bring them closer to Unity or Unreal 4 game engines?

I personally think that later choice is much better. That is why I'm so adamant about it.

[phibermon]

Yes I perfectly agree with you on that. But why is that? Is it because Pascal as a language is not suitable for game development? Or is it because none of the "weaker" Pascal based game engines never remained in development for so long as development of those powerful game engines that were developed in other programming languages have?
Below you are mentioning Unreal 4 game engine. Do you even know how long was Unreal 4 game engine in development? Development of the Unreal 4 engine started in 2003 and it was published in 2012. That is 9 years of development done by experienced team before publishing but its development still hasn't stopped. But we should not forget about Unreal 4 game engine predecessors as they also affected the Unreal 4 game engine development in a way.
First unreal game engine was published in 1998 which is 18 years ago. So this in a way means that there is almost 20 years of development behind Unreal 4 game engine.

So how many Pascal based game engines have seen so long development time? I could come up with only three potential candidates

1. Your unpublished JINK game engine that as you have said has been in development for over 8 years
2. Platform extended which is successor to several popular Asphyre game libraries where the oldest one was releast back in 2007
3. Castle game engine for which I don't have release date of its first iteration

Yes I'd agree with you on that too - there's been numerous engines over the years that seemed to die off - another notable mention for your list would be GLScene - while not an engine in itself? it's still in development and is very capable if you know how to use it. GLScene, Jink, Platform extended/Asphyre and Castle are probably the most advanced pascal frameworks/engines that are actively developed, Cast II is noteworthy too although I've not seen updates for quite some time.

But why is progress so slow?
I guess main reason for this might be the fact that each of the above mentioned game engines is basically being developed by single developers or very small team.
Now you may argue that in the past you offered others to join development of your game engine but there wasn't interest in that. I'm willing to bet that main reason for that is the fact that since you still hasn't published your game engine no one had a chance to see its capabilities and with that also its potential for improvement.
But then looking back at my last sentence I think that the main reason for lack of decent progress with Pascal based game engines is not due the lack of developers but instead lack of users.

Agree again - lack of users - something I'm very much aware of! but it's certainly not a lack of potential users. To my mind the two biggest barriers to 3D development are :

1. Lack of knowledge in the 3D realm
2. Lack of 3D resources to use in games or the skills to make them cheaply

The first I think is still underestimated. We've had GLScene for years and it's very capable - so why isn't there a dozen, large 3D game projects making use of GLScene? well it's mainly number one - it's not good enough to say "here's a model loaded and rendered to the screen" and "here's a particle system with a fire preset" if you want an amateur to create a game using your engine - it has to be, as we've often said, a game engine and a game engine to my mind should be something like Quake or the engine used in Fallout/Oblivion/Skyrim etc

You should be able to load some resources, allocate some defaults - assign a few events and have a 'working game'.

If a great set of useful components were going to take the Pascal Gaming world by storm? it already would of done.

All engines so far, have stop too short in terms capability, to gain a meaningful user-base, given the already small number of potential users.

The second is an issue for game development in general and not just specific to Pascal but it effects all game developers and in terms of the adoption of Pascal 3D engines - I believe it's a factor.

So how can we bring more users to these engines?
Is it by teaching them basics of OpenGL which would potentially allow them to start creating one of their own game engines?
Or by teaching them topics that I recommended which would allow them to use one of the existing engines and actually start making games with it and maybe even join developers of these existing game engines with goal of adding additional features to them in order to bring them closer to Unity or Unreal 4 game engines?

I personally think that later choice is much better. That is why I'm so adamant about it.

Again I agree - perhaps then a tutorial that shows how to do the same basic thing in three different engines?

[SilverWarior]

Agree again - lack of users - something I'm very much aware of! but it's certainly not a lack of potential users. To my mind the two biggest barriers to 3D development are :

1. Lack of knowledge in the 3D realm
2. Lack of 3D resources to use in games or the skills to make them cheaply

Why are you so convinced that in order for a game nowadays to become popular it needs to have 3D graphics? You know there are many popular 2D based games out there?
Here is a list of 6 2D based games (that I know of who) are amongst top 100 most currently popular Steam games (http://steamcharts.com/top):

1. Terraria at 20th place: http://steamcharts.com/app/105600
2. Stardew Valley at 29th place: http://steamcharts.com/app/413150
3. RimWorld at 50th place: http://steamcharts.com/app/294100
4. Factorio at 54th place: http://steamcharts.com/app/427520
5. Oxygen Not Included at 67th place: http://steamcharts.com/app/457140
6. Starbound at 75th place: http://steamcharts.com/app/211820

All engines so far, have stop too short in terms capability, to gain a meaningful user-base, given the already small number of potential users.

Have you ever asked why did this happen? I did and I believe that the main cause for this is too low user base which is killing the motivation for engine developers to continue their work on them.

Again I agree - perhaps then a tutorial that shows how to do the same basic thing in three different engines?

I was more thinking about tutorials about game development parts that are not dependent on game engines but sure when you need to visually show something we could make examples that would work with different existing game engines.