Care for an 80% solution?

[masonwheeler]

Don't take me wrong, but your engine is to focused for our plans. As we told you, we plan to have an open engine without a specific focus to avoid extreme hackery. The purpose of the framework is to bring tools to develop games as you build a vcl or firemonkey app, obviously we are not planning to use visual components but classes, just to not follow the path of glscene, that I consider a complete mess and I think it's abandoned right now (correct me if I'm wrong).

This appears to be more of the same terminology confusion. Can we clear things up a little? Are you planning on building an engine, or a library?

If the distinction is unclear, here's a simple rule of thumb: If Joe The Game Developer needs a copy of Delphi or FPC to build a game with the product, it's a library. If he can use the product itself to build a game, it's an engine and an editor.

Of course we can reuse previously tested and functional code, but you must understand and accept the fact that we are dealing with some kind of license, then if that code exists under a license uncompatible with ours (not yet fully defined), unfortunately we can not use it as it is, some rewrite will be needed, unless the coder donate it to the community changing it's license.

My project is MPL-licensed, which is pretty much the de facto standard for Object Pascal open-source projects. So there shouldn't be any problems.

This is the kind of things we don't want to happen. The framework must be friendly enough for any kind of project you want to do. Here comes the modularity we want to implement, the one that allows you to add certain features you need for the project, it could be anything, from multimedia, HUD/GUI/window system, network, database, local/cloud storage, scripting, to anything else your heart calls because the design will allow you to create your own classes based on our API.

Yeah, this is sounding more and more like a library.

Even the render system is planned to be modular, so you can choose DirectX, OpenGL (for instance the prefered), SDL or GDI+ if you want.

*cringe*

Two problems there. First, why would you want to choose between DirectX, OpenGL and SDL, specifically, seeing as how SDL is an abstraction layer that has DirectX and OpenGL backends?

Second, doing any non-trivial visual effects these days requires shaders. Offering a choice between DirectX and OpenGL means that you just doubled the work your users have to do, since they use incompatible shader languages.

We are putting all of our efforts and knowledge to build a solid framework as a team, that's why we are taking some time to define standards and design based on our experience. In the meantime, we also learn from what is been building in the framework. As you may know, many here have build their one engine/framework, with some success or failure, but as a solo coder. And we all agree that at some point many promising projects go on hold, because it happens that one coder is not enough to complete the project, some times the lack of knowledge to progress or the most common thing, we run out of motivation. Then to avoid wasting that talent, we decide to create a team to finaly build the ultimate game framework for pascal developers, well documented and able to compete pear-to-pear with commercial engines.

So you do want to build something that's a market-grade engine? Then you have to play by their rules. Have you ever seen a commercial game engine that can do "any kind of game"? I can't think of any. The successful ones focus on one genre and do it well, and if you want a different kind of game, you use a different engine. Can you think of any examples to the contrary?