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Author Topic: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?  (Read 6940 times)

greenzyzyzy

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #15 on: August 08, 2020, 05:28:43 am »
Slightly off topic, but can I have a kind of survey?

I am very interested in how computer games can be created and I am now building my game builder. The progress is very slow, I do it only when I have spare time.

What do you think are the things make a good game builder?

For your information, game builder (or some call it game studio), game engine, game framework, game library are not the same. They meanings are often overlapped but they are different.

Here are a list of things that I think good to have:

- Totally free or open source
- Freemium and affordable
- Can build 3D games
- Have game templates (shot-em up, platform, racing, adventure, RPG, RTS, etc)
- Have ready to use AI
- Good documentation
- Written in Pascal
- Object/Material library
- Cross platform
- Can build Android games
- Build-in level editor
- Build-in graphics editor
- Have support forum
- Drag and drop design
- No coding needed
- Can run on old hardware

Implementing all the features are impossible for me, I'm just a single programmer. So if you can choose what are the most important features to you? And how do you rank them? You can add other new features that are important to you.


i think the most important is :
 Written in Pascal
 Cross platform
 Can run on old hardware

Ñuño_Martínez

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #16 on: August 08, 2020, 11:33:21 am »
I agree with trev. That's why I decided to change my mind for next version of my engine.
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mr-highball

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #17 on: August 08, 2020, 04:40:28 pm »
Perhaps a better approach than building an entire game engine from scratch would be to implement a pascal binding for godot?
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-getting-more-languages

The article above is a little old, so the process may be more "refined" now, but godot is gaining a lot of notoriety in the open source game engine scene,and supports every platform including web and ar/vr.

michalis

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #18 on: August 08, 2020, 11:36:30 pm »
Hi everyone!

Quote
- Totally free or open source
- Freemium and affordable
- Can build 3D games
- Have game templates (shot-em up, platform, racing, adventure, RPG, RTS, etc)
- Have ready to use AI
- Good documentation
- Written in Pascal
- Object/Material library
- Cross platform
- Can build Android games
- Build-in level editor
- Build-in graphics editor
- Have support forum
- Drag and drop design
- No coding needed
- Can run on old hardware

For me the priorities when choosing new game engine would be:

- Open source (engine, as well as the surrounding tools, like compiler and editor)
- Actively developed
- Cross platform (desktop, mobile at least)
- Supports glTF (or any other *open* model format -- currently glTF is the best option here)
- Good documentation

As for Castle Game Engine being not easy to use:

- We indeed have a large API. And it is probably too large. I agree with that, and I fight to make API smaller/leaner (but still maximally functional) every day :)

    E.g. our planned features contains a plan how to replace 5 units with something smaller, one day. But it just takes time to make a perfect API design, that hits the perfect spot between being easy to use + have powerful functionality.

- If something seems difficult -- please ask on our forum or Discord chat.

- To make engine easier to use, we also work on CGE editor intensively. And we made a lot of other good features lately :) See the list of new features to be released with CGE 7.0 (you can already use them by downloading CGE 6.5 (snapshot updated automatically)).

- The engine is used for production games :) On Nintendo Switch, Steam, Android, iOS now.

- I'm happy to notice that it's no longer a one-person project :) I was on vacation for the last 1.5 week, mostly offline, just returned today. I am incredibly happy to see that our Discord and forum was busy, with issues getting resolved. Besides me, many people now contribute to CGE regularly -- most importantly the tireless Eugene Loza who deserves my thousand thanks for being part of CGE since many years now.

Have fun developing games everyone :)

Warfley

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #19 on: August 09, 2020, 12:33:29 am »
The article above is a little old, so the process may be more "refined" now, but godot is gaining a lot of notoriety in the open source game engine scene,and supports every platform including web and ar/vr.
I have looked into the godot C++ bindings source a while ago and can say that this (porting to pascal) should not be too hard, but will be a lot of effort. Basically for every godot type a wrapper type needs to be implemented.
It would actually be pretty easy using the(managed) advanced to represent the godot simple types (like vector, string, etc) and classes for the Node types

But, I actually created a small game (well if you call it that, it's more like a base level with some mechanics) with godot and first thought of using the C++ bindings because I really dislike the godot language as it is really weird (can't really handle cyclic dependencies, which means you can't referr to your own class type within it's class without very weird hacks), but the error management and debugging is so absolutely bad that I decided not to after the first few hours of playing around.

Also there are a lot of things that are really hard to express using native code, like godots internal arrays are these pythonesque arrays and you can't just pass a typed C style array to the engine and need to work on those "variant arrays" (I think thats how they are called).

So long story short, Godot is great for making games, creating a pascal binding, while taking some effort wouldn't be that hard, but I don't think that it would be worth it and in the end, as long as you don't rely on performance (in which case the C++ bindings would probably even be a better option) I think using gdscript is the better option.


About the topic in general, I personally feel that none of the pascal game engines (truth be told, I haven't tried out castle in years) can really compare to the "big" engines like Unity, Cry engine, etc. even to Godot (which is compared to the big ones really weak), and I personally would rather choose my tools to be suited best for the project than stick to a certain language and use worse tooling.

I hate gdscript and really like pascal, but would probably take it over pascal any time for creating a game, because with godot you can create a simple marioesque jump and run game in around 1 hour.
« Last Edit: August 09, 2020, 12:36:45 am by Warfley »

Seenkao

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #20 on: August 09, 2020, 12:56:30 am »

Here are a list of things that I think good to have:

...

Хороший движок должен быть проработан под объекты и разделёна работа объектов. В первую очередь!

Объекты должны быть разделены между собой: статический, динамический, анимационный, статический + анимационный и так далее. Такие объекты не должны быть описаны одинаково. Для разных типов объектов своё описание. (статический объект не может иметь скорости и подобное).

А всё остальное - это наложение на созданные объекты. И работа от свойств обектов.

А этого я ни где не видел!

google translate:
A good engine should be designed for objects and separate the work of objects. Firstly!

Objects must be separated from each other: static, dynamic, animated, static + animated, and so on. Such objects should not be described in the same way. Description for different types of objects. (a static object cannot have speed and the like).

And everything else is overlaying on the created objects. And work from the properties of objects.

And I have not seen this anywhere!
 :(
Rus: Стремлюсь к созданию минимальных и достаточно быстрых приложений.

Eng: I strive to create applications that are minimal and reasonably fast.
Working on ZenGL

mr-highball

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #21 on: August 09, 2020, 02:19:03 am »
@warfley I completely agree, when I played around with godot, gdscript seemed to be the best option (or c# if you prefer), just wanted to point out that it was an option.

greenzyzyzy

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #22 on: August 09, 2020, 11:47:57 am »
Hi everyone!

Quote
- Totally free or open source
- Freemium and affordable
- Can build 3D games
- Have game templates (shot-em up, platform, racing, adventure, RPG, RTS, etc)
- Have ready to use AI
- Good documentation
- Written in Pascal
- Object/Material library
- Cross platform
- Can build Android games
- Build-in level editor
- Build-in graphics editor
- Have support forum
- Drag and drop design
- No coding needed
- Can run on old hardware

For me the priorities when choosing new game engine would be:

- Open source (engine, as well as the surrounding tools, like compiler and editor)
- Actively developed
- Cross platform (desktop, mobile at least)
- Supports glTF (or any other *open* model format -- currently glTF is the best option here)
- Good documentation

As for Castle Game Engine being not easy to use:

- We indeed have a large API. And it is probably too large. I agree with that, and I fight to make API smaller/leaner (but still maximally functional) every day :)

    E.g. our planned features contains a plan how to replace 5 units with something smaller, one day. But it just takes time to make a perfect API design, that hits the perfect spot between being easy to use + have powerful functionality.

- If something seems difficult -- please ask on our forum or Discord chat.

- To make engine easier to use, we also work on CGE editor intensively. And we made a lot of other good features lately :) See the list of new features to be released with CGE 7.0 (you can already use them by downloading CGE 6.5 (snapshot updated automatically)).

- The engine is used for production games :) On Nintendo Switch, Steam, Android, iOS now.

- I'm happy to notice that it's no longer a one-person project :) I was on vacation for the last 1.5 week, mostly offline, just returned today. I am incredibly happy to see that our Discord and forum was busy, with issues getting resolved. Besides me, many people now contribute to CGE regularly -- most importantly the tireless Eugene Loza who deserves my thousand thanks for being part of CGE since many years now.

Have fun developing games everyone :)

oh.a draft.
I was thought the new edition was released
at last . when will the 7.0 ver release?
« Last Edit: August 09, 2020, 12:19:41 pm by greenzyzyzy »

Ñuño_Martínez

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #23 on: August 09, 2020, 04:43:24 pm »
Perhaps a better approach than building an entire game engine from scratch would be to implement a pascal binding for godot?
Maybe, but it is too much generic.  As I've said I need something more specific.  Also before I started my engine I tried several ones (not Godot though) and no one convinced me.  Anyway, thanks for the suggestion. :)
Are you interested in game programming? Join the Pascal Game Development community!
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michalis

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #24 on: August 09, 2020, 06:23:52 pm »
Quote
oh.a draft.
I was thought the new edition was released
at last . when will the 7.0 ver release?

To be clear, all the features listed on https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/wiki/New-Features-in-Castle-Game-Engine-7.0 are already available if you just download the Castle Game Engine from our webpage, https://castle-engine.io/. This gives you CGE 6.5 -- which is a "snapshot" version, but it's ready (and used) in production games :)

The non-snapshot, official, stable CGE 7.0 with all these features will be released as soon as possible :) I failed the promised deadline now too many times (I definitely put too many features in this release), so I'm afraid of promising another date that I'll fail. All I can say is that I'm working on it:) The critical features before 7.0 release are defined in our Trello, https://trello.com/b/f3HquBsy/engine-core. Basically, "gizmos" for the CGE editor (to visually move/rotate/scale scenes) are the main missing feature, before I will be ready to announce new version.

jamie

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #25 on: August 09, 2020, 06:56:23 pm »
Slightly off topic, but can I have a kind of survey?

I am very interested in how computer games can be created and I am now building my game builder. The progress is very slow, I do it only when I have spare time.

What do you think are the things make a good game builder?

For your information, game builder (or some call it game studio), game engine, game framework, game library are not the same. They meanings are often overlapped but they are different.

Here are a list of things that I think good to have:

- Totally free or open source
- Freemium and affordable
- Can build 3D games
- Have game templates (shot-em up, platform, racing, adventure, RPG, RTS, etc)
- Have ready to use AI
- Good documentation
- Written in Pascal
- Object/Material library
- Cross platform
- Can build Android games
- Build-in level editor
- Build-in graphics editor
- Have support forum
- Drag and drop design
- No coding needed
- Can run on old hardware

Implementing all the features are impossible for me, I'm just a single programmer. So if you can choose what are the most important features to you? And how do you rank them? You can add other new features that are important to you.


i think the most important is :
 Written in Pascal
 Cross platform
 Can run on old hardware


What ? It won't wash my windows either ?
The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing

lainz

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #26 on: August 09, 2020, 08:06:50 pm »
Slightly off topic, but can I have a kind of survey?

I am very interested in how computer games can be created and I am now building my game builder. The progress is very slow, I do it only when I have spare time.

What do you think are the things make a good game builder?

For your information, game builder (or some call it game studio), game engine, game framework, game library are not the same. They meanings are often overlapped but they are different.

Here are a list of things that I think good to have:

- Totally free or open source
- Freemium and affordable
- Can build 3D games
- Have game templates (shot-em up, platform, racing, adventure, RPG, RTS, etc)
- Have ready to use AI
- Good documentation
- Written in Pascal
- Object/Material library
- Cross platform
- Can build Android games
- Build-in level editor
- Build-in graphics editor
- Have support forum
- Drag and drop design
- No coding needed
- Can run on old hardware

Implementing all the features are impossible for me, I'm just a single programmer. So if you can choose what are the most important features to you? And how do you rank them? You can add other new features that are important to you.


i think the most important is :
 Written in Pascal
 Cross platform
 Can run on old hardware


What ? It won't wash my windows either ?

I think he is talking about Unity that already exists.

I'm not sure if they will add support to internet of things so it can wash the windows but they can as well.

Roland57

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #27 on: August 19, 2020, 07:46:16 am »
Hello! Not yet had time to try it, but this project looks interesting:
https://github.com/drezgames/raylib-pascal

Currently it supports only Windows. It would be good if someone could make a Linux version.

If ever someone is interested, there is a more recent (and Linux compatible) Pascal translation of raylib here:
https://github.com/tazdij/raylib-pas
My projects are on Gitlab and on Codeberg.

Windsurfer

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #28 on: November 06, 2020, 01:39:09 pm »
I've tried writing one or two simple games in the past, but rapidly ran into game loop problems. I then tried Baregame https://github.com/sysrpl/Bare.Game/ , based on SDL, but it has sadly died. It might be a useful starting point, unless things have moved on too far since then.

More recently, my granddaughter introduced me to Scratch at https://scratch.mit.edu. It is used in the UK to introduce children from the age of six to logic and programming. It is a very easy to use code free browser interface. I suggest it should be looked at for ideas, before the experts get to work on anything else.

MarkMLl

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Re: is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?
« Reply #29 on: November 06, 2020, 01:58:18 pm »
More recently, my granddaughter introduced me to Scratch at https://scratch.mit.edu. It is used in the UK to introduce children from the age of six to logic and programming. It is a very easy to use code free browser interface. I suggest it should be looked at for ideas, before the experts get to work on anything else.

Don't get me going on that. MIT started off with Scratch written in Smalltalk- a half-decent language with features that were vastly ahead of its time- and then decided that it was a good idea to migrate to Javascript.

WTF is it that most in the industry both agree that Javascript is spectacularly badly-designed and insist on writing stuff in it? It would be tolerable if they reserved it for the lowest levels and e.g. had a Smalltalk implementation written in Javascript running in the browser, but /why/ FFS do people keep on using it directly? At least C has been widely superseded for application programming, leaving it for people with a modicum of skill and experience to use in situations like the Linux kernel. Anybody who starts a project these days in something as gross as C or Javascript and has the temerity to ask a wider community to support it should be half-hanged, drawn and quartered.

MarkMLl
MT+86 & Turbo Pascal v1 on CCP/M-86, multitasking with LAN & graphics in 128Kb.
Pet hate: people who boast about the size and sophistication of their computer.
GitHub repositories: https://github.com/MarkMLl?tab=repositories

 

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