Lazarus
Programming => General => Topic started by: greenzyzyzy on August 06, 2020, 03:31:33 pm
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is there any game engine easier to use than castle in lazarus?just like cocos or unity
castle is too many functions. hard to use
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Other game engines have many functions as well, it's just they are better at hiding that for the most part. But sooner or later (depending on the complexity of your game) you need to get your hands dirty anyway.
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It is sad to hear Castle Game Engine is not easy to use. It was in my have to learn list if I have spare time.
Here is a list of available game engines for Lazarus/FPC:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/Game_Engine (https://wiki.freepascal.org/Game_Engine)
Maybe you can try Allegro.pas if you don't mind to include third party dll/so files in your distribution package. It is not fully written in Pascal, it just a wrapper to Allegro library. Although not as famous as Unity or some others, Allegro still is a well-tested and well-known game library.
I haven't tested much game engines/libraries but I ever tried Allegro.pas. It is relatively easy. And what I like most is Allegro (official website) has great documentation. Each command has sample code in their reference manual.
https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_and_Allegro (https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_and_Allegro)
http://allegro-pas.sourceforge.net/ (http://allegro-pas.sourceforge.net/)
https://liballeg.org/ (https://liballeg.org/)
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Now Unity has drag and drop blocks or something like that, so you can do games without writing code, but making it from blocks. Like for example Blender nodes to do the shaders.
https://unity.com/how-to/make-games-without-programming
Edit: and also I received an email from Unity, it says:
VISUAL SCRIPTING
Bolt visual scripting is now included in all Unity plans
A short while ago, Unity announced the acquisition of the Bolt visual scripting Asset from developer Ludiq. Now that the integration and technical transition of Bolt to Unity is complete, we are very happy to announce Bolt visual scripting is now included in all Unity plans, at no additional cost.
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It is sad to hear Castle Game Engine is not easy to use. It was in my have to learn list if I have spare time.
Sad but true. Just my opinion: despite there are some good and modern features (and some progress), there are places where it's unnecessarily complicated, while some features (required to me) are missing/incomplete/not enough stabilized to use.
IIRC, this is because author tried (in the past?) to made engine "vrml-compliant" (? - just suggestion) - so this introduces a lot of complexities, not obvious, nor covered by docs.
I honestly tried to dive in for a week-long research (and I'm not a complete novice, I have things working in another engine), but gave up for my old C++ based project.
p.s. Please, don't consider this as negative review. It's open-source project after all, and author seems like open for co-operation. If your goal is not to put a game in production asap, but to learn, it worth trying.
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@greenzyzyzy: See the Choosing a Game Engine (https://wiki.freepascal.org/Choosing_a_Game_Engine) page on the Wiki.
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@greenzyzyzy: See the Choosing a Game Engine (https://wiki.freepascal.org/Choosing_a_Game_Engine) page on the Wiki.
thanks very much.
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@greenzyzyzy: See the Choosing a Game Engine (https://wiki.freepascal.org/Choosing_a_Game_Engine) page on the Wiki.
ok,i have download these engine one by one. but no one is looks like better than cocos or unity.
and i hope castle will improve in later version.
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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.
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@greenzyzyzy: See the Choosing a Game Engine (https://wiki.freepascal.org/Choosing_a_Game_Engine) page on the Wiki.
ok,i have download these engine one by one. but no one is looks like better than cocos or unity.
and i hope castle will improve in later version.
The Castle Game Engine is essentially a one-person project (compare that to Cocos or Unity where one is a bigger Open Source project and the other is commercial). You can influence the author's direction through Patreon or you can directly contribute yourself if you want something done. It essentially needs more contributors if you want it to become comparable to Cocos or Unity.
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Your question has inspired me about the evolution of my game engine. I've wrote this message at Pascal Game Development (https://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?32542-MinGRo-game-engine&p=149579#post149579) explaining it. It will take quite a long time, but I think it would fulfill your needs. ;D
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Your question has inspired me about the evolution of my game engine. I've wrote this message at Pascal Game Development (https://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?32542-MinGRo-game-engine&p=149579#post149579) explaining it. It will take quite a long time, but I think it would fulfill your needs. ;D
ok. thank you .just waiting you good news.
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Your question has inspired me about the evolution of my game engine. I've wrote this message at Pascal Game Development (https://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?32542-MinGRo-game-engine&p=149579#post149579) explaining it. It will take quite a long time, but I think it would fulfill your needs. ;D
before that ,may be i have to use castle instead.
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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.
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I haven't played games since Space Invaders (machine code) and The Secret of Bastow Manor (BASIC) on the Commodore Vic-20, but it strikes me that a "game builder" cannot be all things to all prospective users.
For example, there is a big difference between a "shoot 'em up" and an "adventure" game. I would stick to picking just one genre which should also help with the light at the end of the tunnel and keep you motivated :)
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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
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I agree with trev. That's why I decided to change my mind for next version of my engine.
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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.
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Hi everyone!
- 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 (https://castle-engine.io/) 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 (https://castle-engine.io/planned_features.php) 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 (https://castle-engine.io/talk.php).
- 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)) (https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/wiki/New-Features-in-Castle-Game-Engine-7.0).
- 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 :)
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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.
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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!
:(
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@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.
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Hi everyone!
- 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 (https://castle-engine.io/) 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 (https://castle-engine.io/planned_features.php) 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 (https://castle-engine.io/talk.php).
- 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)) (https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/wiki/New-Features-in-Castle-Game-Engine-7.0).
- 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?
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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 (https://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?32542-MinGRo-game-engine&p=149579#post149579) 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. :)
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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 (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/ (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 (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.
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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 ?
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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.
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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
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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/ (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 (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.
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More recently, my granddaughter introduced me to Scratch at https://scratch.mit.edu (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
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@MarkMLI I whole heartedly agree about Javascript, but there is more to the implementation and its ease of use than the language it was created in.
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@MarkMLI I whole heartedly agree about Javascript, but there is more to the implementation and its ease of use than the language it was created in.
Yes, but it becomes extremely relevant when you're talking about things like writing plugins to control physical equipment. When Scratch was standalone there was debate as to how best to extend it... AFAIK that debate continues, but now also has to consider how to extend it without knocking a security hole in the browser hosting it.
MarkMLl
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I was really thinking about the drag and drop code blocks and the ease of assembly than any other feature.
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I was really thinking about the drag and drop code blocks and the ease of assembly than any other feature.
...which worked perfectly well in a standalone program on e.g. a Raspberry Pi, and had the advantage that if you knew how you could get at the underlying Smalltalk and see how the whole thing was put together. And part of that was thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which ploughed some money into optimising the Smalltalk implementation.
I mean for something which in principle at least can be hooked onto sensors and actuators, how could anybody think that being able to connect to physical equipment was less important than having projects conveniently (and profitably) in "the cloud"?
Later: I notice that Debian's implementation of Scratch is still at v1.4 hence is based on Smalltalk. Just come across http://som-st.github.io/ which is the Smalltalk VM coded in various languages... surprising that nobody's tried Object Pascal yet.
MarkMLl
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I first tried the Linux Mint Scratch first, which appears to be the v. 1.4 Smalltalk version you mention. I then tried the cloud version because it had more features and because my granddaughter could access it from home as I improved it. I never got far enough to consider physical interfaces. However, I doubt if many primary school teachers do much more than try to stay one step ahead of the kids.
I have to admit I have seen a few things that made me think, like sprites for everything. I still think in terms of old school techniques like colour changing lines to show forward motion, bit-blitting and page flipping. I can see some experiments coming along.
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I'm thinking that I wrote a 3D engine in about two weeks for my 2nd PGD Challenge entry (https://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?13208-Momen-3d) which is obviously simpler than Castle Engine 8). Unfortunately it is barely usable not only because the lack of tools :-[ (and I doubt it will compile if using the latest Allegro.pas release).
I think I have the project I'll work in the years after the one I'm working on now.
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What about using BGRABitmap, it has really nice SVG support, and it's really quick, nice to do scalable games. I've readed that the game Another World was made with this technique of vector drawings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game)
As well all Flash (RIP) games was made with vector graphics. So I think it worth to try...
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Ah, Another World - it's well 25 years when I saw it on my buddy's Amiga - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mYD20VBZE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mYD20VBZE).
EDIT: It was actually Flashback (part two of Another World) on buddy's Amiga 600 at that time. It was the first half of nineties.