I am an interested observer of Lazarus but I know very little about it. I am interested partly because Pascal was the first language I ever used (it formed a very small part of a non-CS degree.)
I understand that this is an open source project so I guess that those who develop it do so because they love it.
Are these people users of Lazarus in their day jobs or is Lazarus just a hobby that they don't ever expect to use professionally? I only found Lazarus by accident it seems to have a much lower profile than other open source stuff (eg python, php, java etc). Is there a reason for this?
Where in the world is Lazarus popular/not so popular. I see that there is a german language textbook that may be translated to english sometime.

The level of skill in this mail group seems quite high. Do people come to Lazarus as already skilled programmers in other
languages as I don't see many newbies asking simple questions. Or is it the case that people here are older on average and cut their teeth when Pascal was more popular?
I guess I'm asking in a roundabout way if this community is growing.

I have read in Delphi discussions many times people talking about how to make the language more popular.
One of the issues always brought up is price. Lazarus doesn't have this problem so I wonder
if price is a factor in Delphi's relative unpopularity.

My thinking is that languages need to get the kids interested and the way to do this is game development.
I believe that C++ is the language of the serious game developers. I also believe that object pascal provides
almost the same power as C++ but without a lot of the pain. Correct me if I am wrong as I don't know any of this from experience only from reading.
I recently bought my 9 year old son this book The Game Maker's Apprentice<http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Beginners/dp/1590596153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278161293&sr=8-1> and
he is working his way through it at the moment.
It comes with software enabling users to easily create 2D games with all the bells and whistles (lives, health, levels, explosions) and supplies lots of resources (images and sounds) for sprites etc. For most of the book users learn to create games by instancing built-in objects and altering their attributes and behaviour. Only later in the book is coding introduced to enable users to extend beyond what's provided. I think it's a wonderful but imagine if the language that was introduced was object pascal!

I would be grateful for any information.
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Are these people users of Lazarus in their day jobs or is Lazarus just a hobby that they don't ever expect to use professionally?

For some it is a hobby, some use it for commercial stuff. Perhaps you want to take a look here:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus

I only found Lazarus by accident it seems to have a much lower profile than other open source stuff (eg python, php, java etc). Is there a reason for this?

Pascal is the reason.

I guess I'm asking in a roundabout way if this community is growing.

There are more mails daily than ten years ago, so it looks like the community is growing, but not very fast.

One of the issues always brought up is price. Lazarus doesn't have this problem so I wonder if price is a factor in Delphi's relative unpopularity.

No, it is Pascal. Many people see it as an inferiour language only used for teaching. Other languages have a much higher hype-factor.

Don't forget that assembler is used even in modern games routinely. But regarding your question Object Pascal is well up to the task, especially with the great FPC compiler, which is able to produce very efficient code, but commercial games have been written in Delphi as well. Remember that game programming is no easy task. It needs a good understanding of higher level math and often physics. Nowadays you have to be able to programm your graphics hardware really well (meaning OpenGL or Direct3D is a must), which adds another layer of complexity. And for a current AAA title you need at least 5 artists (graphics and sound) for every programmer (6 - 10 of these should be enough), a big marketing department and more than 10 Million dollar to invest. ;)

Hope this helps a little bit
R.

I am an interested observer of Lazarus but I know very little about it.

You are welcome :-)

IMO it's the bad price/value relationship, that made Delphi unpopular in the last years. The help was unusable for many years, still no 64 bit compiler available, that's what some high-end (paying) users didn't like very much. At the low end there are no really cheap Explorer versions right now, that could attract people with non-commercial interests (students...).

My thinking is that languages need to get the kids interested and the way to do this is game development.

I've no experience with writing games in Lazarus, but the graphics support of some platforms may be not sufficient for such projects. I'd be pleased to hear about different experience of other users ;-)

IMO game support is kind of a decent (graphics) library, and I don't know which libraries are available in C++, Pascal or other languages.

I recently bought my 9 year old son this book The Game Maker's Apprentice <http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Beginners/dp/1590596153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278161293&sr=8-1> and

[...]

I think it's a wonderful but imagine if the language that was introduced was object pascal!

As mentioned above, it's a matter of according libraries. The Lazarus project is about the development system *for* writing librabries and applications, not about the implementation of such stuff.

Perhaps you can work together with your son on such a game-makers library for Lazarus?

DoDi

I use it in my job as well.

I only found Lazarus by accident it seems to have a much lower profile than other open source stuff (eg python, php, java etc). Is there a reason for this?

Object Pascal is not regarded as a 'modern' language, but this is an uninformed view.

Where in the world is Lazarus popular/not so popular. I see that there is a german language textbook that may be translated to english sometime.

I think that it is safe to assume that it is more popular in Europe and in South America. North america is more given to hype C-style languages as Python, Ruby, Java(Script). I am not sure about the situation in the middle/far east.

The level of skill in this mail group seems quite high. Do people come to Lazarus as already skilled programmers in other languages as I don't see many newbies asking simple questions.

I think that it's more easy to reach a high level in Object Pascal, because it is an easy language. On the other hand, most Pascal programmers program pascal since a long time, and with age comes experience...

Or is it the case that people here are older on average and cut their teeth when Pascal was more popular? I guess I'm asking in a roundabout way if this community is growing.

My guess would be: yes. Mailing list traffic increases, website traffic too.

No. The language is. See the answer to where the language is popular.

I would say that this is a correct impression. Object pascal offers all of the benefits of C++ (OO programming, Compiled) and none of the downsides: C inheritance, header/source split, multiple inheritance, strange constructors etc.

Indeed, we can currently only imagine...

Michael.

I've no experience with writing games in Lazarus, but the graphics support of some platforms may be not sufficient for such projects. I'd be pleased to hear about different experience of other users ;-)

Linux, Mac and Win have working OpenGL, so no problem the newest version, but adding additional functions you need is not difficult and 2.0 should be good enough for most projects anyway. Lazarus offers an OpenGL component, so you have no trouble setting everything up. I don't know if TCanvas and friends offer good enough support for (action) games. For simple card or puzzle games they should be good enough and you can use the LCL for your GUI stuff.

IMO game support is kind of a decent (graphics) library, and I don't know which libraries are available in C++, Pascal or other languages.

I never tried GLScene, but I heard it is quite advanced (written in Delphi, but there was a Lazarus port, I don't know anything about the current state of it). You can use SDL in FPC, too. Support for graphics setup, sound and input (keyboard, mouse, gamepads, etc). SDL is used commercially, too, for example Id used it for their Linux ports of the Doom/Quake series. Unfortunately you have to use a C lib. I don't know if anyone ever tried to use Crystal Space or Ogre (open source game engines), but the first on has bindings for perl, python, java. Writing pascal ones should be possible.

As mentioned above, it's a matter of according libraries.

Not necessarily. For small games you can code everything yourself, as FPC/Lazarus come with everything you need. For physics you can use Newton or ODE, both being used commercially, too. Of course you cannot use any of the big commercial engines (Quake, Unreal, etc), but I think that licensing cost prohibit this anyway. Most things depend on the scale of your project (do you want to write Pac-Man or GTA5 or anything in between), but everything is possible with FPC and enough time and/or money. :)

For an example of a game written with FPC look here: http://www.hedgewars.org/

R.

Reimar Grabowski wrote

> Are these people users of Lazarus in their day jobs or is Lazarus just a > hobby that they don't ever expect to use professionally? For some it is a hobby, some use it for commercial stuff.

I'd prefer to use the word "professional" as a description of a user, his techniques and his dedication, rather than as an indication of whether he's doing his "day job" or spending time honing his skills or programming "on spec".

I suspect that I'm by no means not the only user who has a very indistinct line between "official" and "unofficial" work. At present I'm hacking some serial comms stuff which hasn't been commissioned by a customer but would likely be used as part of our support toolkit; much of the business is run using Delphi code and expertise built up on this type of project will help me port that off Windows if that looks appropriate.

Moreover, even if you specify it as day-job, can you consider in-house stuff commercial? It is not sold.

Also you may see Kambi VRML game engine :

http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/

Thank you very much .

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

For an example of a game written with FPC look here: http://www.hedgewars.org/

I didn't know that one.
I found the latest version on Suse servers, installed it and tried. First it killed the KDE's task panel (which KDE restarted automatically). The game itself didn't work. Its window size was apparently many times the screen size. It was drawing some garbage images. It ate all keys and mouse commands. ... Finally I was able to kill it.

It didn't give a good impression of FPC programs. However, there is no technical reason for it, with more effort it could be as good as the competing Wormux.

It was a good test for KDE. It recovered fully. :-)

Juha

I must admit that I never tried it as I quit PC-Gaming many moons ago. :)

R.

Hi jjb,

I first used Pascal in about 1989 when I started a Degree in Computing Studies at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE)... now the University of Canberra. I had a sound knowledge of BASIC and database design. I loved Pascal because I could use my BASIC skills with the structure of a strongly typed language and enumerated types and if... then... else and while... do loops (and repeat... until) etc. Remember that in those days I was used to using Commodore BASIC 4 which didn't even have an 'else' statement. The only way you could implement an 'else' was with goto. This taught me the evils of spaghetti-code by well intentioned programmers (amateur and professional) who over-used the goto statement and wrote code which was impossible to maintain without rewriting large chunks of code. It also taught me how to write code in BASIC without needing to use GOTO statements.

At the Uni of Canberra (which the CCAE became when I studied there) we wrote code in Pascal (Apollo Domain Pascal), Turbo Pascal 3, 5, and 5.5, also C and C++, Assembler, Cobol, Prolog and various databases as well as lots of theory. Most of the students already knew Pascal from college so they skipped the lectures and formed groups of 3-5 and developed the assignments in groups. I was a bit of a loner so I wrote all of my assignments by myself. That's why I got 9+/10 for all my assignments (although I did not do well in exams). Those students who bludged on the group assignments failed the exams. The ones who actually wrote the code, usually only 1-2 of the groups did well in the exams, because the exam questions were based on the assignments. That's why I passed the exams.

I had a good work ethic and wrote my assignments weeks in advance, living on campus and often computing late into the night. Other students left it all to 1-2 days before the assignments were due then panicked. I can recommend learning how to draw Nassi/Schniderman Charts for your procedures and making friends with computer lecturers and programmers.

I wrote a NS chart for EVERY procedure of ALL my program code... and handed it in with a complete listing on 132 column paper. This was a requirement for the assignments. I don't draw NS charts any more but it is worth learning HOW to draw them. I prefer NS charts to flowcharts because with flowcharts it is too easy to write spaghetti-code. We were taught NS charts in the lectures but many students skipped the lectures.

I would like to see this book translated also. I have about 15-20 books on Delphi but none on Lazarus. Is there a good English lazarus textbook that we can buy??? Alternatively, is there a PDF version that I can download and send it to a photocopy shop for printing without infringing copyright laws??? URLs please???

See my comment about about languages taught at Uni of Canberra. I loved Pascal because it was structured and typed in contrast to BASIC (in
1989) which I had a high skill level in. Also Pascal was standardised whereas BASIC was not.

Remember that Delphi 5 Standard was AUD$99 and it did not come with the source code for many units. If you wanted to get all the source code then you needed to buy Delphi 5 Enterprise for about AUD$2500-3000. Yes, cost was prohibitive to a hobby developer. That meant that often-times a developer would buy one particular version then resist upgrading. Also don't forget that if you wanted to port Delphi code from one version to the next one then you needed all the source code. If you just had the .TPU file and not the .pas file then you were stuffed. You either needed to find the .pas file or a replacement for it or rewrite it... which was not always practical.

I worked for the Australian Navy as a Defence Public Servant and much of our communications programs were written in Turbo Pascal for OS/2 then ported to ADA and Visual Basic and C/C++. Ada was the Defence forces' standard programming language because of the work done with it in USA. When MS-Windows took off OS/2 lost popularity. I tried and failed to convince the bosses at work to port their Pascal and ADA code to Delphi. Delphi was not popular enough. They chose to rewrite a lot in MS C/C++ because that was a Micro$oft product and was officially supported by Micro$oft. I always thought that this was a big mistake but because I was a draftsman who also developed databases and websites and not a programmer, my advice was ignored.

Look at this page.
https://sites.google.com/site/pewtas/home/delphi_source_code

It is my Delphi Source code page on my personal website and contains about 11 Delphi open source games. None of them use graphic libraries. All code is for Delphi (5) and are fully working and fully debugged open source code & copyright to me. Feel free to port them to lazarus if you like to ... that is what I plan to do. Please, if you do port any of them or have problems with them then email me. Also, if you derive games from them then please credit my work in the about dialogue and send me a copy.

The only one which uses graphics is Frog! Retro Remake Game which is my first graphics games and uses the Delphi graphics routines and my own unit for graphics which is strongly derived from OpenGL but without needing it. Instead I ported the unit for OpenGL Mono Fonts to Delphi 5 and rewrote it not require the OpenGL library. I have since written it to be improved but a minor bug prevents me from releasing my latest version of the new Frog! game. I *MAY* release it in about 2-4 months, depending on time, interest and priorities.

OpenGL etc can do all that. I am not experienced in using these so I cannot provided examples. Look in the examples folder of lazarus and on the open source archives. Does someone have a URL for this???

I would be grateful for any information.

I has been my pleasure to answer your questions.

Peter aka pew
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Hi!

I just played a "destroy everything on plane sight"-round just to test whether the game is working or not. The game is working as expected (and I personally think it's the best Worms clone out there - I played Wormux once, but it didn't really catch me...).

I'm running Hedgewars 0.9.13 on a current ArchLinux system with wmii as window manager and no desktop environment. So there might be some problems with the libraries on your system or you might be running an older version. I'll list the versions of the libraries that are registered in the hedgewars package as dependencies, so you can compare them with yours:

Qt: 4.6.3
SDL: 1.2.14
SDL_mixer: 1.2.11
SDL_image: 1.2.10
SDL_net: 1.2.7
SDL_ttf: 2.0.9
lua: 5.1.4

Regards,
Sven

But very often the software facilitates services which are sold. We send out hourly reports to customers 365x24 for which we are paid, the code started off as a proof-of-concept for a customer but it turned out to be better business to run everything on a bureau basis (if something goes wrong we can do something about it, rather than having to wait for the customer's contract maintainer who's based in a different timezone).

hi

i have created a component to dump mysql database whis zeoslib. Converting it to use lazarus SQLDb component i have the folowing problem

to list table in my database i use the "SHOW TABLES" statment. According with the mysql 5 syntax
SHOW [FULL] TABLES [{FROM | IN} /|db_name|/]

[LIKE '/|pattern|/' | WHERE /|expr|/]

I use a "SHOW TABLES FROM dbname". this work well with zeoslib but on SQLDb. the query raise an error:

"Error executing query: table "mysql.mysql" does'nt exist"

using only "SHOW TABLES" work and return result

I think it 's a bug
no?

thanks
Claude

hi i have created a component to dump mysql database whis zeoslib.

That's nice, but how about creating a seperate thread for your question instead of hijacking this one?

kind regards
R.

"Error executing query: table "mysql.mysql" does'nt exist"

SHOW TABLES FROM `mysql`
return error
"Error executing query: table "mysql.mysql" does'nt exist"

hi

i have created a component to dump mysql database whis zeoslib. Converting it to use lazarus SQLDb component i have the folowing problem

to list table in my database i use the "SHOW TABLES" statment. According with the mysql 5 syntax
SHOW [FULL] TABLES [{FROM | IN} /|db_name|/]

[LIKE '/|pattern|/' | WHERE /|expr|/]

I use a "SHOW TABLES FROM dbname". this work well with zeoslib but on SQLDb. the query raise an error:

"Error executing query: table "dbname.dbname". does'nt exist"

using only "SHOW TABLES" work and return result

I think it 's a bug
no?

Reimar Grabowski a ?crit :

oups :-\ sorry bad manipulation

Yes, but not always, e.g. billing apps, testing setups etc.

E.g. I last week did a little CRM app based on zeos

Thanks to all for your replies.

Many of you including Michael and Reimar mention that Pascal is unfairly viewed in a poor light by people using other languages. I know for a fact that some deride the use of begin..end in compound statements as though this makes the language verbose. If that's what makes Pascal inferior then I think that's superficial as surely every language needs some demarcator of a compound statement.

@Hans-Peter, maybe my son will one day be a great programmer but as for me making a "game-makers library for Lazarus", I wouldn't know where to start!

@Michael you say you use it in your day job, I have used vb6 as a front end for a database application with an access database as the back end I guess Lazarus would be very easily up to that task.

@Mark I would definitely view in-house projects at work as using Lazarus in the day job

@Peter
I never heard of Nassi/Schniderman charts before. I just googled it and found some info, I'm afraid I tend to design as I code and promise myself to come back and make it all nice later (a promise rarely kept). I know it's the wrong way to do it but I find that in a lot of problems ideas only come to me as I code.
It's like a journey where at each stage you know where to go next but if someone asked you how exactly to get there at the start you couldn't tell them.
but then maybe my inability to plan ahead is down to never forcing myself to learn to. Maybe I should explore Nassi/Schniderman charts a little.

other
languages especially C# which would make you wonder about the future (for Delphi at least)

Thanks again for taking the time to answer
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jjb schrieb: @Hans-Peter, maybe my son will one day be a great programmer but as for me making a "game-makers library for Lazarus", I wouldn't know where to start!

My son wrote (for his own education) a kind of snake clone which he started on Delphi (7). Since a year or so he is using Lazarus/Free Pascal. I am quite impressed by the graphics (the "snake" is not restricted to lines and columns but can be directed in a arbitrary direction and all the chain links follow the head as if it was a real snake, accelleration and direction changes may lead to a coiled snake etc.). Textures are applied to the chain links and so on... He got it running quite fast (well, age *does* a difference ;-)). He used opengl for the graphics.

From what I read on the web a lot of Delphi stuff is now being rewritten in other languages especially C# which would make you wonder about the future (for Delphi at least)

That's the problem: Those who give a ruling often don't know about the things they decide. So they follow the masses and what they hear from others. At least noone can blame them later if it was a bad decision.

BTW: As far as I know C# is something for Windows only.

Juha Manninen schrieb: > BTW: As far as I know C# is something for Windows only. No. There is Mono project: http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

Yes, but doesn't it implement only a (small) subset of what is possible on Windows? I doubt that you run all .NET programs under linux (yet).

BTW: As far as I know C# is something for Windows only.

No. There is Mono project:
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

Juha

On Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:11:01 +0200, J?rgen Hestermann wrote about Re: [Lazarus] Some information please:

The implementation I have here supports all of .NET, plus Silverlight, which is called Moonlight. This is on Gentoo Linux, but can be run on any Linux or FreeBSD.

Hi Hans-Peter,

You forgot to reply to the list :-))). You simply needed to click on reply-all. I would prefer that this discussion be kept on the list instead of private.

Just wondering if there are any copyright issues with sending html or PDF files to a photocopy shop instead of printing them ourselves.

PDP-11 I think. The biggest hassle with these books is that the BASIC's were all slightly different. So you needed to do a little translating of the syntax as you entered them. The BASIC manual was essential. :-)))

I have that book and a few other too. I typed in many of the programs. I eventually rewrote many of the programs in pascal (Turbo Pascal then Delphi). See the above website for "Hunt the Wumpuz" which is a Delphi 5 version of Hunt the Wumpus rewritten in Delphi / Pascal. I tried to be as true to the original game but also use Windows instead of crt print statements. I also got a friend who was a graphic designer to draw the map for the caverns as a GIF image and IIRC you can press "M"ap and it will display the GIF image of the caves in a separate window then you just study it and close the windows. I needed to use a GIF display component, since Delphi didn't have one. I think it's standard now for lazarus. I did not want to use it as a JPEG because as you probably know, if you have a JPEG then edit it a few times the quality of the JPEG will degrade because as you save it each time the palette colour info is reduced and the image quality degrades in a minor way with each save. Other formats don't do this but BMP (M$ Windows) is a memory hog as it is not compressed. At the time PNG wasn't invented, or if it was it was not well supported at the time.

You can find Hunt the Wumpuz and all files on the above page. Anyone feel like doing a quick port of it to lazarus and emailing it to me as a zip so that I can put up a link to the lazarus version of it??? If not, I may do it in a few weeks or maybe sooner.

It nearly broke a party in 1983, when I offered the guests to play with my new LSI-11, because half of them couldn't stop playing any more. At that time I was the only one who had an computer at all...

You'd probably enjoy the "Guess the Animal" game (same web page). Based on a BASIC game and there are also versions of it in prolog. This one is a direct port of the BASIC to Delphi 5 game (or possibly originally Delphi 3). I original was just text based but mine used a form with an edit box and some buttons. I thought this was an improvement. :-))) Also, I wanted to make a MS Windows version of it instead of a console app.

The animal questions and answers are stored as strings. The structures were originally manipulated with MID$, LEFT$ and RIGHT$ in BASIC so I think I used the copy() function is Delphi. Not sure. It was not rocket science!!! Fun to port and play. It is a lot of fun to play the game and build up a good library of known animals. I don't think that the original BASIC game saved all of the known animals. Mine does. IIRC I save them to either a .DAT text file or possibly to a .INI file. Probably a .DAT text file. Funny how a simple small feature like saving the known animals on exit and loading it again next time can improve the game. You just need to make sure that you keep an original copy of the data file in case you corrupt it and need to start again with a fresh one. It would probably be easy enough to hard code it so that you didn't need to save the original copy.

DoDi

Peter W. aka pew

Hi J?rgen and All,

Yes, snake games are fun. I found one on www.planet-source-code.com many years ago and updated it.

My version is for Delphi 5 and I think that the graphics are done with buttons on a form. Colour is used and it does not need as much memory as graphics. IIRC I added sound to it. It was a third party component which simply beeps the speaker (frequency and time of a tone)... simple to use. Just disable it if it doesn't work in lazarus (which I suspect it won't).

Actually the version number probably should be later. I debugged and enhanced the original version. I tried to contact the author to get him to post an updated version but could not so I called my version v0.01 and put it on my page... crediting the author.

The main improvements were to debug it. Nothing drastic. And rewrote a few things in minor ways. The main improvement was to make the walls of the snake area be able to be turn on or off. This meant that if the walls were off then the play area was infinite with the up movement from the top going to the bottom and vice versa, and left going to right etc. This is not hard and it meant the the snake could become very long and it is fun to move it around and see how to move it around until it collides with itself -- death and end of game. Of course with the walls off you also need to check that you don't switch them on again with the snake half way between the walls as that would be silly. IIRC a simple boolean variable does the job of keeping track of if the snake is moving through the open wall/s (a long snake may be going thru' more than one wall).

Snake Game v0.01

(Version #??) original by "//hIDRA_5" with modifications by PEW

The original snake game for Delphi was by //hIDRA_5, and can be downloaded from http://www.planet-source-code.com/ (until he updates it with this new version).

I am one of many people who have visited the above site and downloaded the source to the original game. The attached files form the new version of the snake game, as modified, enhanced and debugged by myself. I am sending this new version (0.01) including this file, to //hIDRA_5, in the hope that it will become the "official" next version, replacing the original.

Firstly, I would like to thank "//hIDRA_5" for sharing his source code and cool little game with the rest of the world. I hope that the new version will be accepted as an improvement to it. :-)))

It seem that "//hIDRA_5" after my many attempts to contact him, has decided to ignore my new version, so I am making it available here.

No comment about C#. I don't know.

Regards,
Peter W. aka pew

2010/7/3 jjb :

I am an interested observer of Lazarus but I know very little about it.

[CUT]

I would be grateful for any information.

I'm an indie developer
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development#Indie_development) and I'm developing a 3D game with Lazarus+GLScene+Newton (between university's exams: it is my thesis degree).
I'm really satisfied; it is a powerful system: multiplatform, hardware accelerated, simply enough to have a speedy development.

I think that I have nothing to invidiate from C++ and direct opengl/directx. I'm using OpenGL 3, I can use shaders, multithread language and physic libs, etc...

OP is powerful enough to be competitive with all others language, FPC is an incredible compiler and this community is amazing (GLSCene and Newton communities, also).

I'll try to sell my game when I'll finish it (maybe via Steam) and I really hope to create a software house around Lazarus+GLScene (so I will be able to help all these communities in a better way).

My optimistic view of life :)

Kjow

This is rapidly getting to the point where it ought to be in lazarus-other, but

Marco van de Voort wrote

Yes, but not always, e.g. billing apps, testing setups etc. E.g. I last week did a little CRM app based on zeos

Reading what people are using Lazarus for, I'm struck by the fact that it doesn't appear to be the database and commercial stuff that Borland assumed was a large enough market to keep Delphi alive.

And that, quite simply, could answer the OP's question about why Delphi is no longer a market leader: it's not that it's based on Pascal so much as it's promoted as competing with business-oriented tools such as Clarion.

And it's worth remembering that Clarion swallowed JPI/TopSpeed for the sake of its tools, in much the same way as Embarcadero appears to have swallowed Codegear/Borland.

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

This is rapidly getting to the point where it ought to be in lazarus-other, but

Well, let's do it there then. I'll reply there.

Actually I have exactly the same lib versions except that lua is not installed. It is not needed by Hedgewars.

I think the biggest problem is OpenGL support for my ATI display card. I have also a Matrox G400 which used to work reasonably fast but not any more with new X Org versions. The support is dropped.
For example I was able to play Cube (now Sauerbraten) earlier but any more.

I am in the process of buying a "new" machine. There is one AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, three or four years old, which I am checking soon. It has an integrated display chip, I must figure out what it is. I will tell you if I can run Hedgewars then.

For anything else my oldish P4 machine is fast enough, including developing the big Lazarus project.

Juha

There is one AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, three or four years old, which I am checking soon. It has an integrated display chip, I must figure out what it is.

The chipset is VIA K8M890. Linux driver support is not good. I will not buy it.

Juha

2010/7/3 jjb

simply inheritance of peaples who changed from dos TP to some visual environment missing Dephi

My thinking is that languages need to get the kids interested and the way to

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From: jjb [mailto:]
Sent: 03 July 2010 13:59

I recently bought my 9 year old son this book The Game Maker's

Apprentice
<http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Beginners/dp/1 590596153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278161293&sr=8-1> and he is working his way through it at the >moment.

It comes with software enabling users to easily create 2D games with

all the bells and whistles (lives, health, levels, >explosions) and supplies

lots of resources (images and sounds) for sprites etc. For most of the

book users learn to create games by instancing built-in >objects

and altering their attributes and behaviour. Only later in the book is

coding introduced to enable users to extend beyond >what's provided.

I think it's a wonderful but imagine if the language that was

introduced was object pascal!

I would be grateful for any information.

Now here's a curious thing.. this is based around GameMaker, which was written in Delphi in the late 90's and early 2000s, and the dev for it (Mark Overmars) has occasionally been seen here, as I recall. GML (the game maker language) is a cross between Object Pascal and C, unless it's been changed in the last few years you can type fairly std Pascal in :-) It also allows C/C++ conventions, and so in some ways is a good way for your son to learn just about event driven programming.

I recent years they moved to a C++ backend for the runtime, I think they were intending to target the mac (I'm not sure they were happy with FPC/LCL at the time to provide what they wanted), but looking at the YoYo games site (the current owners of GM) I can't see any reference to mac now. I followed GM from about version 3.5->5, it's a good program.

If you want to know more about writing games using Object Pascal, http://delphigamedev.com/ <http://delphigamedev.com/> used to be alright (haven't looked at the content for a few years now), and there are a couple of others dotted around.[e.g. http://www.afterwarp.net/ <http://www.afterwarp.net/> http://www.delphigamer.com/main.php <http://www.delphigamer.com/main.php>
http://delphi.about.com/od/gameprogramming/Game_Programming.htm <http://delphi.about.com/od/gameprogramming/Game_Programming.htm> ] Before you ask, no I'm not a games developer, but there are things within games that interest me, certain algorithms, etc. I write Digital Signal Processing software as a hobby, and there can be common ground between the two disciplines.

ATB, Duncan
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