Thursday, October 15, 2009

Delphi: Playing games

Your reviewer was looking at some ALM (Ailing, Lamenting and Moaning) from game developers trying to use Delphi to make games.

Delphi Game Development. End.

Your reviewer takes look Delphi to develop games... The first thing your reviewer noticed is lack of usable game engines or mostly "samples" or very basic demos.

First is the SpriteCraft engine, from a one-page website (make that two if you consider the ftp listing) and unclear project development status. It is not updated to Delphi 2009, and without any decent documentation or examples, your reviewer will have to pass.

The next is andorra, but program against a DLL and with some wierd interface, DevIL.dll, FreeImage.dll, why not link directly to all of those libraries and make your program open-source? Many issues, such as using DLLs, pixel collision issues, memory leaks, non-existent level editor, sprite render (you do-it-yourself) to name a few.

The next is DelphiX, or UnDelphiX, the once updated and seem to require everyone else to publish an unofficial patch or something else to update it. It got so bad, that some people stopped using it due to bad headers/ non-supported featured. Since it was never completed, maybe the results are non-completed Delphi games?

The next is Aspyhre, but not complete, if you dig around, there is a Sprite/Title editor, casual GUI interface, but no good collision engine or fully working game example? What returns are there to develop an Astroids demo or simple non-working Diablo-game?

The next is GLXTreem but that goes into a missing website. Oh well...

Delphi Hater presents...
Your reviewer was looking for a game engine, a solid good game engine that he could develop with using Delphi D2007/D2009/D2010, and even give some money to it going to make a game, but by the looks of how the Delphi gaming community is going, it looks much worse.

Your reviewer googled around and found few quiet sites - PascalGameDevelopment and some game forums.

Your reviewer Downloaded UnDelphiX then SongBeamer's D2009/D2010 DirectX translated headers, then tried GLScene (is there not a library that does both DirectX and OpenGL)? then tried Aspyhre, but ran into sound problems, sprite problem, world map problems. It simply took too long to develop an equivalent "Hello World" game.

There's GameMaker A7/A8 engine, but the "Delphi" part are plug-ins. Ditto for RPGMaker, they call it DLL add-ons and program using Lua/Python.

Your reviewer looked around, notably DarkBasic, C++/Torque and Unity Engine/C++...


Thinking twice...
Now starts the review. Suppose you want to develop a game, what would you do?

- use Delphi and get bad results, mediocre, for making simple games?
- use DarkBasic and their Gaming SDK?
- use Visual C++ and get Torque/Unity/Blender game engine?

then I came back and read about the students who posted on Embarcadero's forums who wanted a copy of Delphi to make games, and wonder if it was all a bad dream, that no-matter how good Delphi was, because of high prices, little-or-no-gaming-support it could be simply wishing thinking.

Playing the devil's advocate, suppose DelphiHater makes game with Delphi, but all the profits would be eaten up by development costs, or maybe the game would fail (what's the difference It could be WorseThanFailure?)

For Delphi, it would be better for playing around, and nothing really serious for game development.

3 comments:

Cezar Wagenheimer said...

I do use Delphi for Game Development and I have 3 successful games! Druids Battle of Magic, Abra Academy and Abra Academy Returning Cast.

I have others game to be released very soon!

All made with Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2010!

Gad D Lord said...

Which engine you used, Sir?

Show Time said...

@Gad D Lord:
He use Asphyre.