[Lazarus] Some information please

Duncan Parsons D.Parsons at seamsltd.com
Tue Jul 6 10:39:06 CEST 2010


From: jjb [mailto:realnug at gmail.com] 
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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