[Lazarus] Some information please

[Reimar Grabowski]

On Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:44:36 +0200
Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:

> 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 there at all. Not 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.
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