Irrlicht for (Free)Pascal: First preview version

Posted by Johannes Stein on Oct 1, 2009 in Libraries, Linux, Mac OS X, OS-related, Windows | 0 comments

Here is the first preview version of IrrlichtWrapper for Pascal.

You need the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ Redist package, or you can use alternatively the MingW DLLs, but the MingW DLLs don’t have DirectX support. I translated six of the original 78 examples. It’s actually working pretty well, but there are a few issues:
- The wrapper supports only Irrlicht 1.4.2
- The particle system is not working, creates an AV
- Text output isn’t working correctly on Linux
- Mac OS is not supported at the moment (for some unknown reason I cannot create a dynamic IrrlichtWrapper library on Mac OS X)
Download IrrlichtWrapperPas (8,1 MB)

And here is a port of Frank Dodd’s IrrKlangWrapper for Pascal: Download here (1,1 MB)
It just features a few functions at the moment, but works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Porting Irrlicht to Object Pascal began…

Posted by Johannes Stein on Sep 9, 2009 in Development, Libraries, Windows | 0 comments

A lot of people googling for irrlicht, freepascal and delphi have been redirected here lately. (Just because I link to the Irrlicht page in my blogroll.)

Nevertheless porting Irrlicht to FreePascal and Delphi has always been a big dream to me. So I took a few hours and began to port Frank Dodd’s IrrlichtWrapper to FreePascal.
That went pretty well and I got a hello world example up and running.

Here is a screenshot:

I’ll continue to work on that later as I have a few other projects at the moment.

Cavern Defense Update

Posted by Johannes Stein on Sep 4, 2009 in Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

Here is finally an update for Cavern Defense. This is mainly a bugfix release. All critical bugs have been fixed and it is quite playable now. I updated the instructions screen, so that it should be more clearer how to play the game. For more information on what has changed take a look at the changelog.txt file.

Downlod links:
Windows (6,2 MB)
Linux (4,8 MB)
Mac OS X (12 MB; Universal Binary)
Source (132 kB)

If you want to compile the source, you also have to download one the binary releases and combine those two because the resources folder is not included in the source zip file.

Ludum Dare #15: Cavern Defense

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 31, 2009 in Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

Last week-end I participated in Ludum Dare.
This time the theme was caverns.

I had the the very ambitious plan to create a turn-based strategy for two players where I slightly overestimated my abilities and the time given.

Here is a screenshot:

Download here:
Windows (5,4 MB)
Mac OS X (11,2 MB)
Linux (4 MB)

Personal notes:
I’m not entirely happy with the result, because of some pretty nasty bugs and a few features which were cut due to lack of time. So I will be releasing an update in a few days. Stay tuned.

Linux notes:
- You need libSDL, libSDL_image, libSDL_mixer, libSDL_ttf and libSDL_gfx installed on your system to run the game.

Mac OS X notes:
- For some strange reason (specific FreePascal/SDL_mixer/Mac OS X – bug) there is no sound on Mac OS X.
- Be sure to copy the application from the image file to a directory with write permissions because the game creates a log file.

I put together a PDF with random thoughts and foodphotos during development and added a short post mortem:
Click here (3 MB)

Click here to see Cavern Defense Timelapse
(I realized I hadn’t chronolapse running all time during the LD, so my timelapse is rather short.)

GLFW for Object Pascal

Posted by Johannes Stein on Aug 1, 2009 in Development, Libraries, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

GLFW is a platform-independant framework for OpenGL applications written in C and quite similar to SDL. Back in 2007, the latest version (2.6) of GLFW has been released containing a (deprecated) header file for Delphi. Unfortunately, it hasn’t had FreePascal support and only worked with Windows.

A few days back the question has been raised in the Pascal Game Development forum if it is possible to use PhoenixLib or Andorra2D on Mac OS X, both engines can be used with GLFW as a backend. I took the time to add FreePascal support to glfw.pas and ensured crossplatform-compability. I also replaced the old OpenGL header with the latest header from dglOpenGL and modified slightly it to work with GLFW. While I was at it, I updated the glfw.pas header version from API 2.5 to 2.6. It took a bit longer than expected, but after all it was not that much work.

Download here (2,4 MB; contains examples Triangle + Mipmaps with binaries and source)

Patch files here (7 kB; if you already have glfw.pas and dglOpenGL.pas installed on your system and you just want to apply the changes)

I contacted the maintainer(s) of GLFW, I haven’t received an answer yet, but I think if they find it useful it could be part of the next release. I certainly hope so.

Update: As of now, I am the offical maintainer of the Pascal bindings.

Play The City

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jul 24, 2009 in Applications, Development, Games, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 0 comments

I would like to share with you guys what I’ve been doing the last few months and why I didn’t participate in a few competitions like Game Jolt Shocking Contest or Mini LD #10.

It all began two months back on May 20th in school when a few volunteers including me were introduced to the idea of a business game. The goal was to develop a business idea within eight weeks with a seed money of only five euros.
Our idea: An educational game about a city. We choose Augsburg (a nice city in Germany), it was an obvious choice, because we all (our team) are studying at the university of Augsburg.
And on top of all, we won this business game. *YEAH*