Interesting: Project “W” game “Phase 2” and multi-platform version on the 2013 agenda of Sascha Willems
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/20
On my interest list: game written in Delphi and now being ported to FreePascal under Lazarus for multi-platform reasons: Agenda for 2013 | www.SaschaWillems.de.
–jeroen






swillems said
Just wanted to let you guys know that I finally ported the game over to Linux (using Lazarus / FPC). And though it took me almost a month of coding (duing my spare-time after work) it’s finally here. It wasn’t easy and I had to learn a lot about the workings of linux itself (e.g. how to get libs working that are needed by the game, etc.) but well, more knowledge is always a good thing ;)
You can grab the most recent versions overe here : http://www.saschawillems.de/?page_id=829#download
Currently it’s windows (32 Bit) and Linux (i386, 32 Bit). I may add a 64-Bit linux release sometime in the future, and as soon as I get my hands on some apple device I’ll try to get it up and running on Mac OSX too.
jpluimers said
Great to read on your progress!
Victor said
Quote: “Multi-platform support (*)
Something I’ve been wanting to do all the time. Since Delphi doesn’t offer this the main obstacle here is to get it compiling with Lazarus/FPC. But since this includes a lot fo changes to the code (e.g. thousands of lines of code that use Delphi’s XML-implementation) I don’t know if it will ever happen, though this is a point that I’d really like to implement.”
Based on that statement, I wouldn’t expect multi-platform to arrive here in 2013…
Too bad Delphi doesn’t come with a ‘native’ XML engine, relying on MSXML instead. There are some open source alternatives out there though.
Sascha Willems said
Actually you can expect it to support mulitple platforms in early 2013. I did moste more news on my undertakings to go multiplatform, and I even got it to compile a native linux version last weekend (after roughly 30 hours of almost straight coding with just a few hours of sleep) that is playable with just a few visual glitches and missing sound. So a linux port isn’t far away (I hope to release it in february), and once I get my hands on some Mac I’ll try to compile it there too (MacOS is based on FreeBSD, so linux code will work with just some small adjustments).
And I must also admit that FPC and (especially) Lazarus made big steps in the last few years. I once tried to get the game ported to Laz/FPC years ago and was totally frustrated by the IDE. But with Laz 1.0 it’s a real breeze to develop. It’s stable, fast, and debugging is working pretty good too (though Delphi still has the best debugging capabilities around in my opionion) and well, FPC is an awesome compiler with functions that Delphi won’t have in years :)
And thanks for linking to my game Jeroen, it’s nice to get some attention from outside the developer communities I’m usually active in!
jpluimers said
Good to hear you made this progress, and thanks for all the info. Much appreciated!
–jeroen
ObjectMethodology.com said
Awesome… Go Delphi !
Jason McMillen said
Well you can check out the whole community at http://www.PascalGameDevelopment.com. :)
Wodzuu said
You should also check this horr game: http://tower22.blogspot.com/
Franz said
the good news in that post : Lazarus is a strong multi platform back up for Delphi (or vice versa), a complex port does not take to much time …