From: jjb [mailto:[email protected]] 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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