Gamers only?

[Marc Van Cauwenbergh]

Hello,

Just an observation. Is PPL mainly orientated for people who want to write games? Everywhere I look I see a lot of text mentioning games. Even when I quit PIDE I get:

You are running the Lite version. Here is what you get…..
Impress your friends , write games with the powerful GameAPI
Write better games with ….
Simplify your game coding …..
Make your games ….

I write business programs and have no plans to write games.

As I said just an observation.

Marc

[MagNet]

Well, you can't really have any things that simplify writing business programs you know, you can write them with PPL of course tho.
I think it's there just because people like to make their own games, but PPL is powerful for making a lot of stuff.

[kornalius]

PPL is a language for serious programming in the first place. We promote with game programming a lot because, just like Magnet said, the market is bigger but PPL can do SQL, ActiveX, RS232, WinSock, it is Object-Oriented, is has a great form designer. Just like any other good language on the market.

I repeat PPL is not only for games! :)

[Marc Van Cauwenbergh]

Ok,

I actually thought so. ;) But first impressions are sometimes enough to attract OR discourage people to have a second look.

Marc

[PocketBrain]

So, what you are saying is, it's great for developing whatever, but you went out of your way to make it easy to program games?
.

[MagNet]

You're not getting the point there PocketBrain.
The fact is that the games that you can develop with the PPL's GameAPI all have lot of similarities so it's possible to make tools that allow you to do those similar things faster and easier.

On the other hand nongame software has to be manually programmed because except for the visual form building there's not really anything you can simplify it with.

Got it now? Or am I completely wrong?

[kornalius]

Marc: I hope we didn't discourage you. :) If so give PPL as better look you'll see all it can offer.

PocketBrain: Exactly, you can program ANYTHING with PPL but we have put a lot of efforts in a complex but very easy to use gaming API. We even have a Visual Game Editor in the PIDE.

[mmtbb]

Let me simplify things. The real reason people mention games so much, is because PPL is one of the ONLY programming environments where you CAN program games for the PPC AND on the PPC. I hope that makes sense. THere are many creative people that would like to program games for the PPC but don't have the tools to do it, or the knowledge to use the big complicated languages. Though PPL is a all incompassing language, PPL just happens to be one of the few languages you can write good games with. writing for the general public.

[PointOfLight]

I have been working with PPL for a couple of years now, and I have as yet to write a game. Not long after SQLite support was added I wrote an SQLite database viewer. One of these days I will get that cleaned up (and hopefully add Pocket Access support) and post it complete with source. If anyone would like a copy before that, feel free to ask and I'll be more than happy to share.

[llamatrails]

Eric,
Would you be willing to post what you have in the Code section for all to see and learn from ? Add the usual disclaimer: Not responsible for damage or death, use at your own risk, consult your knowledgeable advisor, etc. :p

It would be a great help to us and Kornalius.

[PointOfLight]

What I will do is zip it up and provide a link to it in the code section. I don't want to just copy and paste the code since it is basically an entire application. However, I will need to go in and tweak it first, because I wrote it some time ago (over a year) and I'm sure a few things don't work with the latest version. I will try and get that posted this week, schedule allowing.