Allegro.pas / News: Recent posts

Yes, you read it, I released Allegro.pas 5.2.0 10 months ago. And yes, I forgot to tell you. Well, mostly: I announced it in the mailing list as well as in various forums and on Blusky (just search for #Allegro) but I forgot the news. It is being a hard time for me, both job and personal issues. I'm still working on it.... read more

Hello Allegroids and Pascaloids,

I hope you're passing a safe cuarantine.

I was preparing my Allegro.pas based game engine (MinGRO, also in SourceForge) so I can use it in LudumDare and TINS jams when I found a silly but big bug related with sound streams: A parameter of al_load_audio_stream_f was declared as AL_STR and it should be AL_SIZE_T. So I fixed it and uploaded a bugfixing release.... read more

Since the old website was pretty ugly and broken, I've updated it rewritting from scratch. It includes a tutorial, but wiki isn't linked. It is actually still there, but at the moment it is in a halt.

Newer versions of DokiWiki don't work on SourceForge anymore. I've tried alternatives as pmWiki and MediaWiki but none of them work for different reasons. There's the SourceForge Wiki but I don't like it a lot (maybe for internal use, but not for public one).... read more

After almost two years, finally I've just uploaded a new release of Allegro.pas. I know it was long time but I have few free time and I wanted to finish the goals instead of release an unfinished one.

The goals for this release were:

Complete the Allegro core library

This was complete in about 90%. Only secondary stuff as haptic was left out, but I think it will be completed in the next release.... read more

Still working on documentation. There are a lot of changes, adding a lot of documentation that were missed in previous versions. I was thinking to update the on-line documentation, but due to the way the new documentation is being written it can't be done directly. Anyway, I've updated the introduction with a few more sections. May be this helps while waiting for the next release.

May be you already know, but Allegro 4.4.3 was released some weeks ago. This was a big surprise, as such old version is officially not supported anymore. This makes me think if a new release of Allegro.pas 4 is worth of, as there seems to be a few new functions and few other changes (specially in Windows 64bit compilation and MSVS 2010 that forced me to port a game to Allegro 5). I actually don't know.... read more

Almost a year after the last release I've published version 5.2.b.0.

This version doesn't fix a lot of bugs nor adds new functionality, but it is an important milestone (hence the change from alpha to beta) as to recover Delphi compatibility.

May be you know, Allegro.pas was Delphi compatible from the beginning. It was quite complex because Allegro API needed to share variables with DLL, and Delphi wasn't capable of this. To make it possible, I used an extra DLL file that returned the pointers to such variables. That made things quite complex to maintain and hard to use so I decided to remove Delphi compatibility being the latest compatible version the 4.2.2 but I always promised the back to Delphi with version 5 as the new API is more easy to port.... read more

Lazarus user Handoko has made a demo game for the Lazarus' Graphics Contest 2017. He also plan also to write a tutorial explaining how the inners of the game works and how it uses Allegro.pas.

Right now I'm negotiating the possibility to use the game as one of The Demo Game for the Allegro.pas 5.2 branch.

It was a long time ago since the latest release. More than a year. And I've done a lot of improvements to it, so I've released a new alpha version (the 3rd one).

Despite it is still an alpha version, it is quite stable. Please visit the Files section to download and test this new version that fixes bugs and adds new functionality and more examples.... read more

That's it. I've updated the on-line documentation with the current svn-TRUNK one, wich is much better than the one included in the last package. It now includes much more information, some fixes and a search engine.

You can't download it at the moment but you can read it here.

As some people has asked for, I've started with Allegro.pas tutorials in the Lazarus/Free Pascal wiki.

Some body asked me for Spanish tutorials, and also it's more easy for me to do it in Spanish, so I'll write them initially in that language. I plan to translate them to English ASAP, but if some body can do it for me it would help a lot. ;)

Any comment and suggestion are welcomed.

Link to the first tutorial (Spanish)

Thanks to a note at the Discussion forums, I did some fixes and updates to version 4.4.5. They're a few, and mostly on the alwin unit. Actually I'm not sure that it works perfectly, but it compiles.

I've also updated the documentation, adding a search engine (actually just added an option to pasdoc). You can read it online or download as you wish.

As always, you can download from the download page.

About 3 years after 5.0.alpha, a new release of branch 5 (now TRUNK) was released today. It has a lot of improvements, and should be slightly more stable than previous alpha. You can download it from here. Any feed back is welcome.

I'll use it in the comming TINS 2016 contest, and I plan to use my entry as demonstration game for the library.

Yesterday, Allegro 5.2.0 was released. I tested it and it's quite nice. It fixes suff from 5.0 and adds new things, like the new 3D API that avoids the need of OpenGL or DirectX. It is much like the 3D routines used in pre-5 versions but using hardware acceleration.

So, Allegro.pas TRUNK will drop 5.0 support and go to the 5.2. Actually I want to release a new beta before TINS 2006, announced by Amarillion few days ago. This is, before Friday May 13.

Few time ago, Free Pascal version 3 was released. Sometime later, Lazarus 1.6 was released. I didn't test them 'till today, and I found a few issues. They're not major issues, just some warnings here and there. So I did a few changes and uploaded to the SVN.

On the other hand, I was thinking about what demonstration game to ship with Allegro.pas 5 branch. I was thinking in an old idea: first person snowball battle. So may be I'll create a prototype using version 4.4 then port it to version 5.0 (or may be 5.1).

Note: This was published in other of my current projects: Gesbit.

Some days ago, Leo has posted a comment asking why does Gesbit stay in SourceForge. I answered that I know that GitHub is the trend and SourceForge have a bad reputation, but I prefer SVN over GIT and SourceForge did work for many years.... read more

As I said in previous news, I've moved the TRUNK to BRANCHES/4.4, then moved BRANCHES/5.0 to TRUNK. So now TRUNK is version 5, and a new beta should be released next year.

This doesn't mean that development of version 4 is finished. I'll update version 4 if necessary, fixing bugs and adding stuff if I find it useful. Also, if somebody send me patches, fixes and addons, and they fit the project, I'll add them too.

I've finally uploaded stable Allegro.pas 4.4.5 version. It is a major update
of the library, but the first two version numbers are keept to be coherent with
original Allegro Game Library.

This version has some API modifications, as well as a lot of improvements that
makes it faster (and sometimes smaller) executables. Most important changes
from version 4.4.4 below:

• New functions and procedures that detects system stuff at runtime, an
  new units for Windows and UNIX specifics.
• New BOOLEAN type that allows better integration with library.
• Use of ARRAYs and VAR/OUT on parameters, that allows to reduce executable
  sizes and faster execution, and a side effect is reduction of HINT and
  WARNING lines while compilation!
• Several bug fixes in demo game, al_apply_matrix_f and al_pack_fseek
  functions and in examples.
• A lot of changes on documentation.... read more

I was working on next release (yay!) when I found a big stupid mistake: on-line documentation wasn't available! So this is fixed and on-line again, both versions 4.4.4 and 5.0.alpha1.

And yes, I want to upload new release 4.4.5 as soon as possible. It taked too long because alwas I have something to do. I'll try to release new versions in less time (may be tagging them with beta, RS and so) in the future.... read more

I was planning a new release, the 4.4.5 . I think it will be a "beta" or a "release candidate", not sure. Right now I'm working on the new GUI add-on, as it would be the base for the GUI add-on for version 5 too. I'm not sure, but I want also to add more MIDI and sound support (streaming), as well as another game demo that would be ported to version 5 on the future, but it may be a lot of work. Anyway, SourceForge is working on the severver and SVN and download doesn't work right now.

I know, not news, no releases... But I'm working on it.

I was working in a new GUI system, using Object Pascal classes. Currently it's an add-on but I think it should replace the current ugly GUI system.

Also I'm aware of some bugs and new stuff and improvements.... read more

A new member joins to the Allegro.pas developer team. Gregor A. Cieslak (sourceforge.net), who yet created a fork to add Delphi support to Allegro.pas 5. You may remember him from previous messages. He will be responsible of main development of version 5, while I'll be responsible of maintain version 4.4 and (of course) help him with version 5.

Also, I've updated both Feature Requests and Bugs. We'll try to keep it up to date, so you'll have a way to see what's moving in the project.

That's it. I'm working on next version of Allegro.pas.

This new version should be Delphi compatible (Delphi 6 and up or so) thanks the help of Gregor A. Cieslak who did a fork that I'm now trying to merge with the new one. You can download and test his work at https://github.com/Soldat/allegro-pas5-test .

The new version will have more examples too and some bugfixes (I hope).

It has no ETA. At the moment you can get the updates from SVN (https://sourceforge.net/p/allegro-pas/code/HEAD/tree/BRANCHES/5.0/).

Lars Sonnen, Matthias Müller, Michael Willems and Markus Wall have published a new Tetris clone named Amazing Tetris. Of course, it uses Allegro.pas. They created it as a Computer Science project for school, and they helped testing and providing the OGG/Vorbis loader for Allegro.pas that I added as an add-on to the library.

If you are a Tetris fan then you know that not all Tetris clones are the same. Amazin Tetris has some nice features, as a "hold" place, a shadow to show you where the piece will fall and it shows the next 3 pieces. There are also different game modes, and you can customize the game adding music and backgrounds that can be animated!... read more

I didn't work on the project lately, but I decided to release an Alpha version (pre-beta) because it's pretty stable. I've tested in several systems (Xubuntu 32 bit, Fedora 64bit and Windows XP 32 bit) and it works... almost. It doesn't include full documentation, and it may not work properly with your system, but it has the new Allegro API and has OpenGL support and other new features.

The download link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/allegro-pas/files/5.0.alpha/... read more