[bbor]

Ok I’ve got a hacker challenge for the more creatively-inclined: if I wanted to stretch “cross platform” to web (and thus webVR?), how might I wrap/integrate/emulate/polyfill/whatever this?

EDIT: after a quick search the answer is a resounding “you can do it, but yikes.” Multiple people reference custom compilers, which I’m guessing are beyond my reach…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12029566

EDIT 2: wow nvm it’s on their roadmap! Their “why pascal” page says it’s already supported, but i think thats more hopeful than contractual.

  Coming soon (roadmap):

  Oculus (VR) (we have the hardware to test)

  WebGL (FPC can compile to WebAssembly)

  XBox (we have the hardware to test).

(Love the casual “we own at least one xbox” humble brag. If the authors are reading this, that’s the only part that I find a tiny bit off putting — a tinge of overeagerness to persuade me / sell me.)

https://castle-engine.io/features#_cross_platform

Highly recommend the “Why pascal” page in general, the most interesting part of the project to a passerby like me:

https://castle-engine.io/why_pascal

[vintagedave]

> Love the casual “we own at least one xbox” humble brag.

Maybe it's not a humblebrag, but showing they're taking cross-platform seriously. I don't own an Xbox for example, and if I worked on something like this, buying one would be for the specific reason of making sure the project worked. I'd communicate that.

[bbor]

I guess my observation was more along the lines of “they’re game devs, they almost definitely have at least a few Xboxes between them”. But of course a matter of rhetorical taste, and I think you’re in the majority

[michaliskambi]

As for our mention of XBox on https://castle-engine.io/features : the point I wanted to say there was that we have "development" version of Xbox, as provided by Microsoft. Though it doesn't matter much nowadays, since retail Xbox versions can also be used for development, from what I read. I edited that statement to say this

""" XBox (we have the hardware — even devkit, though "developer mode" can also be activated on a retail version of Xbox). """

As for web:

- This is mentioned on https://castle-engine.io/why_pascal as supported nicely by FPC compiler. FPC can compile regular Pascal code to WebAssembly, there's also Pas2Js that can compile regular Pascal code to JS. See samples e.g. here: https://github.com/genericptr/Pas2JS-WebGL?tab=readme-ov-fil...

- In the context of Castle Game Engine, web is part of "Coming Soon" of https://castle-engine.io/features . We want to utilize above to enable to recompile any Castle Game Engine application (as long as it uses cross-platform API) to the web. Details are on https://castle-engine.io/wp/2023/04/08/web-target-progress-a... .

[bbor]

Thanks for the detailed response! That sounds amazing. I’ll try to keep track of this to eventually try it out, I’ve been chafing at the bounds of Three.js and I think the whole web game ecosystem could use a method/tool infusion from mainstream game development.

And gotcha on the Xboxes, sorry if that was rude - clearly HN thought it was! I had no idea that there were special developer Xboxes. And in general was expecting a much less organized operation lol, you seem very on top of your game