I'm pleased to announce the winners of this month's gaming contest. We have a first place winner in the C++ and Delphi categories, one runner up in the C++ category, and two runners up in the Delphi category. There were no entries in the JBuilder category. I was the reluctant judge of this month's contest, but you can, of course, download and test all the entries yourself.
As you will see, the entries in the contest were almost all uniformly excellent. I am simply overwhelmed by the high quality of the entries that we received.
The Delphi Contest
The winner of the Delphi contest was HTK, who produced a beautiful flame, replete with smoke and great animation. His code is small and fast, and produces a great effect. Truth in advertising forces me to confess that HTK broke the rules by not completing a component for his work, but I decided to overlook that in this case, since I find his final result so impressive.
HTK's Dynamic Flame and animated Rocket
Second place in the hotly contested Delphi contest went to Sergay Prilutsky, who created a very compelling image of a farm in winter. Smoke pours from the chimney of a barn, and from two firsts in a distant field. I think it is only fair to say that the presentation, that is, the actual demo, of this code was a contributing factor in its success. The demo, which looks attractive here on the page, is very compelling when seeing in its animated "life" form.
Sergey's powerful presentation of his code helped him win second place. I definitely wanted to walk into that farmhouse scene.
Third place goes to Michael McAuliffe, who produced an extremely flame that looks like it would work beautiful in a game. His flame takes a second to execute, but once the background calculations are finished, the flame looks great.
Michael did a great job producing a flame that would look great in any number of high end games.
I want to stress that the competition in the Delphi field was very good. Most of the entries exceeded my hopes for the contest, and perhaps if the moon had been in a slightly different phase, and the weather slightly different, we would have found a different set of winners. As it was, our choice was at least in part simply the best we could manage to do under difficult circumstances. My hat is off to all the contestants. (In particular, I feel bad that Tom Nuydens didn't earn a place in the top three, as his OpenGL entry was very well done. Unfortunately, it does not run at all on my home system, or I would have included a very impressive screen shot from his powerful entry. His entry was very good looking, maybe one of the best looking in the whole lot, but it ran haltingly and sluggishly even on fairly powerful machines. )
The C++ Contest
The winner of the of the C++ Contest was Lucian Wischik, who has a web site at: http://www.wischik.com/lu. Lucian's flame is very convincing, and extremely well animated. The screen shot I show here really does little to capture the fine effect created by the running program. As with all the examples, I recommend you download this one and get the full flavor from running Lucian's excellent code.
Lucian produced a well animated flame that performed very well even on slow systems.
Second place went to Dallas Nutsch. His entry is very impressive, but it was difficult to compile and run. Lucian's component was well designed and easy to work with, while I felt that Dallas was less comfortable with the idea of creating reusable code in component form. However, we did not base the decision on that factor alone.
The rich colors found in Dallas Nutsch's OpenGL entry are clearly visible here.
Summary
I have to confess that the entries for this contest exceeded my expectations. The entries were almost all spectacular.
The greatest joy of my job is working with the many talented programmers I find both here at Borland, and out in the real world where our customers thrive and excel. The code found in these examples is well worth downloading. Even the entries that are not displayed here are almost all uniformly quite impressive. These folks did a great job and I heartily recommend their work. When viewing their accomplishments I was continually reminded of why my job is so exciting, and why it is such great fun to work in this part of the computer industry.
My only regret is at my own inadequacies as a judge. David Intersimone, John Kaster, John Thomas and myself all worked together to judge these entries, but I was the one who ultimately made the decisions as to who should achieve which ranking. I have to admit that I felt inadequate to the task. My hope is that next month the contest can be judged by votes from the community. It would be a huge relief to me to take this responsibility off my shoulders, and give it to our customers, who are the people most capable of reaching the right decision. (I want to stress that I was a reluctant judge. Our busy schedules, combined with the recent Borland-Corel merger, forced me to take on more responsibility than I wanted.)
Thanks again for your participation. On Friday I will announce the next contest.