Die Lazarus Expedition Mac OS

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As an alternative, you could install XCode, FreePascal, and Lazarus on a MacOX machine. You could still do your development and some testing on Windows/Linux. When you hit a certain milestone, you can copy your source code to the Mac and compile your application to test and give to the user. System 6 (also referred to as System Software 6) is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers. It was released in 1988 by Apple Computer and was part of the classic Mac OS line of operating systems. System 6 was shipped with various Macintosh computers until it was succeeded by System 7 in 1991. (Whether with lazarus or XE2 with Mac as a target compiler) The answer will help me a lot in deciding whether I should use Delphi XE2 or Lazarus (an IDE which I'm not familiar at all with) and see what's the best long term approach to offer/support both Windows & Mac with the minimum headaches. Installing Lazarus on a Mac is unfortunately not as easy as e.g. On Windows, the Lazarus installation contains all necessary prerequisites. This is not the case on Mac OS X, where several other tools are needed: XCode the development environment of Mac, which contains some command-line tools. Gdb The gnu debugger. These tools should.

Made and Published by Maschinen-Mensch

Played on: Microsoft Windows

Also Available on: MAC OS and Linux

We all know the many famous explorers that have graced our history textbooks. Greats such as Charles Darwin, Amelia Earhart, H.P. Lovecraft, Marcus Garvey..? Okay, some of these great people may not be explorers, but they are famous, and have had an impact on the world in one way or another. The Curious Expedition is a rogue-like, turn based strategy game with procedurally generated maps. The goal is to compete against four other explorers and have your explorer, whom you pick, become the most famous of them all. You will have to travel to Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, Antarctica and many other places in your search for treasure.

When playing the game, you will have six expeditions. Each one will become progressively harder. The final goal of each expedition is to find the golden pyramid, located somewhere on the map. The maps slowly get larger, and many obstacles will stand in your way. The first three expeditions simply require you to find the golden pyramid. The final three expeditions will have you wander the map looking for moonstones. You will need one or two of these stones to be able to gain entry into the golden pyramid.

With the map changing every time due to you being able to pick the area you explore in addition to the procedural generation, the game never feels old. Every expedition will feel new and exciting. You will encounter villages with indigenous peoples, sacred temples, abandoned campsites and shipwrecks, mysterious caves, and an assortment of other locations to explore and loot. Exploration in the game is done in a turn-based manner. You will click the place you want your exploration party to go to on the grid based map and they will move to that location. They can go as far as you want them to in one turn, as long as the place they are going was revealed to you on the map before you sent them and they are not interrupted along the way. Moving consumes sanity, which is important. Sanity is what keeps your party together. Moving through rough environments such as thick jungles and deep rivers will drain your party of sanity. If you run out of sanity, increasing bad things will happen to your band of explorers, and they will eventually perish from the game's pixelated Earth. In addition to exploring the map, you will have to face it's many dangers. Ravenous wildlife roam the land, and are alerted to your presence whenever you stop to rest or loot an important location. If you desecrate too many sacred sites, the native people will send out armed search parties to hunt you down and sacrifice you to their gods.

Combat in the game is straightforward. You and your party members will face the enemy in turn-based combat, similar to many JRPG games. The difference here is that each character in your party will have a different set of die that can be rolled any number of times depending on how many people are in your expedition (i.e. if you have five people, the maximum, you can roll your die five times before your turn ends.) Some characters only have support die while others only have attack die. You mix and match these different skills to make powerful and/or helpful attacks and defensive abilities in battle. But be careful, like in many turn-based games, if the main character dies in battle, (your explorer), then the game ends.

If you make it to the golden pyramid, you will return to London. There, you will first get to pick an upgrade. You are presented with three random upgrades after each expedition. Some of these increase the amount of sanity you have. Others will make you lose less sanity when crossing certain terrain, or allow you to carry more items among others. Afterwards, you will sell off the treasure you have found. You can either sell your treasure to the museum, and get fame, which if you have the most fame you win, or, you could sell your treasure on the open market to get cash for your next expedition. Finally before you depart, you will get a chance to buy new equipment, upgrade some of your party members, and get a quest opportunity which you can or cannot accept. These quests tend to repeat each playthrough and consist of finding a person or delivering a letter to someone. If you complete the quests while on your next expedition, then you will receive a cash benefit or a small amount of fame. If you fail, then you will have fame deducted from your total score and not get any money.

While I really like the game for it's variety and personal charm, I have issues with it. My first is the game's performance issues. On my computer (which can run the game perfectly fine according to the system specs on the steam page) I have encountered many glitches that really ruin the experience. The first one I noticed is the sound. The soundtrack to the game is very fitting for exploration in the game's engrossing world and I really enjoy listening to it while playing the game. However, it sounds like a small mammal being run through the garbage disposal at times. I would be investigating a tomb in sub-saharan Africa, and then all of the sudden hear the slow, distorted lurching of the rhyme to the main theme. It really does sound awful and I turn the volume off every time it happens, which is pretty frequent. Other performance issues include the frame-rate dropping and the combat screen taking a while to appear. These didn't happen to me often but they are still a persistent problem.

Another issue I have with the game is the autosave feature. Every few minutes the game will auto-save due to the lack of a manual save function during expeditions. While this did help a few times after I died and wanted one last shot at completing the expedition, this feature is mostly there to taunt you. Most of the time the game saves right before you are ambushed by an enraged group of natives or before you party suffers from a third night without any remaining sanity. I'm not even sure why the game has an autosave feature. From my experience it really only seems to give you the ability to see the moment of your demise over and over again. Frankly I think sticking with the permadeath one-and-done gameplay would have been a better option.

Overall, The Curious Expedition is a pleasant experience. It has hours of the reliably fun permadeath, roguelike gameplay that we see in other great indie games like The Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. The maps are full of entertaining stops and objectives that tie into the overall goal of the game. The combat takes a different approach from other games, which is a good thing as this keeps the game feeling new in a crowded genre. I think that the game is worth 15 dollars despite the performance issues. They may make the game less satisfying to play, but really don't get in the way of the enjoyment. Just don't wear headphones. As always, a VITA version of this game would be epic, and would help eliminate performance issues, but I know that we won't be seeing any of that, at least not soon.

I am giving The Curious Expedition an 8 out of 10

Pros:

Die Lazarus Expedition Mac Os Download

Fun concept and execution

Great turn-based combat

Procedural generation mixed with turn-based movement done well

Cons:

Minor performance issues

Annoying auto save system

Where to buy:

Pascal is considered by many programmers as an old language from the past. And although it is in fact one of the older programming languages, it has greatly evolved into a modern, full featured language over the last decades.

Pascal was initially developed in 1969 by Dr. Niklaus Wirth on the ETH of Zurich. It was used as a teaching language as well as a language for business applications. With the appearance of the Classic Mac OS, Pascal was the language of choice propagated by Apple for serious application development. As an example, the first version of Photoshop was made with Pascal.1

Pascal was standardized as an ISO standard in the early 90s. But unlike other languages, there were different Pascal dialects and compilers since the very beginning. One of the most favourite versions, which made Pascal one of the most well-known and widespread programming languages of the 80s and the early 90s, was Borlands Turbo Pascal2. Over time some object-oriented additions were added to the language by Apple and later by Borland, which has evolved into what we now call Object Pascal.3

Today there are two major implementations: Delphi, the official Turbo Pascal successor, and Free Pascal.

Delphi is a commercial Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment, which consists of the Object Pascal language, a powerful and fast compiler, a large runtime-library (RTL) and a designer for crossplatform Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Delphi runs only on Windows, but can compile programs for GNU/Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android, too.

Free Pascal in contrast is a free, Open Source implementation of the Object Pascal language. It consists of the language, the compiler and a runtime-library - but does not include the RAD-tools which made Delphi famous. But thanks to some Free Pascal enthusiasts, the Lazarus IDE was developed as a powerful RAD environment especially for Free Pascal. Both, Free Pascal and Lazarus, are highly cross-platform and can run on and compile for different systems, among them are GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD.

But beside this historical excursion, what are the reasons that I use Free Pascal in my personal projects?

Pascal focus on types

Pascal is a compiled, statically-typed language, which requires, that you define the types of all variables, parameters and functions in your code. The compiler will instantly raise an error when you're trying to pass incompatible types to a variable or parameter. The type-safety has one big advantage: it forces you to think about how to structure your data.

The language offers many predefined types, but you can also define your own types. For this task Pascal offers you Enumerations, Sets, Arrays, Records and Classes. It is even possible to create sub-ranges of types or to rename existing ones.

Pascal is very strict, so the programmer has to differ between subroutines that return values, in Pascal called functions, and subroutines that does not return something, called procedures. Functions and procedures can also be passed to variables or other functions thanks to procedural types.

It is possible to overload operators for specific types. With this feature, you have the power to define, let's say, the result of the addition operation of two or more instances of the same class.

Object Pascal has full support for OOP

Object Pascal provides you all the tools you need for modern Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Although the language is not fully object oriented in that sense like Smalltalk or Ruby, where even the most basic data types are instances of classes, you will find all the concepts that define OOP in the Object Pascal language: encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.

You can define complex types with the help of classes. A class can define methods, which are procedures or functions, and data, called fields in Object Pascal. It is also possible to define the way of how data is accessed by a feature called properties. Properties define which getter- or setter-methods are used to read or write a field. Classes can also inherit other classes, so you can build a hierarchical tree of the data and behaviour you have modelled within your application. The base class of all classes is TObject.

Interfaces are also a part of Object Pascal as well as Exceptions. You can use the build-in standard exceptions, but you have of course the freedom to define your own exceptions. Class helpers are comparable with Extension Methods in C# or Smalltalks or PHPs traits (although not exactly the same) and let you add methods to existing classes without the need to derive a new class.

Further features are Generics to define classes that apply to a wide range of types, as well as many predefined classes for advanced data structures like lists, dictionaries, streams and many many more.

For an in-depth overview of all the modern OOP features, I recommend an excellent article written by Michalis Kamburelis, which is called Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers4.

Pascal is modular

Pascal supports programming in a modular way. What is called packages or modules in other languages like Java or JavaScript, is called an unit in Pascal.

An unit can contain all the code that has a common relation. You can define which data, types or functions of this unit are visible to other parts of your program - this is called the interface. And you can also define which parts are not visible to others and thus are private to the unit - this is called the implementation part. You can even define code, which gets executed once when the unit is included into your program, the initialization part of the unit, and code that gets executed when the program terminates, the finalization part.

Units have another advantage: they encapsulate the code in its own namespace. So you can have for example two or even more procedures with the same name in two different units without a name-collision.

Pascal is fast

One of the reasons why the early Turbo Pascal was a huge success was the speed of the compiler. Even on older hardware code was compiled in a few seconds. In comparison to other compilers this is still true today.

Die Lazarus Expedition Mac Os X

But despite the fast compilation of code, the compiled code itself is very competitive to applications developed in plain C, C++ or Java due to the highly optimization for different processor architectures, allowing the program to run at a very high speed and with little memory consumption.5

Pascal is verbose

This is maybe the fact, that most developers are annoyed about: the absence of braces and the very verbose syntax of the language. As an example, instead of opening and closing braces, Pascal uses the begin and end keywords for blocks. The if keyword is complemented by the word then. As you can see, the whole syntax is readable like plain English. If you start to cry now, you should consider one important question by yourself: What is more important? The ability to have a short syntax to write code fast or the possibility to read and understand code that was written by other developers or even by you a year ago? I'm in favour of the second fact and I really enjoy that verboseness.

Did Lazarus Die

Pascal has good documentation

A language without a good documentation is only half the value. The team behind Free Pascal has done a very good job. You can browse the whole language documentation as well as the documention about the compiler itself, the Runtime Library (RTL), Free Component Library (FCL) and the Lazarus Component Library (LCL)6. In addition to this you will find many examples in the Free Pascal Wiki7, but this takes us to the fact that…

Die Lazarus Expedition Mac OS

Pascal has a great community

Beside the official wiki, there is also an official forum8 where Free Pascal and Lazarus users will answer your questions. If you're active on Google+ you can have a look at the Google+ Free Pascal / Lazarus IDE Community9, too. There are several (althoug not many) Object Pascal related conferences as well as some local Free Pascal and Lazarus meetups. And with the Blaise Pascal Magazine10 you will find a regular publication which offers a broad selection of articles about Delphi, Free Pascal, Lazarus and Object Pascal in general.

Conclusion

Object Pascal is really worth a look. Don't let you discourage by people that tell you that Pascal is out of date. It is definetly not! There are many great projects out there that prove how strong the language is: from the Lazarus IDE itself to high performance 3D-Game engines like the Castle Game Engine11, which compiles your games for Android and iOS, too. If you're interested in the path aside of the mainstream languages, have a look at some of the resources I mentioned. Or simply install Free Pascal and Lazarus and try out the language for yourself!

Die Lazarus Expedition Mac Os 11

  1. You can read more about the history of Pascal in the Free Pascal Wiki[return]
  2. programming language performance benchmark at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game[return]




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