Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha.2 release

[Michalis Kamburelis 13]

We are proud to announce the Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha.2 release! After 18 months of intensive development since 7.0-alpha.1, we have a lot of new features that upgrade the engine to a new level

Castle Game Engine is a cross-platform (desktop, mobile, console) 3D and 2D game engine. We feature a visual editor, we support glTF, X3D, Spine and more. We are of course using modern Pascal (FPC and Delphi). The engine is free and open-source. More complete list of features here.

Notable new features in this release:
 

• Sprite Sheet editor
• Many new components in the viewport - primitives, text, image, reference
• Font components
• Sound components, ability to design spatial sounds in editor
• Lights components
• Background (gradient, skybox)
• Fog
• New camera and navigation handling - much more natural, camera is a transformation and can have children and be a child of something else
• Components to visualize terrains
• Tested and documented how to use engine with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins
• Build Debian packages for your project
• Delphi support!
• Numerous smaller editor improvements, like double-clicking to open Pascal files at proper file and proper line
• glTF improvements: step interpolation, cameras fix, normal scale handling, ability to pick a subset of glTF
• Inspect your game hierarchy and logs at runtime — just press F8
• Integration with Vampyre Imaging Library
• Android building improvements
• macOS improvements: Cocoa backend in TCastleWindow and more
• A lot of documentation upgrades

This is just a summary of the full release announcement with all the details and plans.

In related news, we will host an open meeting on Discord this Saturday. We'll talk about the new features and plans, and it's an open meeting -- everyone can ask questions and show their work too. You are invited

We count on your support via Patreon to fund more engine development.

[Rollo62 536]

@Michalis Kamburelis

Good to hear that your great project is now Delphi compatible.

I have read before that it was only partly Delphi compatible, nur sure what that meant.

Would you say this is now "fully" supported, or are there still some stumbling blocks and construction sites to watch out for ?

[Michalis Kamburelis 13]

38 minutes ago, Rollo62 said:

@Michalis Kamburelis

Good to hear that your great project is now Delphi compatible.

I have read before that it was only partly Delphi compatible, nur sure what that meant.

Would you say this is now "fully" supported, or are there still some stumbling blocks and construction sites to watch out for ?

 

Right now with Delphi you can build and run all CGE applications using TCastleWindow (which is our advised way to display engine content, used by all templates and 90% of examples) on Windows.

 

The 2 bigger things missing (and planned) for Delphi still, both documented on https://castle-engine.io/supported_compilers.php#section_delphi are:

 

1. More platforms.

 

    Right now with Delphi we support only Windows (32 and 64-bit). Work on Linux has started.

 

    Going forward, of course we could support all platforms that Delphi supports (and that CGE already supports with FPC/Lazarus) so Linux, macOS, Android, iOS too. See https://castle-engine.io/features#_cross_platform about all our platforms.

 

2. TCastleControl to put the engine rendering inside FireMonkey or VCL form.

 

    Right now with Delphi we only support TCastleWindow, which means engine renders and handles input in a dedicated window (on desktop; it has dedicated implementations for Android, iOS etc.). So this is similar to game engines (like Unity, Unreal, Godot) -- the engine creates and manages a window dedicated for the engine rendering.

 

    Going forward, we want to implement TCastleControl, which is essentially an alternative "gateway" to access engine functionality than TCastleWindow. It is documented now on https://castle-engine.io/control_on_form for Lazarus LCL -- but it can be realized on Delphi VCL and/or Delphi FireMonkey too. This allows to drop TCastleControl on a regular form, set TCastleControl size to whatever you want (it can be a big component filling your form, or it can be a small thing, you can use many such components on a form simultaneously too). And then CGE rendering/logic is done alongside your regular GUI designed using VCL or FireMonkey.