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Manual

Lazarus

1. Introduction

You can use Castle Game Engine with Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) and Lazarus IDE.

2. We don’t strictly depend on Lazarus

Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) is a separate thing from Lazarus IDE. To understand the difference:

  • FPC is a (command-line) Pascal compiler. You need to use either FPC or Delphi to compile your CGE programs. We only support these 2 modern Pascal compilers.

  • Lazarus IDE is an IDE (editor, project manager) using FPC.

    Lazarus also provides LCL, a visual component library, along with ability to visually design LCL applications. But we do not use LCL in most CGE applications (the ones based on TCastleWindow). In effect, while Castle Game Engine integrates well with Lazarus, we don’t strictly depend on Lazarus — not like we depend on FPC.

3. Installing both FPC and Lazarus

Windows

Download and run a simple installer from the Lazarus website that will install both Lazarus (IDE) and FPC (compiler).

Linux

You should

  • install FPC first. It is easiest to install a package called fpc using your package manager.

  • Then download and install Lazarus package for Linux.

  • To compile the applications, install also GTK and OpenGL development libraries, from packages like libgtk2.0-dev, libgl-dev on Debian-based distros.

macOS

You can download packages for both FPC (download file like fpc-3.2.2.intelarm64-macosx.dmg) and Lazarus (file like Lazarus-2.2.0-0-x86_64-macosx.pkg) from the downloads on Lazarus website.

Lazarus website
Tip
 You can install FPC and Lazarus in other ways, for example using FpcUpDeluxe.
Tip
 If you prefer other IDE than Lazarus, you can install only FPC and use any Pascal code editor you like, like Visual Studio Code.

4. Configure FPC and Lazarus locations in Castle Game Engine editor

Configure FPC and Lazarus locations in Castle Game Engine editor Preferences, if they have not been auto-detected correctly.

Castle Game Engine Editor Preferences

5. Register Lazarus Packages

In Castle Game Engine editor Preferences, go to tab FPC and Lazarus and click on the button "Register Lazarus Packages". This will allow to compile and debug CGE applications inside Lazarus.

Lazarus packages registration confirmation

To improve this documentation just edit this page and create a pull request to cge-www repository.

Previous: Pascal IDEs
Next: Delphi
Manual
Documentation
  1. Recommended Tutorial: 3D Physics Fun
  2. Manual
    1. Install
    2. Build your first application
    3. Designing user interface and handling events (press, update) within the view
      1. Managing Views
    4. Viewport with scenes, camera, navigation
      1. Tutorial: Designing a 3D world
      2. Tutorial: Designing a 2D world
      3. Camera
      4. Navigation
      5. Writing code to modify scenes and transformations
      6. Behaviors
      7. Multiple viewports to display one world
      8. Expose scene elements, like children transformations as TCastleScene children
    5. User interface
      1. Text and fonts
      2. Customize loading image
      3. Custom drawn 2D controls: player HUD
    6. Editor
      1. Custom Components in Editor
      2. Components to reuse a design in other designs
    7. 2D games
      1. Sprite sheets
      2. Images
      3. Tiled maps
      4. How to render 2D games with images and sprites
    8. Physics
    9. Sound
      1. OpenAL
      2. FMOD
    10. Persistent data (user preferences, savegames)
    11. Save screen (screenshot)
    12. Network, downloading and using URLs
    13. Logging
    14. Cross-platform (desktop, mobile, consoles...) projects
      1. Data directory
      2. CastleEngineManifest​.xml
      3. Customize UI scaling, font, warmup cache by CastleSettings.xml
      4. Build Tool
      5. Touch Input
    15. Platforms details
      1. Android
      2. Android FAQ
      3. Android Services (Google Play Games and many more...)
      4. Adding New Android Services
      5. iOS
      6. iOS Services (Apple Game Center and many more...)
      7. In-App Purchases (Android, iOS)
      8. Nintendo Switch
      9. macOS
    16. Optimization
      1. Occlusion Culling
      2. Profiling Using Valgrind
      3. Detecting Memory Leaks
    17. Making rendering prettier
      1. Bump Mapping (Normal Maps)
      2. Shadow Volumes
      3. Background (skybox, sky and ground)
      4. Fog
      5. Blending
      6. Color Space (Gamma Correction)
      7. Alpha Bleeding
      8. Sketchfab
    18. Engine on a form (VCL, FMX, LCL) using TCastleControl
    19. Automatic Builds (Continuous Integration and Delivery)
      1. GitHub Actions (automatic builds for GitHub projects)
      2. GitLab CI/CD (automatic builds for GitLab projects)
      3. Docker (easily get CGE, compilers, texture compression tools)
      4. Jenkins (automatic builds by your Jenkins server)
    20. Pascal IDEs
      1. Lazarus
      2. Delphi
        1. Delphi packages
        2. Delphi for Linux
      3. Visual Studio Code
    21. Miscellaneous
      1. Which way is up?
      2. Transformation hierarchy
      3. CastleWindow Backends
      4. Threads
      5. Compiling from source
      6. Supported compilers and IDEs
      7. Coding Traps
      8. Units Map
      9. Dedicated GPU
      10. fpcupdeluxe
      11. FpMake and FpPkg
      12. License
    22. Helping in engine development
      1. Donate
      2. Roadmap
      3. Coding Conventions
    23. Deprecated: Utilities for typical 3D games
      1. Overview
      2. Loading game level
      3. Player
      4. Defining creatures and items
      5. Using creatures and items
      6. Extending creatures and items classes
  3. Creating Game Data
    1. API Reference
    2. Why Pascal?
    3. Modern Object Pascal Introduction
      1. Overview for Unity Developers
      2. Scene Graph (X3D)
        1. Conferences

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