Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha.3 - Release notes

Table of Contents

1. Main News Announcement
2. Summary
3. Details
4. New Tutorial and Learning Materials From Conferences

1. Main News Announcement

See the main news announcement on our blog. This page contains both the summary and the details, down below.

2. Summary

We are proud to present a big new release of Castle Game Engine, with lots of new features, improvements and fixes. The new engine version is available for download now.

The highlights of the release are below. For more details, see the full release notes. The number of this release, "7.0-alpha.3", is a signal that we’re on our road to the big 7.0 release (see the roadmap and plans and timeline).

This release is dedicated to the late Eugene Loza. I miss you, dear friend.

The most important highlights of this release are:

Physics. New components for colliders and rigid bodies, ability to run physics simulation in the editor, joints, layers, forces.
Many rendering improvements: Correct and automatic blending, both batching and occlusion culling easier to use and more powerful, fully modern rendering on new GPUs, better support for ancient systems with old GPUs.
Also OpenGLES (Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch) rendering supports now almost all desktop rendering features: shadow volumes, shadow maps, 3D textures, occlusion query, anisotropic filtering, meshes with 32-bit indexes.
Shadows using shadow volumes are trivial to activate. Work is under way to expose shadow maps through a trivial property as well.
Visual Studio Code integration. Our own VS Code "Castle Game Engine" extension with code completion and syntax highlighting for all Pascal code and easy building / running / debugging of Castle Game Engine projects.
Delphi integration improvements: TCastleControl available for VCL and FMX applications, Delphi packages with IDE support, Delphi Linux support and more.
Support for Tiled maps with a new component that is comfortable to use and efficient to render.
User Interface improvements: better default font, UI batching, image regions and 9-slices borders visually configurable, mask component.
Many editor UX improvements: modern color picker, unified tools to edit UI and transformations, wireframe view, "Change Class" menu action, Sketchfab Importer, finding components by name, multi-selection.
Improvements to views (formerly states): better API, automatic initialization of the published fields, opening the project greets you with UX to manage views.
Mobile improvements: lots of Android services improvements, Castle Model Viewer Mobile and more Android applications released on Google Play, lots of general Android and iOS fixes and improvements to make porting your games to mobile trivial, safe borders.
Loading and saving: cache, MD3 improvements, X3D 4.0 improvements, custom model formats registration, STL saving.
Inspector (press F8 / 3 fingers in a debug build of any project) improvements: tweaking boolean properties at run-time, hot-reloading at run-time to iterate on your graphics.
Float-based images (e.g. for precise terrains) full support at loading and rendering (formats: 16-bit PNG, float-based KTX, 16/32-bit TIFFs).
A lot of new documentation and examples. We in particular recommend 2 new tutorial articles introducing most important engine concepts: Bad way to play chess, aka 3D physics fun.

Support us

We appreciate your support on Patreon. There are also other ways to support us and if you’re a company, we’re open to cooperation (write to [email protected]). By 2024, Michalis, the lead engine developer, spent most of his life on the engine and doesn’t plan to stop. Moreover, Michalis now works on the engine full-time counting only on your support. So anything you can give is really appreciated!

Spread the word!

We don’t do much marketing. Because we suck at marketing. Help us — spread the word about this new release! Post about it anywhere you can. Talk about it in your communities — online or in the Real World. Tell your family about it (they really want to know). Reuse this news post and screenshots freely.

Have fun everyone and thank you for using the engine.

3. Details

Physics
- New components (colliders and bodies)
- Running simulation in the editor
- Explicitly causing forces and impulses by Pascal API
- Joints
- Layers
- Ray-casting (querying for collision) using physics colliders
- Updated 3rd-person navigation component that can now work with physics too
- A lot of new examples, see examples/physics
- See also the initial news about physics, where I tried and failed to provide a concise summary of what changed :)
Renderer improvements:
- Correct and automatic blending sorting. Read blending documentation and news 1 and news 2 to understand the details. But the gist is that it now works much more "out of the box" in both 3D and 2D typical game scenarios.
- Batching is easier to use (just flip TCastleViewport.DynamicBatching, observe the MyViewport.Statistics.ToString to learn if you achieved any performance improvement). And it is more powerful — it can now batch across the scenes and can batch more things, e.g. TCastleImageTransform with the same image will be nicely batched and rendered using one "draw call".
- Occlusion culling is also simpler to use: flip TCastleViewport.OcclusionCulling. See examples/viewport_and_scenes/occlusion_culling for demo.
- OpenGLES supports now almost all desktop rendering features: shadow volumes, shadow maps, 3D textures, occlusion query, anisotropic filtering, meshes with 32-bit indexes.
- Using only modern OpenGL 3.x context features, if possible.
- Using "core" OpenGL profile on macOS by default, thus having OpenGL 4.x API on macOS
- More optimal drawing of line primitives and quads.
- TCastleRenderUnlitMesh utility.
- Fixes for older ATI GPUs.
- New projects automatically contain code to use dedicated GPU (important on laptops with dual GPUs).
- TCastleTransform.RenderLayer to render stuff in front.
Easily activate shadows, just select checkbox Shadows at the light source to use shadow volumes.
- By default only shapes that are detected as 2-manifold are valid shadow casters. We use the shadow volumes technique to render shadows.
- You can also force to treat the whole scene as 2-manifold (useful when its 2-manifold when you sum all shapes, and shapes can use different materials) using TCastleRenderOptions.WholeSceneManifold.
- Note: We plan to expose also our shadow maps in a similar easy-to-use fashion in future releases. See shadow maps plans. We’ve done initial work on this.
- Both shadow volumes and shadows maps work on mobile (OpenGLES) too.
- See news.
Visual Studio Code integration:
- Intelligent code completion and syntax highlighting for all Pascal code (not necessarily CGE projects).
- Integration with engine project building / running / debugging for Castle Game Engine projects.
- Packaged in one neat VS Code "Castle Game Engine" extension with trivial configuration: just point it to your engine directory.
- The underlying LSP server is useful also with Emacs, NeoVim and other text editors supporting LSP.
Delphi:
- TCastleControl available now for Delphi VCL and FMX applications, in addition to existing Lazarus LCL.
- Full support tested for Delphi >= 10.2.1, up to the latest 12.0 (see Delphi versions supported).
- C++ Builder compatibility, so you can use 100% of CGE API from C++.
- TCastleDownload for Delphi supports http(s)
- Using Delphi "welcome page" feature to show your README.md
- "Tools → Castle Game Engine" menu in Delphi IDE, with easy access to main engine tools. See news.
- New Delphi packages organization, cross-platform and future-proof.
- Full Linux support with Delphi, for both TCastleWindow and TCastleControl, with almost all CGE examples compatible and entire CGE API fully supported.
New component to support Tiled maps:
- Part of the viewport (can be mixed with CGE scenes, sprite sheets…),
- Excellent performance to render huge maps.
- Configurable layers.
- Examples on examples/tiled/ upgraded, in particular we feature a complete playable turn-based strategy game.
User Interface improvements:
- Default fonts include a lot of common Unicode characters, so rendering text in local language in most cases will not just work "out of the box".
- Simple User Interface Batching
- Configure image regions and 9-slices borders
- TCastleMask (see news and manual and example) to define a mask to limit rendering of other UI controls. Very powerful, as it can affect anything — even viewports with 3D or 2D scenes.
Many editor UX improvements. The most important ones:
- Modern color picker dialog to adjust colors as HSV, RGB, hex, show Pascal code, auto-apply. News.
- Unified tools to edit UI and transformations in the editor, also with slicker icons.
- More reliable (much less often reloaded) hierarchy of components.
- Wireframe view.
- "Change Class" menu action.
- Dragging and dropping in the hierarchy preserves transformation by default (hold "Ctrl" to not preserve). Also dragging and dropping of multiple components is now possible.
- Sketchfab Importer
- Property editors more comfortable, angles in degrees in editor (news)
- Component warnings, to warn e.g. if you have TCastleRigidBody without TCastleCollider or vice versa.
- Find components by name (useful in large designs)
- Automatically reload data at design-time
Improvements around our views (formerly states):
- Cleaner API to set / push / pop the view on given container.
- Published fields of a view are now automatically initialized.
- Editor greets you, when you open a project, with UX to open existing view, or create a new view. This communicates the recommended actions to user after opening a project, and emphasizes our focus on designing you application around views. See relevant news.
Mobile:
- Lots of Android services improvements: Google Play Games, OpenAL, AdMob.
- Castle Model Viewer Mobile and more Android applications available to demonstrate capabilities of our engine on mobile.
- Installation of tools is also simpler and better documented. See news.
- The on-screen keyboard on Android is automatically invoked when you focus a TCastleEdit.
- Lots of iOS fixes and improvements. As with Android, it takes some effort to keep up with the changes in the tooling (macOS, Xcode) and actual devices (iPhones, iPads) but we do this, so that you don’t have to :)
- SafeBorders to position your UI such that it doesn’t collide with system.
Improvements around our installation process:
- On Windows and Linux, the engine download automatically includes a useful compiler (FPC 3.2.2) so that you can build CGE applications without the need to install anything extra.
- On Windows, we now have a self-extracting installer, that is simpler and faster than manually unpacking zip, and registers our engine editor in Windows menu.
- Raspberry Pi engine downloads for both 32-bit (Arm32) and 64-bit processors (Arm64 aka Aarch64) available officially. The Linux/Aarch64 versions are also tested on PineTab2, a nice Linux tablet from Pine64.
Loading and saving of models:
- Cache for scene loading: TCastleSceneCore.Cache.
- MD3 support improvements: multiple animations supported (we load animation.cfg), so playing particular MD3 animations is trivial, just use our PlayAnimation method. Optimized loading. Choosing skins. Support for tags. See MD3 support docs, see news.
- X3D 4.0 support improvements, e.g. proper MetadataXxx containerField handling for both X3D 4 and 3, added new X3D 4.0 fields to various nodes.
- Register custom model formats using RegisterModelFormat and TModelFormat. The formats you register this way, can be loaded using LoadNode or TCastleSceneCore.Load and saved using SaveNode.
- STL saving (convert any model to STL). Saving to glTF is coming.
More important improvements without a clear category:
- Cache for faster compilation.
- Improvements to usage of TCastleDesign and TCastleTransformDesign: context menu to them to edit, revert, and open a referenced design.
- Inspector (press F8 in a debug build of any project) improvements: hot reloading at run-time, tweak boolean properties at run-time.
- Float-based images (e.g. for precise terrains) full support: 4 float-based image classes (passed to GPU and shaders), loading 16-bit PNG, loading float-based KTX, loading 16/32-bit TIFFs
Lots of new or upgraded examples. E.g.
- mesh_update
- split_long_animation
- eye_of_beholder
- space_shooter
- optimize_animations_test
- shader_effects_on_texture
- Example talking with OpenAI (ChatGPT) assistant
- Big graphical update to our fps_game thanks to Alya Vaneskehyan and Adrianna Matejek. See news. This will be followed in next releases by functional improvements to make it easy to design FPS games.

4. New Tutorial and Learning Materials From Conferences

Lots of documentation updates. Links to some pages not already mentioned above: custom components, behaviors, coding conventions (extended with our guidelines about memory management, nil and more) .
Bad way to play chess, aka 3D physics fun — 2 great tutorial articles about CGE. Highly advised reading if you want to learn the engine right now. Solid, up-to-date and practical tour of all the important engine features. Shows using the editor (part 1) and Pascal programming (part 2) and how they go in tandem.
Lots of materials (slides, examples) and recorded talks from conferences:
- GIC 2022 presentation along with slides
- IPC 2023 workshop and keynote slides
- Embarcadero CodeRage 2022 presentation
- DelphiCon 2023 presentation (CGE starts at 5:09)
- Zlot Programistów Delphi (Polish conference): slides from talk and examples
- ITDevCon 2023 conference: Presentation (slides) from 1st talk, "Creating 3D games and applications using Castle Game Engine", Presentation (slides) from 2nd talk, "Advanced Castle Game Engine: forms, 3D generation, shaders, customization", Example projects.
- More at https://castle-engine.io/conferences