First of all, I hope to finish and release Castle Game Engine 6.2.0 this weekend! So, watch this page closely.

The next release 6.4.0 will focus on Delphi compatibility, and start of visual editing (of 3D world and 2D controls) within Lazarus and Delphi. In all the pre-release excitement, I started playing around with it already today 🙂 I added a property RenderAtDesignTime to the Lazarus OpenGL control (patch here), and I made a simple design-time menu to add a sphere to the SceneManager at Lazarus design-time. See the screenshots!

In other news, there is a bunch of engine features done recently, not announced properly yet. Here they are (officially coming in 6.2.0 release this weekend):

1. Rendering of normalmaps (through CommonSurfaceShader.normalTexture or Appearance.normalMap) was improved to work even when no diffuse texture is defined.
2. TCastleEdit: a simple edit box. Demo in examples/2d_standard_ui/edit_box/game.pas . Not perfect, but already useful anyway 🙂
3. New build tool command “generate-program”, to generate perfect starter program code and Lazarus lpi.
4. Added easy Application.ParseStandardParameters method to the TCastleApplication in CastleWindow, may be useful for your standalone games.
5. image_convert (in examples/images_videos/) has an additional command-line option –alpha-bleed, to perform “alpha bleeding” in batch mode.
6. Added TDebug3DCustomTransform – a simple reusable utility to debug bounding boxes and spheres of T3DCustomTransform (like T3DTransform or T3DOrient). A generalized version of what you get for creatures (the ones from CastleCreatures unit) when you use RenderDebug3D.
7. x3d-nodes-to-pascal is our new tool to parse X3D nodes and produce skeleton code to glue X3D with Object Pascal.