Mobile View3Dscene Coming Soon

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view3dscene-mobile
view3dscene-mobile: Options screen, with table view
view3dscene-mobile: navigation method popup
view3dscene-mobile: About screen

Let us introduce a new mobile application based fully on Castle Game Engine. It’s a mobile version of our view3Dscene. Basically, it opens scenes in supported 3D formats, and lets user to walk / explore them, navigate through viewpoints and take screenshots. It also includes some demo scenes. As it should be a regular mobile app, not a game, we had to add many new GUI-related features into the engine.

The mobile view3dscene is developed on GitHub by Jan Adamec. We plan to release it soon.

New features available in the engine, added because view3dscene-mobile needed them:

  • Examine camera uses new gesture recognizer to detect pinch-to-zoom and two-finger panning gestures. The panning was possible only with the white round touch control before, so we can get rid of it for Examine camera now.

  • We handle screen DPI setting to scale UI on Android and iOS and present properly sized controls to the user. App works both on tablets and phones in both landscape and portrait modes. The Window.Dpi is now correct on both Android and iOS.

  • New controls: SwitchControl represents variable with on-off state (i.e. a touch-friendly checkbox), and powerful TableView control that has been designed to provide easy way to present dynamic lists with accompanying images or custom controls. It has similar interface as the native iOS UITableView or Android ListView.

  • Option to have the operating system status bar on (with carrier name, clock, battery status). Games usually hide it, which is also the default in our engine, but it may be useful for regular app to leave on. It also applies to the bottom bar with software buttons on Android. To use this in your own applications, set fullscreen_immersive=”false” in CastleEngineManifest.xml and design your UI to leave space at the top following Container.StatusBarHeight.

  • As view3Dscene is an app to view all supported 3D file formats, apps made with Castle Game Engine can now define the file extension associations for Android and iOS in their manifests. See view3dscene-mobile CastleEngineManifest.xml for an example how to define file associations in your own applications.

This post was written mostly by Jan Adamec, who is developing view3dscene-mobile since November 2017. My thousand thanks go to him, both for working on view3dscene-mobile and for implementing many missing necessary features in the engine!

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