NURBS, simplified license (just LGPL out-of-the-box)

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  1. The need to define symbol CASTLE_ENGINE_LGPL to get LGPL engine (otherwise you only had GPL) disappears. The whole engine can be used on a permissive LGPL terms out-of-the-box now, there is no point in defining the CASTLE_ENGINE_LGPL symbol anymore.

    I have clarified and simplified our license terms on https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/blob/master/COPYING.md . In short: we’re exactly like FPC and Lazarus. Yes, you can make closed-source applications using CGE.

  2. We have a new NURBS implementation, developed by Michalis from scratch. I deleted the old (GPL-only, copyright by White Dune developers) implementation in this commit, and later implemented new one (LGPL, copyright by me) in subsequent commits. So the LGPL engine supports NURBS now.

    The new implementation also got some serious optimizations (utilizing the fact that we usually calculate not one point on a curve/surface, but a number of such points in a series).

    The new implementation also features a helper method TNurbsCurveNode.Point. See this test for a quick usage example. This allows you to use NURBS curves calculation for any purposes, not necessarily by placing the NURBS nodes inside TCastleScene.

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Fixes, demo switching projection, website and API documentation improvements

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Busy month! Partially due to developing the last chapter of our game The Unholy Society, in which a certain-special-someone is scheduled to appear 🙂

New stuff in the engine:

  • Important bugfix: Changing the FullScreen property of the window is now more reliable. The actual change (which may involve recreating OpenGL context) happens with delay, not immediately at the point you assign the “FullScreen” property. This makes it safe to use always, even during Window.OnOpen / Application.OnInitialize. Thanks for Ninjamida from Discord for finding this nasty bug.
  • SceneManager.OnProjection event along with a demo switch_projection.lpr showing how to use it to toggle between orthographic/perspective projection.

  • TAbstractBindableNode.Bound property.

  • More reliable on-screen keyboard on Android thanks to Benedikt Magnus!

New website improvements:

  • You can now comfortably switch between viewing API documentation for engine stable version (6.4) and unstable (6.5). The currently viewed version is clearly visible, and when switching we try to show the same identifier (if it exists in the other version).

  • The “search” in our documentation is better now (highlights found terms, no messed up HTML) as I improved the “tipue search” functionality in PasDoc.

  • I have adjusted our analytics (Piwik) settings to be compliant with GDPR and anonymize the IP addresses and delete old data. Our privacy policy was reflected about this.

    P.S. Have you seen a new pretty webpage of our studio Cat-astrophe Games ? 🙂 My cats are there!

Retired: GitHub -> SourceForge SVN synchronization

Our GitHub -> SourceForge SVN synchronization (using forked sync2git) started to have problems.

(Details: The synchronization repository got into a state unexpected for git-svn. Possibly the underlying reason was a random SourceForge connectivity issue, but that’s speculation.)

Since I don’t think anyone is using SourceForge SVN anymore, I just turned it off, and I made sure no links to SourceForge SVN repository exist anymore on our website. Please use only CGE repositories on GitHub from now on, in particular the main Castle Game Engine repository.

Note that you can still use either GIT or SVN client to get Castle Game Engine. GitHub supports doing “svn checkout” on a GitHub repository (or a subdirectory of it).

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Engine improvements: CommonSurfaceShader with shadow maps fix, demo of mouse picking 3D/2D objects, view3dscene without console

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  1. We added a simple demo how to detect which scene (TCastleScene) was clicked with the mouse: https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/blob/master/examples/3d_rendering_processing/detect_scene_clicks.lpr .

  2. The behavior of shadow maps when combined with CommonSurfaceShader is now correct. Testcase: https://github.com/castle-engine/demo-models/blob/master/shadow_maps/primitives_with_commonsurfaceshader.x3dv

  3. view3dscene no longer uses console for various messages. Instead we display our own message box, with contents that can be copied to clipboard with Ctrl+C. This makes it more comfortable to use as a normal GUI program, in particular on Windows. Remember that you can always download the latest view3dscene snapshots from here. (Or you can compile view3dscene from source, of course.)

  4. Our website supports now IPV6, HTTP/2, has better redirects (from www domain to non-www), and is HTTPS-only (non-secure HTTP merely redirects to HTTPS, and we use HSTS). Thanks to Raul Tambre for suggesting and testing these improvements!

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