Article about CGE in Blaise Pascal Magazine (free for Patrons), also: meet me at Lazarus Professional Conference next week

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  1. The next issue of Blaise Pascal Magazine will contain a nice long article I wrote about Castle Game Engine! 20 pages, describing how to use the engine from absolute basics, showing how to construct a simple cross-platform 3D game using TCastleWindow, TCastleScene, TCastleTransform, SoundEngine features. I am quite happy with it 🙂

    I will also make the article available for all Patrons of Castle Game Engine at the end of this month (September). If you would like to support the development of CGE, now is the time 🙂

    The article is accompanied by a public example code and data.

  2. I will also be present next week an the Lazarus Professional Conference in Bonn. You can meet me on Saturday (22 September), during Community Day, when we will be showing Castle Game Engine.

    Please drop by to talk, or just to say “hi”:)

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X3D Standard Plans, Michalis Professional Membership in the Web3D Consortium

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Shadow maps in Castle Game Engine

Since a week, Michalis is a Professional Member of the Web3D Consortium. These are the people who make X3D specifications, see also our documentation how X3D fits within Castle Game Engine. By being a “professional member” I will have some extra access (e.g. to see draft specs of upcoming X3D versions) and some influence to take X3D into interesting places 🙂

My vision and goals for X3D is documented publicly in my “x3d-tests” wiki. This wiki contains an overview + lots of details what I would like to see in X3D standard. Many of the ideas revolve around bringing X3D more “aligned” with glTF 2.0 feature set. Which is of course closely tied with getting glTF 2.0 into Castle Game Engine, as an X3D scene graph. I believe that this is a solution in which everyone wins, i.e. we will have an engine with perfect interchange format (for which glTF 2.0 is now better, although X3D tries to catch up) and a perfect scene graph (where X3D shines already).

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Improvements: castle-data protocol, new editor features, AMD Compressonator, better model formats docs…

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We have a number of engine improvements to announce:

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Castle Game Engine Editor!

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Screenshot of selection at 2018-09-01 02:46:05
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I’m proud to present first public screenshots from the upcoming Castle Game Engine Editor!

The goal of the editor is to allow you to manage CGE projects (create, build, run…), visually design hierarchies (of user interface controls and 3D/2D models) and browse project assets. Yeah, just like those other big game engines:)

A more precise list of features is in the README at the editor source code. And this is all following my plan for editor in 2018.

What does actually work now?

  • You can create a project from a template, or open an existing project. Project is just any directory with CastleEngineManifest.xml file.
  • You can compile / run / package / generate textures and do other usual operations on the project. The output, like compilation output, as well as program log (regardless of the OS) is displayed at the bottom. The editor calls the build tool for these operations, which in turn calls FPC and other tools.

  • You can open and save a designed user interface (anything descending from TCastleUserInterface, formerly TUIControl) and 3D/2D game models (anything descending from TCastleTransform). They are serialized using Pascal RTTI (JSON format produced by FpJsonRtti). The editor, as well as your own game, use CastleComponentSerialize unit to do this. The files have extensions .castle-user-interface or .castle-transform and can be loaded with functions UserInterfaceLoad or TransformLoad.

  • You can edit the published properties of the selected component using the object inspector on the right. It’s all updated “live” in the middle window of course. If you save the edited file, and run the project, you will see that it’s actually using a new design.

  • See the screenshots for the initial stuff:)

Of course, many things are missing now, including some crucial things to make it actually useful for real applications. E.g. dropping new components on the design is not yet implemented. And dragging the UI controls, and TCastleTransform, visually (in the 3D window) is not possible yet. Well, there’s work ahead!

I’m really pleased with the result so far 🙂 P.S. If you like what I do, please consider donating to help in the development of the engine. Thank you!

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