New sound features: alternative backends, new demo, aliases

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play_sounds demo screenshot
  1. Our sound engine was refactored to support various backends. There are 3 backends available now:

    • OpenAL (full-featured, with spatial (3D) sound support),

    • SOX (only useful for testing — executes command-line sox to play files),

    • and Nintendo Switch sound backend (not open-source, only available for developers who signed an agreement with Nintendo).

  2. A new sound demo in examples/audio/play_sounds is available. This allows to test mixing multiple sounds in various formats at runtime.

  3. Sounds XML file now supports <alias> to create an alias for another sound, or for a group of sounds.

    The latter case allows to play a random sound from a configured set of sounds, without any extra code necessary. This makes it a nice feature for sound designers, that can edit the sounds XML file but probably don’t want to write actual Pascal code.

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Castle Game Engine 6.5 “Beta” available for download, many editor and release improvements

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Editor - Scene Preview
Editor - Image Preview
Editor - Sound Preview

First of all, notice that big shiny button on the main page to download CGE version 6.5. Try it out!

While we work on making next stable 6.6 (or maybe 7.0?) release perfect, you should enjoy using the latest 6.5 snapshot. It’s in practice very stable (at Cat-astrophe Games company we even use it in production). It also contains a ton of new features compared to the last stable release (6.4, more than a year ago), and you should enjoy them:)

Probably the biggest new feature is the Castle Game Engine Editor. It is documented in the manual, and our “Getting Started” page was also updated to clearly advise using it. The 6.5 engine snapshots contain the editor (as well as other tools) in a ready, compiled version. Just execute bin/castle-editor.

Editor and packaging improvements from April:

  1. Selecting file in the file browser (bottom of the editor) opens a small asset preview (useful for scenes, images, and quickly playing sound files).

  2. Double-clicking in the file browser opens a suitable viewer, like view3dscene or castle-view-image.

  3. The editor, build tool and some other tools are now also provided in compiled form, and more integrated. E.g. you no longer need to define CASTLE_ENGINE_PATH environment variable if you just run the editor (or build tool) from the bin subdirectory of the engine. They will find the CGE code (and other tools) in any case.

  4. view3dscene and castle-view-image (formerly called glViewImage) are also distributed along with the engine. No need to download them separately.

  5. When using snapshots, the CGE version number contains the GIT commit hash.

  6. Compiling with the build tool now automatically places relevant DLLs alongside the EXE file on Windows.

  7. CGE applications automatically use Libpng if available, and only fallback on FPImage. You do longer have to compile with any symbol to use Libpng.

  8. Editor “File Browser” automatically hides some files/dirs, like castle-engine-output.

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