Two news about our TCastleWindow class:

1. The TCastleWindow and TCastleControl are now (again) advised to be used through these simple names.

   There is no more need to use the names with Base suffix, TCastleWindowBase and TCastleControlBase. They are now just deprecated aliases to the simpler names without the Base suffix.

   Underneath, this happened because of a change I announced at the end of 2021: The old deprecated TCastleWindow.SceneManager and TCastleControl.SceneManager are now removed. They were causing complicated dependencies (in the end TCastleWindow / TCastleControl code should not deal with viewport/scenes specifics), and the assumption that “every window starts with a default scene manager” was unnecessarily complicating understanding of CGE, and even the name SceneManager was outdated (we call it just “viewport” since a long time). The deprecated CastleWindowTouch was also removed — just use TCastleTouchNavigation.

2. We now use a Unicode (UTF-16) version of WinAPI throughout our TCastleWindow backend on Windows. This fixes support for international characters in window caption and in native open/save dialogs.

This is yet another post when it was hard to find a screenshot expressing the API improvements 🙂 So here’s a rendering of window glTF model from SketchFab, by Yury Misiyuk in Castle Game Engine editor. The window glass nicely utilizes the material possibilities of PBR, the reflections of a dirty/old glass are nicely realistic and completely dynamic. Here I show them with lights designed in CGE editor — a feature that is correctly in development.