Video: Viewports, cameras and navigation in Castle Game Engine

Posted on

I’m happy to present a new video about Castle Game Engine that shows how to design 3D and 2D game world from scratch, by creating a viewport (with cameras, lights, some primitives, some navigation). We start from the “empty” template and explore what we can do in a viewport. The video goes into details about camera and navigation features, with a common theme “how to see what you want to see”.

We cover:

  • Building upon the “empty” template a simple 3D world with cameras, lights, primitives

  • Building upon the “empty” template a simple 2D world

  • Navigation in the editor using “Fly”, “Examine” and “2D” modes

  • Various helpful commands for navigate in the viewport, like Focus Selected (F), View All (Home), Top/Bottom/Front/Back/Right/Left (1/3/7 Ctrl+1/3/7) and more

  • Adding a navigation component to allow user to move around in the 3D world, customizing the move speed

  • Adjusting the camera translation and rotation in various ways

  • Using multiple cameras

  • Adding some children to the camera (like a weapon in FPS games or a headlight)

  • Making a camera be a child of something else (e.g. mount it at some vehicle or attach to some animated bone)

  • ProjectionFar automatic and manual adjustment

  • Finally, more friendly and obvious key shortcuts for various editing operations in editor (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X, Delete, Ctrl+Z… they all do what you expect)

I hope you enjoy the video. Go ahead and download the engine for free and please support us on Patreon.

The related documentation is:

The accompanying news post describing the new camera and navigation features is here.

Be sure to watch also our recent “Castle Game Engine Intro Tutorial – July 2022”. It’s a nice companion to this video, that shows more the “3D FPS game” and “2D game” contents, how to add more complicated stuff (like sprite sheets and glTF models) to your design, and how to do basic code operations (play a sound, handle button click, shoot a missile).

Start the discussion at Castle Game Engine Forum