Let’s make a recap of 2024 and talk about plans for 2025! I included below some new information, so even if you follow our news and roadmap, you shall find something new here 🙂

Before we start, I want to sincerely say thank you to everyone in our community. Thank you for supporting the engine development, thank you for all the kind words, thank you for being with us in our desire for an open-source game engine using modern Pascal. We’ve made a lot of cool things in 2024 and I have big, big plans for 2025 that I think may excite you. So, let’s start!

What we did in 2024

1. First of all, we’ve made a big engine 7.0-alpha.3 release. This release packs a lot of big new features that we’ve been working on for last 2 years. Some of the most prominent ones:
   • Physics with new components, running also in the editor, with joints, layers, forces.

   • A lot of rendering improvements. Blending doing out-of-the-box what you need in many cases, occlusion culling, fully modern OpenGL rendering on new GPU (utilizing OpenGL 3.3 features without anything deprecated) while also reliable rendering for old GPUs (we can fallback even to ancient OpenGL 1.1 versions and work e.g. in Windows virtual machines), OpenGLES (mobile) rendering upgrades to support shadows, 3D textures and more.

   • Visual Studio Code integration. Our own VS Code “Castle Game Engine” extension with code completion, syntax highlighting (for all Pascal code) and integration with Castle Game Engine projects.

     This coincided with my (Michalis) big personal change, as I switched from using Emacs for ~20 years to VS Code as my main text editor.

   • Delphi integration improvements: TCastleControl available for VCL and FMX applications, Delphi packages with IDE support, Delphi Linux support and more.

   • And much more…

2. After the release, we’ve made more improvements:

   • Big optimizations of shadow volumes done.

     In progress: working towards more intuitive shadow maps usage, to make them viable alternative to shadow volumes in all applications.

   • Steam integration, see news.

     In progress: we work on making engine available on Steam as a game development tool, we already started adding integration to editor.

   • Initial version of TCastleMoveAttack and TCastleLiving which allow to have “drag and drop” creature intelligence in your games. See news.

     In progress: we work on making these components honor physics for movement.

   • Support for the IFC, 3D model format used in BIM to design construction of real things. Interoperability with BonsaiBIM, FreeCAD and other tools in the ecosystem. Working with native IFC classes.

     In progress: there’s more IFC features we want to support.

   • Example of integration with mORMot.

     In progress: extend this to really allow collaborative editing (right now the edited world is stored on server, and persisted in database, but multiple clients do not reflect each others’ updates).

3. Last but not least, we have a number of new training materials available:

   • We published a tutorial: 3D physics fun (aka “the bad way to play chess”) which is a great tutorial describing all important engine concepts from scratch. Recommended reading!

   • We published some videos and in particular we encourage you to watch Coding games using Castle Game Engine and Delphi (presented at Emcarcadero Dev Days of Summer).

   • I was quite active at conferences in 2024. Enjoy the slides and examples linked from the conferences page.

   • I made (also presented at conferences) a demo game using Blender, Sketchfab, Quaternius models, TCastleMoveAttack. This is a great example of using the engine to easily make a working FPS game.

Plans for 2025

1. First of all, we work intenstively now on the web target. We’ve made cool progress documented at this page. We’re working right now on finalizing it, adjusting our rendering code to WebGL.

2. Some important things were already mentioned above as “in progress”: more intuitive shadow maps, engine as tool on Steam, TCastleMoveAttack and TCastleLiving following physics, more IFC, collaborative editing with mORMot.

3. I want to announce today our design plan for the package system in our engine. This is our way to build ecosystem of packages around the engine, this is our equivalent to “asset stores” on some other engines, suitable for both code and data and combined packages. I wrote a lot of details in the package system section of the roadmap.

4. Everything planned is collected at our roadmap page. It is updated regularly, so check it out to see what to look for.

Non-technical things

• We lost Eugene Loza, a fellow engine developer.

• For a few months now, Michalis Kamburelis is now working solely on the Castle Game Engine development. Yeah, I have no other job. I count on your donations to make this possible for a longer time! First of all, support us on Patreon. If you have a company, contact me ([email protected]) — we’re open to various forms of cooperation, including paid support and prioritizing features you need.

• Remember you can reach me. For questions that benefit everyone, I recommend asking on the forum where I always try to answer threads ASAP. We also have Discord chat though it’s no secret that lately I’ve been a little offline (no big reason, I just concentrate best on coding when I’m offline). For private questions, just send me an email ([email protected]).

See you all in 2025! Have fun developing games with Castle Game Engine 🙂