This was a busy month, with lots of engine work and also a great conference in Germany organized by Sorpetaler. Let me then announce a bag of engine improvements and news all across the board from last month (and more):

1. We’ve been working a lot in recent months on our IFC support.
   • More details about the IFC improvements will be announced later this week. Otherwise they would “dominate” this news post 🙂

   • For now, let me just say I talked about our IFC support at the conference in Germany and I will talk about it again at the conference in Poland next week. Catch me if you can!

2. Web target improvements:

   • Building for web from Windows no longer has problems with opening fonts. Previously building e.g. platformer for web failed on Windows with error “FreeType DLL could not be loaded”.

   • OpenUrl works on web now, e.g. clicking on “Credits” in platformer works.

   • As more features work, we have added and updates some demos. In particular check out:

     • dungeons_and_skeletons_fight

     • walking_adventure

     • Note: mouse look does not work on web, so playing 2 examples above is still not comfortable. Stay tuned for more work 🙂

     • Castle Model Viewer mobile (good on web too)

3. We have a new unit CastleHttps to easily activate HTTPS support in TCastleDownload.

   • Easy to use, no need for any $ifdefs on your side.

   • Fixes HTTPS + FPC 3.2.x + Linux with newest SSL (because our CastleHttps pulls a fork of SSL for FPC 32x in this case).

   • Fixes CGE editor SketchFab auto-download functionality.

   • See URLs and networking docs for various pointers and examples using TCastleDownload.

4. Our VS Code extension brings a major upgrade with version 1.4.

   • Your VS Code should update it to version 1.4 already.

   • New version has improved debugging support. See the Debugging section in the README for ways to activate it.

   • New version has been upgraded from plain JavaScript to TypeScript, which makes the code much easier to read and maintain.

5. New “Maximize Preview” feature (“zen mode”) is available in our editor.

   • Use menu item “Edit -> Maximize Preview” or key shortcut Shift + Space.

   • It toggles the visibility of most things except the main preview of your application. So it hides / shows the hierarchy (left sidebar), object inspector (right sidebar), files / console (bottom panel). It allows to focus on the main thing: the preview of your game.

   • The key shortcut, Shift + Space, is somewhat consistent with similar Unity and Blender‘s features that maximize the panel under mouse. In our case, it always maximizes the preview window. In Blender, the shortcut is actually Ctrl + Space, but we didn’t want to take that, as Ctrl + Space is commonly used for completion in text editors, so (even though the CGE editor is not a text editor) we don’t want to conflict with that meaning.

   • We unofficially call it “zen mode”, as the spirit is similar to “zen mode” found in VS Code and recent Delphi versions: no distractions, maximize the one most important view.

   • This is based on similar idea by Andrzej Kilijański he implemented for the terrain PR.

6. “Open Engine Location in File Manager” button is now available in the editor “Preferences” dialog. It’s sometimes useful to explore engine easily, esp. since on Windows engine is installed to AppData which is by default hidden.

7. Various X3D 4.0 and 4.1 support improvements:

   • Viewpoint nearDistance / farDistance support.

   • Validation of audio and volume rendering X3D 4.1 nodes.

   • With thanks to Don Brutzman and John Carlson for submitting lots of feedback in these areas, causing us to improve!

8. We maintain a mirror of our releases at SourceForge (files of castle-engine project). You can download from there the same files as from GitHub releases.

   • Why? We found cases of networks where downloads from GitHub releases don’t work reliably (are often interrupted in the middle) while downloads from SourceForge behave reliably. Your mileage may vary — you have an option.

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