All Delphi users: Enjoy now easy link to download Castle Game Engine with Delphi support (beta version) on our main page!

And be sure to watch our presentation at DelphiCon 2021 today! (Update: this has already happened. Recorded video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JfFxnZO4Jc ).

The development of Delphi port is now happening within PR #350. We have almost everything in CGE working now smoothly in Delphi!

Works:

• glTF, X3D (classic and XML), Spine, sprite sheets (and likely all other TCastleScene formats).

• X3D nodes and fields, including interpolators (animations).

• TCastleViewport, TCastleScene which are our most important classes to render game world.

• Audio (WAV and OggVorbis). Be sure to place the OpenAL DLLs alongside EXE (build tool will do it for you automatically).

• TCastleUserInterface and descendants.

• Teading JSON designs.

• TCastleWindowBase on Windows 32 and 64-bit.

• CGE editor support for Delphi IDE, you can choose Delphi as code editor, Delphi as compiler, default is to autodetect.

• Build tool support for Delphi compiler dcc*, compiler can be chosen on command-line or in manifest, default is to autodetect.

• Build tool support for the Delphi project – generates DPROJ, DPR, warns when using LPR (as Delphi doesn’t handle it).

• Image formats:

  • PNG reading support (using libpng, fallback on PngImage).

  • Internally-supported DDS, KTX, some others are also OK.

  • Vampyre Imaging Library support (optional, can be used with both FPC and Delphi) to support lots more, e.g. JPG with Delphi. More on this in later post.

• Physics.

• Utilities for typical 3D games (ready creatures, items, levels).

Some examples that compile and work with Delphi (as well as FPC of course):

• examples/user_interface/state_events
• examples/3d_rendering_processing/collisions
• examples/mobile/simple_3d_demo/
• examples/3d_rendering_processing/view_3d_model_basic/
• examples/3d_rendering_processing/view_3d_model_advanced/ (use this to load any model or image from https://github.com/castle-engine/demo-models ! )
• examples/animations/play_animation
• all 4 templates created by “New Project” from CGE editor
• examples/terrain
• examples/physics/*
• examples/fps_game

(Soon, all examples will follow.)

For more information, consult also past news about Delphi: 1, 2.

This is a result of large work by Andrzej Kilijański and Michalis since many weeks. Please support us, and sponsor the development of next CGE features by donating on Patreon.

We’re happy to present a new 3D platformer prototype made in Castle Game Engine – Pepper and the Potion of Jumping.

You can check out the source code and build it yourself from Pepper and the Potion of Jumping.

Most levels include collecting gems (currently yellow spheres) until you have enough to continue. There’s also a swimming level, 2 flying levels, and a couple of levels where you have to throw snowballs at Saffron, Shichimi, and Coriander. The final level is a ‘boss fight’ (kind of) against 3 dragons and a giant dragon head. Throw snowballs at them to win.

Credits go to ultidonki from our forum — thank you! Please post any feedback in the related forum thread.

 

Foxy Misfortunes is a simple top-down shooter with a funny NSFW theme. Download it for Windows, Linux and Android from Foxy Misfortunes (itch.io).

It’s a free and open source game done using Castle Game Engine by Eugene Loza. The source code is on Foxy Misfortunes (GitLab).

In the game you control Foxy – a fox girl who decided to go on adventure collecting golden coins and zapping enemies with lighting bolts, but it quickly turns out that her clothes are her hit-points. Warning: the game contains some adult-only elements, such as cartoon nudity (optional censored mode is available) and mildly suggestive themes.

You can now easily choose to invoke Visual Studio Code or Delphi from the Castle Game Engine Editor preferences window.

This is in addition to the previous options to invoke Lazarus IDE or a custom editor (where you can easily configure e.g. Emacs, my editor of choice 🙂 ).

By default we have Autodetect, which selects the first of Lazarus, Delphi or Visual Studio Code — whichever we find on your system.

Visual Studio Code is a modern cross-platform IDE for various programming languages and frameworks. You can use it with Object Pascal and Castle Game Engine instantly.

Tip: Did you know there’s also a web version of VS Code, easily available? Just go to any repository on GitHub (like castle-engine) and press . (dot) on your keyboard. Woah — a full-featured editor running just in your browser! And it can sync settings. And it is integrated with GIT and GitHub — if you edit a repo where you’re not a member, it can easily create a PR from your edits. I recently listened to GitHub Universe 2021 talks, a lot of interesting content from GitHub, and they integrate new features into VS Code intensively.

The Delphi integration with CGE editor is not a final version — it will be better once we use DDE for inter-process communication to avoid opening new Delphi window each time. More on Delphi progress in later post.

The usual Android CPU, used by most of physical Android devices, is Arm (32-bit or 64-bit). But sometimes it makes sense to build for Android x86 CPUs (32-bit x86, 64-bit x86_64). The main use is to run such applications in emulators and virtual machines, like emulators provided in Android SDK or a virtual machine installed using ISO from Android-x86 project.

To do this, build Android APK using our build tool like this:

castle-engine package --os=android --cpu=x86_64

You can add --fast and/or --mode=debug if you want.

Then just transfer the resulting APK inside the Android machine.

If you use an emulator installed by Android AVD Manager, and visible on the adb devices list, you can even install and run (showing logs from the device) using the standard install and run commands of our build tool, like this:

castle-engine --os=android --cpu=x86_64 install
castle-engine --os=android --cpu=x86_64 run

Note: Setting up the emulator using command-line AVD Manager was unexpectedly hard, due to an enormous amount of questions I had to answer about the emulated machine. I recommend to use GUI to create new emulators instead, run Android Studio and from More Actions choose AVD Manager.

Note: The behavior of command castle-engine package --target=android, which you can use to create an APK for a “normal” Android device, has not changed. It still builds only for Arm (32-bit and 64-bit, aka Aarch64), assuming these are systems used on actual devices. Though we’re open to change this some day (if usage of Android x86 rises, and will be useful for more than just “developers testing apps in virtual machines”).

This has already somewhat worked in the past, but now we made it better:

1. Instructions to setup environment for this are adjusted on Android docs and Android FAQ. Following the stuff related to Android/x86 is completely optional, so if you have a working Android setup and are not interested in x86 support, just ignore it.

2. Our support libraries are now packaged with x86/x86_64 variants too:

   • https://github.com/castle-engine/android-freetype
   • https://github.com/castle-engine/android-openal (note: while it works, according to logs, but I have not been able to actually hear any sounds from OpenAL on Android/x86; from what I can tell, audio output just doesn’t work on Android/x86 with OpenAL; if you need it, I would suggest as a next step to test Android/x86 with FMOD).
   • https://github.com/castle-engine/android-tremolo
   • https://github.com/castle-engine/libpng-android

   The precompiled libraries are inside CGE services on Android. So you don’t need to do anything, just package for Android using the build tool commands shown above, and it will add the required libraries.

Nudged by the report of high memory usage I want to seriously optimize memory usage of CGE. Right now X3D nodes cost too much in memory — which limits some use-cases (when spawning a lot of TCastleScenes would be the most natural solution), and it affects both loading and runtime performance (as loading is slower when you need to clone/initialize more memory, and performance is slow when the cache is underutilized).

A first wave of improvements has already landed in the engine. A 2nd wave is in progress — it depends on remaking how all X3D nodes are set up, so it’s a big rework (but it was a long time coming).

Things done now:

1. We now have an efficient step interpolation mode (see TInterpolation), used automatically by sprite sheets and glTF models with step animation.

   While “step” interpolation was possible previously, but it was (ab)using the linear interpolation calculation, by duplicating keys. This was wasting both memory (2x data needed) and time (doing useless lerp operations).

2. We have simplified our X3D nodes inheritance. We use now TNodeFunctionality (a simple component system inside X3D nodes) with some descendants like TTimeDependentFunctionality and TTransformFunctionality. We no longer use Pascal interfaces for them. There are actually 2 reasons for it:

   1. In some cases, we really wanted to share implementation, not just API. So interfaces were never a proper tool.

      In effect our new TTimeDependentFunctionality is a much simplified and more natural old TInternalTimeDependentHandler, the new concept just fits our needs better.

   2. I never really grew to like COM interfaces. In FPC/Lazarus we have CORBA interfaces, and I made no secret that I like CORBA interfaces much more (basically, they work more like Java and C# interfaces, and are not entangled with unrelated things like memory management or COM technology). But Delphi only has COM interfaces, so CORBA interfaces are not available to us.

      This introduces quirky code when using interfaces, as we do not want the automatic garbage collection that the COM interfaces bring (and one has to watch out for it, even with hacked _AddRef, _Release like TComponent does). So one has to watch for lifetime of temporary values.

3. CoordinateInterpolator in sprite sheets can be often much simpler or even removed completely. This saves memory and execution time.

This year DelphiCon, an annual Delphi conference, is fully online and free. As we’re working hard on a Delphi port right now of course I will show Castle Game Engine there! I guess it will be the first public showing of CGE on Delphi.

Register for the talk here!

Our presentation is on November 17 (Wednesday). The whole conference is 16-18 November, there’s a lot of talks including stuff around cross-platform dev — check it out 🙂

We improved behavior of gizmos (for translating, rotating, scaling TCastleTransform in the editor):

1. The translation mode is more comfortable for 2D games. When you have typical 2D projection (orthographic, and camera looks along -Z axis) then

   • clicking on a special box in the middle of the gizmo,

   • or clicking on the Z arrow (previously a useless blue dot in case of such typical 2D projection)

   … allows to move the object simultaneously in X and Y. This allows to just move the object in 2D freely. This is done thanks to Andrzej Kilijański!

2. Fixed a case when translation may behave a bit crazy when the transformation had both rotation and non-uniform scale applied.

3. Fixed imprecise calculations (that caused the gizmo size to “tremble” sometimes) when using on a scene with large bounding box.

We now have an extensive docs about occlusion query in Castle Game Engine.

We also fixed occlusion query for shapes with blending, and made it behave correctly when batching is used (right now, batching has to be disabled for the scenes that use occlusion query).

On a more general note: Sorry for the relative silence in the news in last 2 weeks. We’re busy making a few things at once, big (memory optimizations, Delphi compatibility, docking editor) and small (Android x86, editor gizmos improvements). I will gradually post about them 🙂

We now load OpenGLES 3 context on mobile when possible (but still fallback to OpenGLES 2).

Core Castle Game Engine for now doesn’t actually use any OpenGLES 3 functionality. But we make available SetTransformFeedbackVaryings for shaders, which can be utilized by components like Particle Emitter (particle system for 3D and 2D in CGE) to now work on mobile.

Many thanks go to Trung Le (Kagamma) for implementing this!

iOS note

We made it work for both Android and iOS. But then we disabled it for iOS, at least for now.

Because it caused a small regression in Unholy Society — sometimes using FBOs causes a weird shift in further display. This was observed only on iOS + OpenGLES 3 (same code works OK on everything else: OpenGL on desktops, Android with OpenGLES 2 and 3, iOS + OpenGLES 2). Evidently Apple didn’t make the OpenGLES 3 truly backward compatible with OpenGLES 2. If you want to try it anyway (everything else works, the regression likely doesn’t affect most applications), adjust the code responsible for context creation on iOS in tools/build-tool/data/ios/xcode_project/cge_project_name/OpenGLController.m. You want to use this:

    EAGLContext *context = [[EAGLContext alloc] initWithAPI:kEAGLRenderingAPIOpenGLES3];
    if (context == nil) {
        context = [[EAGLContext alloc] initWithAPI:kEAGLRenderingAPIOpenGLES2];
    }

Further details about this will follow. Ideally we want to workaround this problem at CGE level, and just create OpenGLES 3 context on iOS by default, same as on Android. If this will be impossible, we’ll give you a choice whether to try creating OpenGLES 3 context on iOS in CastleEngineManifest.xml.