In this video I focus on the engine capabilities to render glTF and X3D content with a lot of graphic features. I show also glTF -> X3D conversion capabilities. This video has been originally made for Web3D 2020.

Two weeks ago I made a presentation about Castle Game Engine at a Debian conference MiniDebConf Online #2 “Gaming Edition”. I think it turned out to be a very nice video introduction to the engine, presenting the editor, creating 3D content in Blender, and even using Docker to create an Android build — all wrapped in 40 minutes. This is the best video introduction to CGE right now, so I really recommend watching it to everyone here 🙂

I added a simple demo to show our Compositing Shaders effects used in practice. The demo is available in examples/3d_rendering_processing/shader_effects.

The demo adds an Effect node by code, to a model loaded from glTF, and also shows how to manipulate custom effect parameter (which maps to GLSL uniform) at runtime. These effects use shader code (GLSL, running on GPU) that is automatically integrated with standard engine rendering shaders.

If you come from Unity then these effects are CGE analogy of Unity “surface shaders” (but much more flexible 🙂 ).

Last week we did an important fix for glTF skinned animation combined with normalmaps. It fixed the problem with incorrect lighting, but also made the code a little slower in case of skinned animation + normalmaps (we had to turn “off” one optimization). To counteract this, I’m reworking a relevant part of CGE renderer, to not only bring the old optimization back, but also optimize it even more, and bring other small improvements.

It’s a work-in-progress, but we already have:

1. Colors per vertex passing optimized (faster copy, 3/4 less data for RGB colors).

2. Custom shader attribute passing optimized (faster copy) and fixed for non-indexed primitives (see demo file).

3. Tangents and bitangents passing optimized (pass 2/3 less data due to not duplicating normal info).

Thanks to our glTF support, you can export to CGE from the latest 3ds Max and Maya versions. We have updated our documentation:

• Detailed instructions how to export from 3ds Max

• Detailed instructions how to export from Maya

Thanks go to Andrzej Kilijański for updating these pages!

Being an open-source engine, done by open-source fanatics, we of course remain committed to perfect Blender support 🙂 As a reminder, our Blender exporting documentation is here.

So we really want to cover all our bases here. Whether you like Blender or a big proprietary 3D modeling software from Autodesk — you can use Castle Game Engine.

An unorganized list of new things implemented in Castle Game Engine lately:

1. I started an important engine example: component_gallery. Right now it’s an extensive demo of TCastleButton possibilities. It will be extended with more pages soon.

2. We made significant image loading optimizations. Loading PNG is now much faster on platforms where we don’t use libpng (Android, Switch). Loading JPG is now faster everywhere.

3. We have a new API for getting/setting metadata on X3D nodes, with example in examples/short_api_samples/metadata/.

4. We bump our Android API to 29, to satisfy latest Google requirements. Our Docker images have been updated to contain the appropriate version by default.

5. AutoSizeToChildren reimplemented to be much more flexible, suitable for any anchor.

6. Selecting of dragon in 2D template fixed.

Thanks to a great work by Andrzej Kilijański, we now have a brand new way of using sprite sheets in Castle Game Engine: you can load sprite sheets to TCastleScene and arrange them within a TCastleViewport.

This means that you can load, display, transform, animate sprite sheets just like all other scenes. Refer to our manual, in particular chapters about loading, displaying and transforming, animating. Everything described there now just applies to sprite sheets.

This also means that you can arrange sprite sheets in CGE editor.

See the sprite sheets documentation for details.

To use this, you need to express sprite sheets in the Starling or Cocos2d format — but we have a plan to make this operation trivial using the CGE editor.

Demo files are in our demo-models repository, explore the cocos2d_v2, cocos2d_v3 and starling subdirectories.

As an additional cool bonus, you can also now load 2D images into TCastleScene. Underneath, we construct a simple textured rectangle that shows the image. This is also extensively documented.

A demo of using the new approach to easily build a game is coming too (you can observe a ticket).

Tomorrow (Sunday, 22 November) at 13:30 there will be a presentation about Castle Game Engine at MiniDebConf Online #2 (see schedule). Come and listen 🙂

Here’s a 37-teaser I made for it: https://michalis.xyz/nextcloud/s/mRjBQEmW429NB8Q.

And in the meantime, watch pretty videos from Enes Geven — upcoming mobile game, using CGE:

1. I’ll give a presentation about Castle Game Engine at MiniDebConf Online #2 “Gaming Edition”, an online Debian conference devoted to game development. The presentation is already recorded :), and I hope it is good. I focus on Castle Game Engine editor. I create a 3D level in Blender and put it in a 3D CGE game, I do some code editing, and I build a 2D game for Android too — all in 38 minutes. I hope it will serve as a nice introduction to CGE, from scratch, going over the core engine/editor features and showing how to use it in practice.

   Afterwards there will be ~7 minutes for live questions.

   My presentation starts on Sunday, 22 November, 13:30 UTC, see schedule.

   You’re most welcome to attend 🙂

2. As a teaser, see the presentation about CGE + view3dscene for Web3D 2020 that was this Wednesday. This is 21 minutes, and focuses on graphic features we offer in view3dscene (I mention there CGE, but don’t go into details how to use it from developer perspective).

3. I implemented some additional X3D nodes to describe 2D geometry: Disk2D, Polyline2D, Polypoint2D, TriangleSet2D.

4. We no longer depend on libGLU, even on desktops where we use OpenGL (not mobile OpenGLES) by default. This was a long-time coming move. The remaining usage of libGLU in CGE eliminated:

   1. You can use TCastleScene with X3D geometric primitives (like TSphereNode, TDisk2DNode and more) to render “quadrics” (previously, 2 old CGE examples used libGLU for this).

   2. We have own routine to generate mipmaps for ancient GPUs (on modern GPUs, we use glGenerateMipmaps since a long time of course).

I’m happy to be swamped with things to announce about the engine! 🙂 So, after previous announcements this weekend, one more list of new stuff 🙂

• We have an extensive documentation how blending (partial-transparency) works. While the engine tries its best, it’s not always possible to make blending automatically “just work”. This documentation should help you understand what and why you can tweak.

• We have important fixes for edge-cases when handling MessageOK, progress bars or TCastleViewport.AvoidNavigationCollisions by Andrzej Kilijański.

  Moreover, Andrzej submitted a big PR that introduces a huge upgrade to handling sprite sheets in CGE. It is under review now (i.e., waiting for Michalis 🙂 ), stay tuned!

• We have renamed mouse button names/types to buttonXxx and TCastleMouseButton. This way they do not conflict with LCL. The old names mbXxx still remain, but are now deprecated, and we will be able to remove them in later CGE (7.2?). Thanks to Eugene Loza!

• In the editor, we now expose “Scene (Optimal Blending for 2D Models)”, which is just TCastleScene with Setup2D performed.

  It is better than the now-deprecated TCastle2DScene. Dealing with TCastle2DScene was sometimes uncomfortable: when you wanted to derive descendants and mix 2D and 3D models in your game. And existence of TCastle2DScene was not really justified: in the end, it is a completely trivial variant of TCastleScene, the Setup2D just sets "RenderOptions.BlendingSort := bs2D" (really, that’s it! nothing more needed for 2D scene).

• I added an example of using CastleXMLUtils unit in examples/short_api_samples/xml_utils/.

• Our Jenkins (see wiki docs) is now integrated with GitHub, and it sets “build status” on GitHub. This means we can quickly recognize failing commits, branches, PRs etc.

  ( It’s not always the fault of the branch/PR author, so don’t worry — I’m diagnosing all fails and will let you know if this is something you need to take care in your PR. )