Because people will read again, I improved various parts of our documentation:

• New page about using CastleSettings.xml to easily configure UI scaling and default font, in a way that can be applied in game as well as in the CGE editor.

• Our Coding Conventions (and some related notes about contributing code to the engine) are now on our wiki. It’s long, so here’s a short version: write a code that is good (as simple as possible) and submit a pull request on GitHub.

• Improved the README about how to compile TCP connection demos using Lazarus.

• Large updates to our “planned features” page. A lot of stuff was done, or partially done, during the development of the upcoming CGE version 6.6. And a lot of new stuff is planned 🙂

Valter Buccina made a demo application using sprites in Castle Game Engine.

The demo is available on https://github.com/valterb/sprite-demo-castle-engine.

Citing from the README:

Demo is divided into two parts:

1. Goniometer
2. Road demo

The first shows with extreme precision the direction of the sprite in degrees. Using mouse click coordinates and Player position we apply the arctangent formula and convert the value obtained in degrees. This way we get the requested direction.

The second one is a demo with a road background where you can move the sprite that is sized according to the distance from the observation point. One click to walk, double click to run. Run animation is divided into three actions, short initial walk, run, short final walk but it is not perfect.

See the forum post for details. (This post was on an old forum — please use new forum for comments.)

Thank you!

• New Appearance.alphaChannel field (TAppearanceNode.AlphaChannel in Pascal) determines alpha channel treatment when rendering a shape with given appearance. We can use alpha testing, alpha blending, or ignore the alpha channel (render as opaque).

  This field overrides the engine auto-detection “how to treat alpha”, which normally looks at Material.trasparent and the alpha channels of textures (which can, in turn, be affected by ImageTexture.alphaChannel). If you set Appearance.alphaChannel to something other than "AUTO" then we avoid any auto-detection, and we just render according to this field.

  This corresponds to glTF alphaMode.

• New utility methods TCastle2DSceneManager.PositionTo2DWorld and TCastleSceneManager.PositionToWorldPlane have been added, to easily convert mouse/touch position into a position inside 3D/2D game world.

  Our example 2d_dragon_spine_game inside CGE sources demonstrates this, using SceneManager.PositionToWorldPlane to determine target position of the dragon. Also, this example now demonstrates animation blending.

• glTF texture can be converted to a MovieTexture . If your texture URL is like .avi or .mpg, we will automatically load it as MovieTexture in X3D, and it will actually play in a loop (if you have ffmpeg installed).

We have a new Castle Game Engine forum: https://forum.castle-engine.io/ .

It is using an open-source Discourse platform. It should be significantly better than the old forum 🙂

The forum is also integrated with WordPress (used for engine news). All WordPress news will result in Discourse posts (in the forum news category), and comments under post are leading to Discourse.

• The font rendering behaves better when the text contains a character that we cannot render: it displays a fallback glyph (usually “?”) and makes a warning (using WritelnWarning, so it goes to log). This allows to easily spot missing characters in the font and makes backspace working sensibly if you input a character which glyph isn’t supported.

  You can toggle this by setting TTextureFont.FontData.UseFallbackGlyph to false.

• TCustomizedFont.Load allows to load font texture in a couple of alternative sizes. The resulting font rendering will look better, it will use the best texture, and thus can look crisp regardless of the final size on screen.

  It is very easy to use this feature by CastleSettings.xml. Simply define a default_font and instead of size_at_load="20" use something like sizes_at_load="10 20 30".

• TCastleFloatEdit and TCastleIntegerEdit allow to easily edit a Single / Integer value by an edit box.

• TCastleScrollViewManual allows to have a scrollbar that controls… well, anything you want (handling OnChange event). This is a more flexible version of TCastleScrollView that scrolls user interface inside.

The new controls and font rendering capabilities can be of course easily tested in CGE editor.

We have a Docker image that you can use to easily get Castle Game Engine along with prerequisites (like FPC with various cross-compilers): kambi/castle-engine-cloud-builds-tools image on Docker hub .

If you’re new to Docker, I wrote a nice description how to use Docker with CGE. Basically, instead of installing CGE, FPC, Android SDK/NDK… you can just get a Docker image.

(P.S. Wow, last 2 months were exhausting. I have a ton of news about CGE for you, and will publish them in the upcoming days 🙂 ).

I’m happy to present a new large Castle Game Engine demo: “Aliens vs Humans”. It is a simple strategy game with maps designed using Tiled.

The demo is in the examples/tiled/strategy_game_demo/ directory of our source code. You can also download precompiled versions for Windows or Linux.

Our Tiled maps API was enhanced with various methods to make writing games easy:

• TCastleTiledMapControl.PositionToTile
• TCastleTiledMapControl.TileRectangle
• TTiledMap.TilePositionValid
• TTiledMap.TileNeighbor
• This is all building upon improvements I announced last week to the Tiled support in CGE.

These methods work for all map orientation types (hexagonal, orthogonal, isometric, isometric staggered). This way you can handle e.g. hexagonal and orthogonal maps the same way, with the same code, without worrying about the differences how “neighborhood” is defined differently for hexagons (6 neighbors) and orthogonal maps (4 or 8 neighbors, depending on CornersAreNeighbors).

The user interface is designed using Castle Game Engine Editor. The game code uses TUIState to split the game into states. Each state UI is loaded from a separate .castle-user-interface file. Thus, this is also a demo of how to use TUIState with CGE editor, to organize a larger game into states.

This demo was requested by Castle Game Engine supporters on Patreon. I took some time to make it, as I wanted to make it perfect 🙂 If you’d like to see more crazy CGE demos, join us on Patreon!

A new application to manipulate sprite sheets: https://github.com/valterb/spritesheet-utility , thanks to Valter Buccina!

It is a GUI application for Windows.

You can:

• Load the necessary images and create the spritesheet.

• Flip and resize individual images (with or without constraints of proportions). It might be useful for creating spritesheets in the opposite directions.

• For resizing it is possible to set the interpolation mode in those proposed in TResizeInterpolation.

• Finally you can load a spritesheet and see the animation. Frame sizes are automatically calculated based on the number of frames and columns. It is possible to change frames per second during the animation.

The application is made using Castle Game Engine, with TCastleImage, TGLImage, TCastleControl and TSprite.

See the related forum thread.

With big thanks to Eugene Loza, we can celebrate new year with a new game using Castle Game Engine!

Swappy Jigsaw is a simple jigsaw puzzle game, where you have to unravel an image split into many tiles. Click to pick a tile and click another tile to swap them. There are 84 images total. The game is made in Castle Game Engine (Lazarus/FreePascal), is free, libre and open source.

• Sources on GitLab.

• Windows binaries.

• Linux binaries.

Many new features in our integration with Tiled, a cool open-source 2D map editor. They all can be tested by the examples/tiled/map_viewer application from the Castle Game Engine sources on GitHub.

This work is sponsored by supporters of Castle Game Engine on Patreon. You asked for a Tiled demo, it is in progress now:) Thank you for supporting the engine!

Tiled integration improvements:

• Support Isometric, Isometric Staggered, Hexagonal maps (in addition to simple Orthogonal).

• New properties: URL (easily load/unload the map), Origin, Scale (easily move and zoom the map), SmoothScaling, SmoothScalingSafeBorder (adjust map scaling mode). See the API documentation of TCastleTiledMapControl.

• TCastleTiledMapControl is nicely configurable in the CGE Editor.

• Tiled demo (in examples/tiled/map_viewer) improved a lot, designed using CGE Editor, and allows to move and scale the map, as well as adjust scaling properties.

• Fix reading some Tiled files (support offset as float, try harder to determine proper tile size).

• Use BackgroundColor optionally set in Tiled.

• TCastleTiledMapControl is correctly influenced by UI scaling and anchors.

• Refactored some internal structures.