Web target – big progress, first 3 demos to try!

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Web demo - 3D viewport, lights, Examine camera, physics
Web demo - invaders
Web demo - first demo

We are proud to present the first 3 working applications developed with Castle Game Engine for the web! Check them out — just open the links below, in any web browser (Firefox, Chrome…), on desktop or mobile!

  1. 3D viewport, with random cones, animated spot light, dropping boxes with physics, Examine camera navigation.

  2. 2D “Invaders” game – simple game, using keys, multiple views, 2 difficulty modes. Note: This example is not really useful on mobile, just because it relies on the keyboard input.

  3. The first, simplest example that we got running on the web!

Note: These are early demos, don’t judge the quality yet — we have some known TODOs (fuzzy text; and the demos will look more impressive once we will have data loading, for now everything you see was set up by code). Stay tuned for more 🙂

How is this possible?

  • We use the WebAssembly target available in FPC and we have a “glue” code generated using Pas2js. We render using WebGL (1.0, with 2.0 features useful but optional), using the Castle Game Engine code. The game code is cross-platform (the 3 examples above can be recompiled to desktop, mobile, console without any change). The TCastleWindow abstracts all platform differences providing rendering and handling input (key, mouse, touch).

  • This is not yet available in the CGE master branch, not yet available in the downloads! The development is on a branch webassm_platformer_test. It should be merged to master soon.

  • We have a ton of documentation what works already, how it works, how to test it, what is missing, and what do we plan on the web platform page. This page was quite intensively updated in the last 2 weeks, so check it out!

Do you like what we do? Spread the word to your friends and support us on Patreon! And have fun developing games with our open-source game engine 🙂

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New CastleTransformManipulate unit to move/rotate/scale 3D objects in your applications, wireframe “shading” toggle for IndexedFaceSet, Steam achievements fixed with Delphi, slides from my presentation in Bielsko-BiaÅ‚a

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Transform editing using CastleTransformManipulate
Transform editing using CastleTransformManipulate

You love the super-long news titles, right? 🙂 Again I have a backlog of announcements to do, to communicate everything happening around the engine development. There will be more news in 2024 (stay tuned for traditional “summary of this year, plans for next”), for today a bag of improvements to announce:

  1. We have a new unit CastleTransformManipulate with 2 new components: TCastleTransformHover (visualize the TCastleTransform we hover over) and TCastleTransformManipulate (visualize selection and move / rotate / scale TCastleTransform).

    Together, they allow you to implement selection / manipulation of 3D objects in your own applications just like the Castle Game Engine editor does.

    Their usage is rather simple:

    Practical examples of using them are in:

    Note: We still work on 2 examples above (we want to improve some things in IFC support, and we want to make mORMot example really support collaborative editing). But their usage of CastleTransformManipulate is now completely stable 🙂

  2. We support toggling any TIndexedFaceSetNode to display as wireframe.

    To do this, set TAbstractShapeNode.Shading to shWireframe using Pascal. If you’re unsure how to manipulate X3D nodes from Pascal, read Writing code to modify scenes and transformations manual, section 11. Building a mesh using code and X3D docs.

    Or, in X3D file, set shading="WIREFRAME" following our X3D Shape.shading docs. Test X3D file is shading_wireframe.x3dv.

    Wireframe display done this way is often useful for model debugging, inspection etc. While you can also construct lines explicitly (using TLineSetNode, TIndexedLineSetNode), it is sometimes more convenient to just define a regular mesh using TIndexedFaceSetNode and then toggle it (based on any condition) to wireframe.

    For some design decisions (e.g. why this is called “shading”) see Shape.shading docs.

  3. We have fixed Steam achievements usage (getting, setting) with Delphi.

  4. I made a presentation about our engine at the beginning of December at Meetup Delphi in Bielsko-Biała (Poland). This was a bigger presentation about engine features, physics, Blender, Sketchfab, Steam integration.

    Slides (in Polish) are here.

    ( If you don’t speak Polish, but you’re interested in the topics — slides from my previous presentation in Cologne are the closest equivalent in English. )

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New Castle Tester – running all engine automatic tests on all platforms (desktop, mobile, Nintendo Switch…) with all compilers (FPC, Delphi)

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Castle Game Engine Automatic Tests

This screenshot will not win the #screenshotsaturday hashtag, but it took a lot of effort to achieve 🙂

Thanks to Andrzej Kilijański we have a big upgrade to our automatic tests application, available as always in tests/ subdirectory of CGE. Instead of using FpcUnit, the application can now use our own testing framework CastleTester that

  1. Is deliberately very compatible with FpcUnit (in fact, using some of its code).

  2. Tightly integrated with CGE, providing easy UI using CGE to run and display all tests results, and some extra utilities like CreateWindowForTest.

  3. Compiles and runs with both FPC and Delphi. All our tests now pass with both compilers. We made a number of fixes to Delphi support thanks to this (FPC support was being tested and flawless since a long time).

  4. Compiles and runs for all platforms we support. E.g. you can run the testsuite on Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch this way, by building the castle-tester for these platforms — just like any other CGE application.

As always, both Jenkins and GitHub Actions run all these tests automatically after every push. Jenkins even runs them with both FPC and Delphi 11.

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Creating Debian Packages with Castle Game Engine build tool

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cge+debian

Debian is a popular Linux distribution, also serving as a base for other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu. You can now easily create a Debian package, .deb file, from any game!

  • From Castle Game Engine Editor use menu option Run -> Package Format -> Debian Package (DEB) and then Run -> Package.

  • Or use command-line build tool with --package-format=deb option. The full command may look like this:

    castle-engine package --package-format=deb --fast
    

To install the resulting package using command-line you can execute sudo apt install ./xxx.deb. Once installed, you can see it in all applications listing currently-installed packages (like Synaptic). You can remove the package using e.g. Synaptic or just sudo apt purge xxx.

While it will work out-of-the-box, to have a really good package you should make sure you filled some information in the project manifest:

  1. Be sure to specify the project author

  2. Specify an icon, in XPM or PNG formats.

  3. Specify sections, categories and comment to have the package and application look best.

This feature was mostly developed by Eugene Loza (thousand thanks!) with some additions from Michalis. It’s not a secret that we’re both using Debian OS as the main operating system and as such most of CGE was probably created on Debian or Debian-derivatives 🙂 So we’re very happy with this integration.

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Various asset improvements: Wavefront OBJ texture options and possible PBR, Spine free form deformation with curve animation, fixes for creaseAngle in X3D and OBJ

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Oak Wavefront OBJ model
Spine FFD animation test

Various improvements to various asset formats:

  • We now implement Wavefront OBJ texture options. They are all parsed correctly, and the scale, offset, clamp are actually handled.

    We can also generate PBR (physical) materials when reading Wavefront OBJ files. This feature is for now experimental, and you have to toggle global WavefrontPhongMaterial in X3DLoadInternalOBJ unit to false. In effect, we will create X3D PhysicalMaterial nodes from Wavefront materials, and we’ll use Pr for the PhysicalMaterial.MetallicRoughnessTexture. See the X3D specification of PhysicalMaterial for details what it implies.

  • We now support curve animation for Spine free form deformation. Thanks go to Kagamma (Trung Le) for implementing this!

    The testcase is in our demo-models, open spine/free_form_deformation/exported/skeleton.json and run head_curve animation.

  • Fixed important bug on all 3D models that could use automatic normals generation based on creaseAngle (like X3D and Wavefront OBJ by default).

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“The Unholy Society” release on Android and iOS

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The Unholy Society - NPC dialogue
The Unholy Society - woof
The Unholy Society - fight
The Unholy Society - tentacles
The Unholy Society - jerk
The Unholy Society - pope

We are proud to announce a mobile release of The Unholy Society, a game done by Cat-astrophe Games using Castle Game Engine!

The Unholy Society, the first part of a snarky exorcist’s adventures, is inspired by ’80s and ’90s movies, comic books, as well as everything else that fits into the categories of “iconic” and “pop culture”.

The story revolves around Bonaventura Horowitz – an exorcist who isn’t exactly an angel himself. At the request of the Pope, Bon, accompanied by a group of his peculiar friends, sets off on a thrilling mission, leaving behind a trail of cigarette butts, empty whiskey bottles, and broken demonic hearts.

The game is available on both Android (Google Play) and iOS (App Store). It is a free download, and you can play the prolog for free — afterwards you can purchase Act 1.

We hope for a great success on mobile, and we want to develop and publish further acts of the game. We have a cool story in the works.

P.S. If you’re a die-hard PC player, go ahead and grab the same game on Steam. Or on Nintendo Switch.

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