Tag: gamedev

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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Google Play Billing Library upgrade

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unholy_iap

To implement in-app purchases on Android, under the hood we use Google Play Billing Library. We have just upgraded the way we use it, to follow the latest API (no AIDL, and use built-in asynchronous methods).

This is important if you use in-app purchases on Android. Since November 2021 (in one month) Google will no longer allow uploading Android builds (APK, AAB) that use the old API.

There’s no change to the Castle Game Engine public API. Just use the Pascal unit CastleInAppPurchases, following the documentation how to implement in-app purchases on both Android and iOS. Both consumable and non-consumable in-app purchases are supported.

The Unholy Society is already using the new API for our only purchase in the game.

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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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