pascal – Castle Game Engine

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

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!

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

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:

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:
- just create TCastleTransformManipulate, call TCastleTransformManipulate.SetSelected, set TCastleTransformManipulate.Mode.
- just create TCastleTransformHover, set TCastleTransformHover.Current.
Practical examples of using them are in:
- examples/ifc, example of using IFC in our engine.
- example of our engine integration with mORMot
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 🙂
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.
We have fixed Steam achievements usage (getting, setting) with Delphi.
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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