Rendering to texture (FBO, our TGLRenderToTexture) works now on the web.

This enables a few features on the web:

Water, with reflections and waves, visible in the terrain demo (source code in examples/terrain/) is correct now on the web.
Screen (Post-Processing) Effects work on the web now.
- screen_effects_demo demo (source code in examples/screen_effects_demo/).
- Model viewer includes demos of screen effects: switch to demos of Defocus, and Chromatic Aberration.
Shadow maps work now correctly on the web.
- Our model viewer includes 2 demos: switch to “Shinto Shrine” and “Simple Shadow Maps” models (scroll down in the “Open” panel to see them).
- Another demo: test_rendering_opengl_capabilities demo (source code in examples/research_special_rendering_methods/test_rendering_opengl_capabilities/) (walk to the “Some text” geometry over which a moving sphere casts a shadow).
- Note: We plan a big upgrade to shadow maps, making using them in the engine much more natural. So stay tuned for more/better demos of shadow maps:)

We also fixed alpha treatment on the web.

This fixes a few subtle bugs, as in various edge-cases we wrote to the color buffer pixels with alpha < 1. This happened e.g. when displaying hearts in the platformer demo (source code in examples/2d_games/platformer/), cat hair in model viewer, tree leaves in the walking adventure demo (source code in examples/3d_games/walking_adventure/).
This was harmless on non-web platforms (where pixel alpha of the color buffer is used only for eventual blending with incoming colors; nothing cares what is the final calculated alpha left in the buffer). But on web, in the past, our canvas was using “blending with page background (typically white)”.
This is fixed now, making the web rendering work just like other platforms. See comment here for more information.

We now correctly “reset” keys pressed state after you switch a browser page or application:

Previously, switching tabs or applications by key combo like Ctrl+Tab, Alt+Tab could leave the engine thinking that “Ctrl” or “Tab” are pressed.
This had some consequences, e.g. TCastleWalkNavigation will refuse movement by AWSD if it thinks that you hold down Ctrl/Alt modifier. (And it will do “run” if it thinks you hold down Shift!)
This is fixed now, we react to blur event by switching all keys “up”.

We have also fixed both terrain and water shaders for Chromium-based browsers (like Vivaldi or Google Chrome). They needed highp in certain shaders to work reliably (water waves, terrain textures smooth), as they multiply bigger floats with small floats.

As always, we hope you have fun developing games with Castle Game Engine! And if you like what we do, we appreciate support on Patreon!

Shaders on web fixes:

Our shaders on the web platform can render now all our effects:

Bump mapping (normal maps). As shown by demos:
- bump_mapping (source code).
- creature_behaviors (source code).
- third_person_navigation (source code).
- game_3d_sound (source code).
ClipPlane X3D node, useful to clip part of 3D/2D content when rendering. The node can be instantiated using Pascal class TClipPlaneNode or by writing X3D file like this:

#X3D V3.2 utf8 PROFILE Interchange ClipPlane { plane 1 0 0 -100 } Inline { url "my_model.gltf" }

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#X3D V3.2 utf8
PROFILE Interchange

ClipPlane {
plane 1 0 0 -100
}

Inline { url "my_model.gltf" }

Save this as my_cut_model.x3dv and open (using our Castle Model Viewer, or from Pascal load it using our TCastleScene). In effect, you will see my_model.gltf but cut by a 3D plane. To be precise, the plane equation is Ax+By+Cz+D=0 with the (A,B,C,D) values given by the ClipPlane.plane vector above. The points we render are ones that satisfy Ax+By+Cz+D>=0, so they are in half-space determined by the plane.
Fog.
- Example in eye_of_beholder (source code).
TCastleTerrain shader.
- Used by terrain example (source code).
- Note: Water used in this demo doesn’t work on web yet — we need to fix our FBO on web.
Shader effects using varying, like “time to shader” in Castle Model Viewer (Mobile) on web.

The above features failed to work in the past due to a bug in ANGLE, library used to processes shaders (and optionally render) in both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (I test with Vivaldi).

There’s a real bug in the latest Firefox that was affecting us — and it is workarounded now in our engine, so our games rock in Firefox. See my Firefox bugreport and reproduction of the bug, with details why/how ANGLE processes some shaders incorrectly.
The ANGLE version in the latest Vivaldi is already OK (there was a period when it also exhibited issues).

Occlusion culling on web:

We have fixed how occlusion culling works on the web. We needed to account for the fact that occlusion queries on the web can run for multiple frames.

See the running demo here: occlusion_culling (source code).

Unholy Society demo on web:

We have updated The Unholy Society web demo. We fixed audio, comic bubbles size, “pope call” animation (using ClipPlane, see above). Overall, at this point the complete game works on the web and yes, you can just play it for free here 🙂

Note that the web version doesn’t support persistent savegames (reloading the page will reset the game state), which is of course something we plan to fix soon.

Enjoy and please support us on Patreon to make it possible to continue improving the engine!

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