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  • Kambi VRML Game Engine 2.5.0 Released

    I'm proud to announce a new version of Kambi VRML game engine 2.5.0. It's a cross-platform open-source 3D engine for FPC/Lazarus, using VRML/X3D (can be exported from any 3D modeler, more info here) as it's main scene format.

    Together with the new engine version, we also release new view3dscene 3.10.0. view3dscene is our "Swiss army knife", a browser/viewer for 3D files using our engine underneath.

    For developers, the main page with engine sources and documentation is here.

    New features in this release:


    • "Pure" shader rendering, where everything 3D is rendered through adequate GLSL shaders.

      This gives us per-pixel lighting (perfect specular highlights, spot light beam, light radius and such).

      This also makes shadow maps much nicer (shadow is tested in the correct place of the equation), with multiple shadow maps from multiple light sources working out-of-the-box. Just set shadows=TRUE on lights, and you're done in the simple cases, more documentation is here.

      Bump mapping is also much improved, cooperating now with all normal lighting and texturing settings.

      To test it fully, you can set in view3dscene "View -> Shaders -> Enable For Everything" option. In your own programs, set "TVRMLGLScene.Attributes.Shaders := srAlways;", see unit VRMLGLRenderer. Otherwise, shader rendering will be used only when required (shadow map receivers, shapes with bump mapping and such).
    • Extensions to composite GPU shaders are implemented.
    • Conversion from 3DS, Collada and other 3D formats to VRML/X3D is improved. It now results in modern X3D 3.2 scene graph. We also support bump maps in 3DS and Wavefront OBJ formats.
    • Headlight can be better customized now.
    • And some other smaller improvements and fixes. See our main page for a complete release announcement.
    Comments 5 Comments
    1. Cybermonkey's Avatar
      Cybermonkey -
      This engine looks rather interesting but I am still searching for a step-by-step beginner's tutorial.
    1. michalis's Avatar
      michalis -
      There is a draft version of what will become a tutorial: See inside downloaded engine sources in doc/, or see it online on https://vrmlengine.svn.sourceforge.n...e_tutorial.txt . It's not complete now, and it's not formatted nicely yet. It will be finished along with engine 2.6.0, when also some internal stuff (like AI) will be more friendly to use for developers. Then it will be available on main engine page, in nice HTML with lots of screenshots , right beside the links to engine reference.

      So the good news is that I'm aware of this and it's in progress, and it will be finished for next release

      Comments about the draft tutorial are most welcome of course. Also, there are a lot of basic examples in the sources, so these should help also.
    1. Matthias's Avatar
      Matthias -
      Impressive and promising. I like the fact that it is aiming at FPC/Lazarus rather than other environments.
    1. WILL's Avatar
      WILL -
      I'm very happy to see this library still coming out in new versions. It's been around since 2005 I believe and these days that a good history for a Pascal-based game/graphics library.
    1. michalis's Avatar
      michalis -
      Engine 2.5.1 version was just released. Not worthy enough to make a full news article, so I thought I'll just mention it here

      New features revolve around saving VRML/X3D nodes graph to file, and conversions. The "nodes graph" represents the whole thing that you see in 3D (you could use it to save the state of a dynamic 3D world, or even to make a 3D modeler on top of our engine).

      • You can now save to the standardized X3D XML format.
      • You can convert VRML 2.0 to X3D.
      • Conversions are available in our view3dscene tool, as menu items and command-line options (for batch processing). Of course you also have API to call them yourself in your programs (look for SaveVRML procedures in VRMLNodes unit).
      • And various smaller improvements to the older "classic" output format, and various small cleanups in the engine API.

      The full release notes are, as always, available on our main page http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/. Have fun!