I'm proud to announce a release of Castle Game Engine 4.0.0, an open-source 3D game engine for FPC/Lazarus.

This release adds a lot of features to make the engine really comfortable for game developers:
  1. We introduce a nice API to make 3D games, with out-of-the-box intelligent creatures, items, levels, nice game data layout and more. Finally it's really easy to make a complete 3D game using our engine.
  2. Everything is also very flexible under the hood, everything can be extended by overriding appropriate methods in classes, new types of creatures/items/other 3D objects can be defined, with specialized behavior.
  3. We have a couple of new examples, in particular examples/fps_game/ (in engine sources) shows how to easily make a fully-working FPS game using our game. It has a lot of comments in the code describing how things work.





We also add a lot of new documentation in this release:
  1. We have a nice tutorial that introduces basic engine concepts.
  2. Classes overview.
  3. And a guide to creating data (3D models, XML configuration files etc.).
  4. And, as always, a complete API reference.

I put a lot of work into this documentation, hopefully it will be useful to new developers that want to try our engine

You can read the full news announcement here.

Engine overview, with all the links to downloads and documentation, are here.

Engine features at a glance:
  • Reads many 3D model formats, focusing on VRML/X3D standards (so you can make 3D models in pretty much every 3D modeling software), but also supporting Collada and other popular formats.
  • We use OpenGL for graphics, and we have many eye-candy features (shadows, mirrors, bump mapping, screen effects, shaders etc.).
  • The engine is basically integrated into Lazarus (you can drop TCastleContol on Lazarus form, and a couple of non-visual controls, on the form), although it can also be used without LCL (we have our own TCastleWindow).
  • The engine is open-source, license is modified LGPL (same license as FPC RTL and Lazarus LCL), so you can make both open- and closed-source games with it.
  • More features listed on engine page.

Have fun! We welcome people that want to use our engine, and/or contribute of course. If you want to make a game using our engine, give it a try!

P.S. I created also a news announcement about this release on the main page of PGD, it's waiting for site admins to pubilsh it