Castle Game Engine 6.0 released

[michalis]

We're proud to release Castle Game Engine 6.0, an open-source 3D and 2D game engine for Object Pascal.

This release is a culmination of more than a year of intensive engine development. The main feature is that almost every part of the engine got significant improvement, and we have more "new features" than you probably care to read about

You can download the engine, and read the documentation, from

https://castle-engine.sourceforge.io/

Some highlights of the new features (see the full release announcement here):

• New user interface features: auto-scaling, parents, anchors, many new components and properties,
• New build tool features: automatic generation and usage of GPU-compressed and downscaled textures, --mode=valgrind,
• A large number of Android package components, that provide an integration with various 3rd party Android libraries on Android (Google Play Games, In-app Purchases, sound libraries, ad networks, analytics, vibrations...),
• New castle-anim-frames format, with a Blender exporter, to export *any* animations from Blender to our engine (armature, shape keys, baking physics simulations, ....).

Also, the entire website, and the manual and the guide to creating game data, received a lot of additions and changes.

Last but not least, I wanted to mention our new Patreon page. You can support the engine development and get some real rewards --- I'm devoting a weekend per month exclusively to the features requested by Patrons, you can get access to the "cloud build server" (continuous integration) for your game projects, and I will have a 24h gamejam every month making a demo game requested by Patrons. Please check out our Patreon page on:

https://www.patreon.com/castleengine

P.S. Everything compiles with the today's announced FPC version 3.0.2 (and other FPC versions too) of course!

[phibermon]

The engine is really holding its own now - performance is excellent and feature set is fat and juicy - really impressed! keep up the good work

[michalis]

The engine is really holding its own now - performance is excellent and feature set is fat and juicy - really impressed! keep up the good work

Thank you! We have great plans for 2017 to add more features: see https://castle-engine.sourceforge.io...d_features.php

[phibermon]

Some exciting features planned! I too am looking to make use of bullet and I've got some ideas for an abstraction of their C++ API - if you fancy it one of the days perhaps we can brainstorm a design for our mutual use?

Also if it's ok with you I'd like to support Castle scene files in my editor - your engine is more complete and advanced than my own and I thought it would be wise to compliment your work rather than reinvent the wheel

[michalis]

Some exciting features planned! I too am looking to make use of bullet and I've got some ideas for an abstraction of their C++ API - if you fancy it one of the days perhaps we can brainstorm a design for our mutual use?

Yes, by all means. We could actually create a project (on GitHub or SourceForge or such) with Pascal bindings for Bullet, and use it in both our projects -- that would be very cool!

My (rough) estimate of next Castle Game Engine releases:

- 6.2 release: Easy iOS recompilation
- 6.4 release: Delphi compatibility
- 6.6 release: Physics or Visual designing of our components (like GLScene) (depending on people feedback, what do they need most)

So, I may sit to physics quite soon, in <2 months. I'll make a note for myself to ping you when I have anything to start. Or, if you start anything earlier, I'll gladly join!

Also if it's ok with you I'd like to support Castle scene files in my editor - your engine is more complete and advanced than my own and I thought it would be wise to compliment your work rather than reinvent the wheel

Great! By all means, please do, the engine is open-source and free to use (on terms of LGPL, just like FPC/Lazarus units). By "my editor" do you mean your Jink Engine? Because that looks extremely impressive, and I would be proud if my engine would be the renderer underneath.

[phibermon]

Yes, by all means. We could actually create a project (on GitHub or SourceForge or such) with Pascal bindings for Bullet, and use it in both our projects -- that would be very cool!

Yes sounds good to me - I was thinking about a small library that takes common features of both bullet and physx and implements each in tandem - to begin with just static geometry and rigid primatives then moving onto constrained joints for rag-doll and wheeled vehicle simulations - the flat pascal headers would be for this abstraction layer. Would save on having to keep pace with bullet API changes etc or at least that's one idea.

Great! By all means, please do, the engine is open-source and free to use (on terms of LGPL, just like FPC/Lazarus units). By "my editor" do you mean your Jink Engine? Because that looks extremely impressive, and I would be proud if my engine would be the renderer underneath.

Yes indeed the main strengths of my system so far lie in JinkEd (the editor) and it's ability to co-operatively edit scenes across IP networks - arbitrary properties of any kind can be attached to each node so property sets for the castle scene graph would be quite painless to implement - allowing castle to be used for rendering.

I'll have a think and study castle in more detail and get in touch with you when I can - I've been unable to entice people to join me on my project so I think it's time to accept its weaknesses and play to castles strengths.