Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha.3 release: physics, blending, batching, shadows, Delphi (packages, Linux), UI masks, lots of editor UX, Android, iOS work, float textures, VS Code, Sketchfab, more…

We are proud to present a big new release of Castle Game Engine, with lots of new features, improvements and fixes. The new engine version is available for download now.

The highlights of the release are below. For more details, see the full release notes. The number of this release, “7.0-alpha.3”, is a signal that we’re on our road to the big 7.0 release (see the roadmap and plans and timeline).

This release is dedicated to the late Eugene Loza. I miss you, dear friend.

The most important highlights of this release are:

• Physics. New components for colliders and rigid bodies, ability to run physics simulation in the editor, joints, layers, forces.

• Many rendering improvements: Correct and automatic blending, both batching and occlusion culling easier to use and more powerful, fully modern rendering on new GPUs, better support for ancient systems with old GPUs.

• Also OpenGLES (Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch) rendering supports now almost all desktop rendering features: shadow volumes, shadow maps, 3D textures, occlusion query, anisotropic filtering, meshes with 32-bit indexes.

• Shadows using shadow volumes are trivial to activate. Work is under way to expose shadow maps through a trivial property as well.

• Visual Studio Code integration. Our own VS Code “Castle Game Engine” extension with code completion and syntax highlighting for all Pascal code and easy building / running / debugging of Castle Game Engine projects.

• Delphi integration improvements: TCastleControl available for VCL and FMX applications, Delphi packages with IDE support, Delphi Linux support and more.

• Support for Tiled maps with a new component that is comfortable to use and efficient to render.

• User Interface improvements: better default font, UI batching, image regions and 9-slices borders visually configurable, mask component.

• Many editor UX improvements: modern color picker, unified tools to edit UI and transformations, wireframe view, “Change Class” menu action, Sketchfab Importer, finding components by name, multi-selection.

• Improvements to views (formerly states): better API, automatic initialization of the published fields, opening the project greets you with UX to manage views.

• Mobile improvements: lots of Android services improvements, Castle Model Viewer Mobile and more Android applications released on Google Play, lots of general Android and iOS fixes and improvements to make porting your games to mobile trivial, safe borders.

• Loading and saving: cache, MD3 improvements, X3D 4.0 improvements, custom model formats registration, STL saving.

• Inspector (press F8 / 3 fingers in a debug build of any project) improvements: tweaking boolean properties at run-time, hot-reloading at run-time to iterate on your graphics.

• Float-based images (e.g. for precise terrains) full support at loading and rendering (formats: 16-bit PNG, float-based KTX, 16/32-bit TIFFs).

• A lot of new documentation and examples. We in particular recommend 2 new tutorial articles introducing most important engine concepts: Bad way to play chess, aka 3D physics fun.

Support us

We appreciate your support on Patreon. There are also other ways to support us and if you’re a company, we’re open to cooperation (write to michalis@castle-engine.io). By 2024, Michalis, the lead engine developer, spent most of his life on the engine and doesn’t plan to stop. Moreover, Michalis now works on the engine full-time counting only on your support. So anything you can give is really appreciated!

Spread the word!

We don’t do much marketing. Because we suck at marketing. Help us — spread the word about this new release! Post about it anywhere you can. Talk about it in your communities — online or in the Real World. Tell your family about it (they really want to know). Reuse this news post and screenshots freely.

Have fun everyone and thank you for using the engine.