Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha.1 release, view3dscene 4.0.0 release

[michalis]

We proudly present the first alpha pre-release of Castle Game Engine 7.0. It is time to break the long period of waiting since CGE 6.4!

We emphasize that it is a pre-release. We’re still working on a finished 7.0 release, where all the features are polished, all examples are reorganized to show the new approach, all of manual is updated to show editor usage etc. In the meantime, we feel (since a long time now) that what we have is fantastic, and a big step forward since the last CGE release.

If you prefer a video introduction, watch the video presentation embedded on our “Getting Started” page.

The most important new features are:

• CGE editor
• glTF 2.0 full support and realistic rendering upgrades
• Nintendo Switch
• Better API for viewports and cameras in TCastleViewport
• Third-person navigation (with avatar)
• TCastleDownload class, to make asynchronous (non-blocking) downloading
• Load sprite sheets and images to TCastleScene
• Big user interface classes improvements
• Easy serialization of components as JSON
• CastleSettings.xml file support
• castle-data:/ protocol
• TCastleBehavior to enhance TCastleTransform functionality like TCastleBillboard or TCastleSoundSource
• Many optimizations and profiling features
• New screen effects API
• Easy mirrors on flat surfaces
• Localization
• Animation blending improvements
• Many new notable examples
• Android support for Arm64, many new services, upgrades to build infrastructure
• iOS vibrations, GPU compression, IPA building, new services
• Physics detecting collisions, settings and triggers
• Sound backends, FMOD backend, LoopingChannel, sound streaming

The more complete list of changes is here. Even that longer list is just a summary — just browse our news to know all the details.

Along with the new engine, we also release view3dscene 4.0.0 and castle-view-image 2.0.0. These tools are packaged within the main CGE download (they will be automaticaly invoked if you double-click from CGE editor on a 3D scene or image), but you can also download them separately.

• New view3dscene 4.0.0 features include CGE improvements, like glTF support, X3D 4.0, Spine improvements, sprite sheets, animations panel (test animations, with cross-fading, simultaneous animations), dynamic batching and more. It also features a few new view3dscene options like “Edit -> Convert Inline to Group (pulls external content into this model)” and gamma correction configuration.

• castle-view-image 2.0.0 features CGE improvements, like removal of dependency on libgtkglext and libGLU.