Editor improvements, UI improvements, in-progress Snap packages (Linux packages on any distribution), testing lights and 3D models from Sketchfab

News
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Cars from Sketchfab
New cameras and editor improvements
CGE lights and room from Sketchfab
Crypt from Sketchfab
Porshe from Sketchfab

OK, so we have now 3 big things in-progress 🙂

  1. I started to learn Snap packaging. It allows to create packages that work on any Linux distribution and has a connected central store of Snap packages where users can find packages. Both open-source and closed-source packages are allowed there, you can browse existing packages and see there’s a lot of good stuff there. You can always upgrade all your packages using sudo snap refresh. The package release is managed by us (i.e. we will be able to just update CGE there, to any version we want, without waiting for others). Personally, I use it on all my Linux installations now (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux) to manage stuff that for this or that reason is not available in distros’ packages.

    The end result should be that we could tell all Linux users “You can install Castle Game Engine using sudo snap install castle-engine“.

    My current efforts are in view3dscene/snap subdirectory. I.e. I’m learning Snap packaging doing a package for view3dscene.

    Note: there’s also Flatpak with very similar goals. We’ll be looking into it too 🙂 My simple practical reason to target Snap first is that it seems to just have more “market penetration” in my eyes, looking at my apps I just see a number of things that are officially available (and regularly updated) through Snap. Ideally, CGE will be on both Snap and Flatpak 🙂

  2. In the meantime, the work also continues in new-cameras branch. I’m improving now how does the navigation work, we even have a simple key F that works like in Unity — bring to focus the selected 3D/2D thing.

  3. And in the meantime, Andrzej Kilijański works on physics branch. The physics just works cool in the editor now, and it allows us to trivially create new demos. There will be a new 3D and 2D physics demo using the new features.

New features available on master:

  1. Nice colors for class name in editor hierarchy. The component name should “stand out” while the corresponding class name is dimmed.

  2. Hidden the labels displayed over designer when selecting UI items. These labels were often causing more trouble than gain — as they obscured the actual things you were trying to select/move/resize.

  3. Hidden names of subcomponents that you are not really supposed to edit. This applies to subcomponent names, like Perspective subcomponent within a camera.

Moreover, announcing some UI improvements available for a long time now:

  1. TCastleButton.Alignment, TCastleButton.VerticalAlignment.

  2. Safer look of exception messages and inspector invoked by F8. They will look reliably, always the same, regardless of how you customized the UI.

  3. Configurable theme features: TCastleUserInterface.CustomTheme, FallbackTheme, ForceFallbackLook

For this post’s screenshots, I used a few models from Sketchfab. I wanted to test editor on “real” pretty models 🙂

  1. Pony Cartoon by Slava Z.

  2. 1975 Porsche 911 (930) Turbo by Karol Miklas

  3. Abandoned Warehouse – Interior Scene by Aurélien Martel

  4. Crypt Location by Bocharova

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Do you have an ETA for CGE being available as a Snap package?

My aging Windows laptop is becoming unreliable, so I am hoping to switch to using a Raspberry Pi 4 and Snapcraft seems to be a convenient way of keeping software updated.

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I very much want to get back to Snap work, but it is less priority than other CGE 7.0 finishing tasks (see Summary of 3rd Open Meeting last weekend, announcing 4th Open Meeting – Castle Game Engine , text from “Plan for 2022 still mostly doable” :slight_smile: ). So I will likely sit to this only after CGE 7.0 release – so in January 2023.

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