Fixes and optimizations: Shadow Volumes Optimizations, Shadow Maps Refactor, Nintendo Switch updates, important fixes

News
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LCL TCastleControl Pirates - at Dev Days Summer 2024! Pirates demo with shadows
  1. We’ve made a big optimization to processing of large worlds (which means: many TCastleTransform in a viewport), that in particular benefits cases when you use shadow volumes.

    This changes how an important rendering code works. We now make 1 pass to collect all the shapes, and reuse results of this pass a few times — 2x without shadow volumes (because we render opaque and then transparent objects), 4x for shadow volumes (was 5x before the optimization, but I managed to completely remove one). This means that “traversing transformations” (which matters for large worlds) is 2x-5x faster now.

    This matters for a number of applications, in particular it is impactful for applications using shadow volumes and non-trivial amount of scenes: pirates demo for Dev Days of Summery 2024 or games like DSRally from DiDi.

    For some technical details, see notes in the GitHub issue and notes about AddRenderEvent (how to make custom rendering code now).

    (This was done over a month ago, but I finally got to announcing it: ) ).

  2. We made a big refactor to the shadow maps processing.

    The immediate benefits are: much simpler code (using shadow maps is no longer entangled with texture coordinate generation in ProjectedTextureCoordinate) and fixes for some cases, like using shadow maps and occlusion texture.

    The more long-term benefits: This opens the door to finally improve shadow maps to work cross-scene and be trivial to activate from editor. The way forward is now clear: remove the TShape.InternalShadowMaps, pass the shadow maps when rendering, thus enabling the shadow maps from one scene to another.

  3. Small inspector rendering optimizations, and FrameProfiler shows now also rendering time spent in DrawPrimitive2D and TDrawableImage.

  4. Nintendo Switch version updated.

    While we cannot publicly share much details, the overview is simple: the very latest version of the engine is available and tested for Nintendo Switch, using the latest software stack for developing games from Nintendo). We also added “Run -> Platform -> Nintendo Switch” to the editor menu, so building can be done from GUI.

  5. Improvement: In the design mode (that is, in editor), we always have precise collisions. You no longer need to worry to toggle TCastleSceneCore.PreciseCollisions just to select things in the editor.

  6. Fix: Important fix has been pushed for physics. If you modify a transformation of TCastleTransform that has children TCastleTransform, and these children have physics behaviors (colliders, rigid body) then it’s automatically OK now.

  7. Fix: Saved JSONs are a bit shorter. No need to write JSON object for a vector / color with default value.

  8. Fix: Container.MousePosition during Motion events could be wrong due to recent Motion events collecting. It’s OK now. This also fixes mdRotate option of the TCastleWalkNavigation.

  9. Fix: Billboards in multiple viewports are now rendered OK. This also fixes lights gizmos in editor, when using camera preview. This also fixes lights gizmos in editor in terrain demo blinking.

  10. Improvements: examples/lazarus/model_3d_viewer for various UI improvements.

  11. Improvements: default .gitignore for new projects is improved to ignore some files produced by Delphi.