Improvements to property editors, in particular display and input angles in degrees in the editor

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We’ve done a number of “quality of life” improvements to properties manipulation in the Castle Game Engine editor.

  1. We simplified the display of floats and vectors. No need for excessive trailing zeroes. Instead of 0.00 0.00.0.00 or 1.00 2.00 3.00 we now display 0 0 0 or 1 2 3 which is much easier to “parse” by a human eye.

  2. Editing vectors and components of vectors automatically updates everything immediately. E.g. if you edit TCastleTransform.Translation.X to 10, the TCastleTransform.Translation will update immediately to 10 0 0. And if you edit the vector TCastleTransform.Translation to 42 0 0, the TCastleTransform.Translation.X will update immediately to 42.

  3. The TCastleTransform.Direction and TCastleTransform.Up are now exposed in the “Basic” tab. Thanks to above improvements, you can now clearly see they are synchronized with TCastleTransform.Rotation — changing one changes the other.

  4. TCastleImageTransform.Size is now more comfortable to edit: simply type single float to set both X and Y to the same value. E.g. type 10 to set Size to 10 10 (in Pascal this would mean Vector2(10, 10)). This is consistent with TCastlePlane.Size, TCastleTransform.Scale and similar properties: typing a single float sets all vector components to be equal.

  5. The display and input of angles and rotations now displays / accepts degrees.

    Note that the Pascal API still accepts angles in radians. This is standard (in X3D, glTF, Math routines etc.). I experimented and looked at how others (Blender and Godot) present angles to make the end result useful and not confusing. To this end:

    • Angles are now displayed as degrees in CGE editor.

      And the fact that they are in degrees is explicitly shown by wrapping them with deg(xxx) text. So the angle looks like deg(45).

      We are deliberately explicit that the angles are in degrees, to avoid confusion.

      This affects both angles displayed as angle of axis+angle rotation (like TCastleTransform.Rotation saying 0 1 0 deg(45)) or as single float number (e.g. if you expand the TCastleTransform.Rotation to reveal the Angle (W) component).

    • When you input an angle value, you can keep the "deg(...)" wrapping, or you can input just the number. In the latter case, we will automatically add "deg(...)" around, so we interpret input as being in degrees anyway.

      This is similar to what both Blender and Godot are doing too, likely for similar reasons (have API in radians, but for display and input in editor — degrees are easier to use).

      This affects both single-value fields and 4D vectors. So for single-value field (like TCastleTransform.Rotation.W) typing "45" is understood as "deg(45)". For editing rotation as 4D vector (axis + angle) typing "0 1 0 45" is understood as "0 1 0 deg(45)". You will see the "deg(...)" added immediately, so it is hopefully clear what happens.

    • To be consistent, you can also use Deg in Pascal. It’s just an alias for DegToRad.

      The deg(....) case doesn’t matter. Deg or deg or DEG are the same. To interpret expressions in editor, the deg is a function in Castle Script.

    • This is also applied to 2D image rotations in TCastleImageControl.Rotation and TCastleImagePersistent.Rotation. Degrees everywhere!

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