Many engine improvements on the road to next release: TCastleShape outlines, VS Code integration improvements, decide which viewport controls listener, packing to zip easier...

[michalis]

As you can see from our increased frequency of news posts, we’re busy busy doing lots of things around the engine 🙂 The primary goal is to push engine 7.0-alpha.3 release out, with the bigger goal on the horizon to finally reach the mythical engine 7.0 release. And then of course do more things, planned after 7.0, like the web platform. As much as I like talking about our roadmap, I like doing it even more!

Remember that we’re listening for your feedback on our forum, Discord, GitHub issues, Reddit, Patreon and everywhere else we can.

And we appreciate if you can support us on Patreon — this is what ultimately allows us to commit more resources toward the engine!

So below, another bag of engine improvements “all across the board” — everyone may find something to enjoy below 🙂 They are all already available in latest engine downloads which are now snapshots, built from latest GitHub code.

1. TCastleShape more functional: Outline, Filled and related properties undeprecated and implemented for triangles too.

2. Our LSP server improvements (no more spamming with errors in case of include file without {%MainUnit xxx.pas}.

3. VS Code extension improvements, in particular fixed behavior with bundled FPC on Linux.

4. TCastleThirdPersonNavigation fixes and API documentation improvements to work better in case your avatar has non-standard orientation.

   Note that new navigation components are coming, as part of PR 533. But we are committed to maintaining TCastleThirdPersonNavigation for a few releases too — as migrating to new navigation components will not be an automated process, they present quite a bit different API.

5. TCastleViewport.UpdateSoundListener added, to indicate which viewport controls sound listener. Esp. useful when you have multiple viewports.

6. Tiled improvements — when when we have a tileset without image atlas (not yet supported, but at least gracefully ignored now).

7. projector example important fix (do not stretch the texture where it shouldn’t be).

8. ApplicationData deprecated, and simplified (returns castle-data:... now). This also means that now

   FindFiles(ApplicationData('something'), false, @FoundIndex, nil, [ffRecursive]);
   

   will work, also on Android. But also, compiling it will clearly encourage you to use castle-data:/something instead.

9. Removed old deprecated physics components (TRigidBody, TCollider) as they could confuse new engine users, and there was now plenty of time to upgrade 🙂 See physics for description of our physics components.

10. Packaging to zip is now more reliable: we no longer depend on external zip executable, on most platforms we will use built-in code that packages to zip.

11. We now specify program name in DPR, to avoid Delphi IDE from breaking code when adding new units.