TCastleTransform.RenderLayer to render stuff in front, TCastleScene.PreciseColisions, upcoming plans

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So I have now around 5 things in parallel in progress 🙂

  1. Review and merging of new physics (components for colliders, rigid body, joints) with Andrzej Kilijański. It takes a while, but it’s also a large change, and I want to iron out various API details.

  2. Working on big upgrade to FPS game graphics with Adrianna Matejek and Alya Vaneskehyan. Aside from a prettier demo, I get from them a ton of feedback about engine experience from a perspective of experienced 2D and 3D graphic artists. And I have a ton of resulting good TODOs and priorities that will over time find their way into the egnine (some of them already did).

  3. I’m planning restructure of our settings. I would like to deprecate our CastleSettings.xml in favor of a design like CastleProject.json that allows to specify more, and is editable in editor too. In addition to current settings, it would also allow to define some project-wide components (like sounds and fonts that should be loaded and available for the entire application lifetime).

    While a plan is written down, I will likely postpone it after 7.0 release.

  4. I have a great plan how to allow to visually customize materials and material effects in CGE. We have some unique challenges and unique features (our compositing shaders or easy mirrors are really great, we just need to expose them in a way that is simple — both from editor and from Pascal to use).

    I consider this high priority and want to push to make it happen before 7.0 release.

  5. I’m organizing a Windows certificate so that our EXE files are less scary to run on Windows 🙂

Some things done lately that are already available in CGE master branch:

  1. New property TCastleTransform.RenderLayer to force some things to be rendered in front of others. Particularly useful in 3D, e.g. to display weapon in FPS game always in front of other 3D objects.

  2. New property PreciseCollisions and deprecating previous complicated Spatial property. This is anyway part of old “simple physics” — while still available, with time we will want to move everything to new physics, so PreciseCollisions is doomed to be deprecated (at some future point, after 7.0 release) too. But for now it’s great to e.g. easily control how FPS navigation by TCastleWalkNavigation behaves.

  3. Important fix for DistanceCulling with shadows.

  4. Testing LSP servers with Pascal! More about it in next news post 🙂

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