I hope you enjoyed the packed series of Castle Game Engine news last week. It’s time for the first news in 2022: summary of 2021 and plans for 2022! Before we start, I want to thank everyone who contributed to the engine in 2021. Together, we work on making a great open-source game engine. I …

Documentation upgrades done lately Lots of documentation (in particular from wiki) was reworked, simplified, updated, consolidated with other pages… See in particular: Build Tool CastleEngineManifest.xml – Syntax and Examples Android Services (each particular service now has a dedicated documentation page) iOS Services (each particular service now has a dedicated documentation page) glTF Sprite sheets Coding …

Thanks to the related Lazarus issue being fixed by Juha Manninen, our editor can now open Pascal files in the proper Lazarus project reliably if you use Lazarus >= 2.2.
We also query Lazarus version, to activate new behavior only for new Lazarus….

A non-production release for development and testing, which will hopefully lead to a “stable” release.
Noteworthy changes relative to 3.5.0-beta4:

Bugs and defects addressed:

SimpleApplication.stop(true) causes deadlock (issue #1721, PR #1722)
Chase…

I have just released a new version of glplotter, a small utility implemented using Castle Game Engine to draw graphs. Graphs can be defined using an intuitive mathematical expression syntax (thanks to Castle Script). Multiple graphs are visible at the same time, and you can inspect the function graphs by moving, zooming, toggling various grids …

With many thanks to Trung Le (Kagamma), we have a new experimental way to manage editor windows. You can freely rearrange them within the main form, you can rearrange them in tabs, you can also detach them from the main form. This is great to spread the editor windows across multiple monitors too, to e.g. …

As we extend the engine, we sometimes have to deprecate some old features, that were not very useful, and sometimes prevented the engine API from being flexible and easy to understand. One of these things was TCastleSceneManager class (renamed to TCastleViewport since 2 years), with its single “central” instance in TCastleWindow.SceneManager or TCastleControl.SceneManager. In a …

Blending is a common technique to achieve partial-transparency of various things (UI, 2D and 3D models). In many cases it means that your texture has an additional channel, alpha channel, that determines how much each pixel is opaque. But there is a trap — colors from fully transparent pixels (that you, by default, don’t see …