Castle Game Engine 5.2.0 release

[michalis]

New Castle Game Engine 5.2.0 release is available to download from

http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/engine.php

Castle Game Engine is a modern cross-platform open-source 3D/2D engine for FPC/Lazarus.

Be sure to also check out the slides and examples (data and code) from a tutorial about our engine given during the recent Web3d 2015 conference. They show (from the ground up) the creation of a simple 3D FPS game and 2D game.

Highlights from this release are:

• GPU texture memory profiler, improvements around texture GPU compression.
• New font rendering features: scale, outline, print in rectangle.
• TUIState to implement simple UI mode switching (with possible stack) in your games.
• New option android_project added in our build tool to support custom Java and manifest code in your Android project. This allows to integrate your Android game with Google Games (leaderboards, achievements, save games...), biling, ads, analytics and anything else you want
• Clean API to get/set X3D fields.
• Built-in handling of PNG format
• Logging improvements on Windows GUI applications.

And more... See the full release announcement !

Take a look also at some of the latest games using Castle Game Engine:

• Dragon Squash
• Project Helena
• Hydra Battles

[Handoko]

This project really sounds great. I tried it several months ago, run the examples, and I'm impressed. I still haven't really understood how to use it, now you even added some more features.

You mentioned it now has Android export feature, do we required to install Google NDK and SDK?

[michalis]

This project really sounds great. I tried it several months ago, run the examples, and I'm impressed. I still haven't really understood how to use it, now you even added some more features.

I hope that the new tutorials will help with that:)

You mentioned it now has Android export feature, do we required to install Google NDK and SDK?

Yes. Setting up a development environment for FPC+Android for our engine is documented in great details here: https://sourceforge.net/p/castle-engine/wiki/Android%20development/. It's mostly straightforward if you follow the instructions carefully (and check stuff along the way, compiling examples etc.), please do ask questions (on this forum or CGE forum) in case of trouble.

We cannot really avoid this, I mean: we cannot "bundle" a suitable Android SDK + Android NDK (+ FPC cross-compiler to Android?) with Castle Game Engine, unfortunately. This would be quite a huge task, Google NDK and SDK contain a lot of stuff (including their own update and package mechanism...) and have their own organization. So, we have to leave installing them to a developer, the engine does not "contain" them (and neither does FPC).