We’re proud to release Castle Game Engine 6.0, a major upgrade to our open-source 3D and 2D game engine for Object Pascal!

Download it from our main page.

This release is the result of more than a year of intensive engine development. The main feature is that almost every part of the engine got significant improvement:) Throughout 2016 I was using the engine intensively to make some cool games, and it resulted in numerous major improvements.

The most important new features are:

User interface and 2D

Build tool

See the build tool documentation and CastleEngineManifest.xml examples for more details about these features.

Automatic generation of GPU-compressed and downscaled textures. They can also be automatically used by loading the same material_properties.xml in game, so you have a single place where you control which textures are compressed / downscaled. Valgrind compilation mode ( --mode=valgrind ), new subcommands "run" and "simple-compile" .

Android

A large number of Android package components that provide an instant integration with various 3rd party Android libraries: Google Play Games, in-app purchases, sound, ads, analytics, vibrations and more. Savegames in the cloud. See ShowSaveGames, SaveGameSave, SaveGameLoad. UserConfig supported for easy persistent data (local savegames).

Game assets – new formats, extensions, conversions

More stuff!

Last but not least, I wanted to mention our new Patreon page. You can support the engine development, help me add great features to the engine, and get some real rewards — I’m devoting a weekend per month exclusively to the features requested by Patrons, you can get access to the cloud build server (continuous integration) for your game projects, and I will have a 24h gamejam every month making a demo game requested by Patrons. Please check out our Patreon page:

Suppport the engine on Patreon

At the end, I wanted to thank many people who helped in this release. In particular, my warmest thanks go to Trung Le, Eugene Loza and Tomasz Wojtyś for contributing a lot of engine improvements. There’s nothing more rewarding than to see other people actually using your engine to do cool stuff, so you really made a difference in my happiness!:) Please continue to contribute!

And a special thanks go to Paweł Wojciechowicz for relentlessly designing fantastic graphic stuff for a color-blind, stubborn programmer!

Thank you!