[fpc-pascal] Castle Game Engine 5.0.0 release

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Reimar Grabowski wrote:
> On Sat, 03 May 2014 21:35:17 +0200 Michalis Kamburelis
> <michalis.kambi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The main engine site, with detailed list of features, links to
>> downloads and documentation, is on
>>
>> http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/engine.php
>
> First I have looked everywhere but not found how physics are handled.
> It does not look like there is an integrated engine but I have not
> found any documentation on how and which external engines can be used
> either. Can you tell me where to find the information?

We do not integrate yet with any physics engine. I know it's important 
(and fun!), and it is planned for the near future (for 5.1.0 or 5.2.0) 
release. See also 
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/forum.php#section_developers . 
Right now, we have our own collision detection and gravity, but without 
any real physics fun.

Contributions are very, very welcome here of course :) You could also 
implement physics integration on top of the engine, in principle you 
don't need to modify the engine, just animate the transformation 
hierarchy. (Although in practice integrating physics more tightly with 
the engine will surely be nice.)

> Second I am not sure that I understood correctly what kind of
> animations are supported. If I export my animations from blender, can
> I export the armature (bones) and get access to them in your engine
> or is it only key frame animation. Key frame animations would not be
> enough for me since at least some animations need to be physics based
> and not predefined.

We support various animations in VRML/X3D using interpolators, we also 
support H-Anim skeletal and skinned animation ( 
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/x3d_implementation_hanim.php ).

However, current exporter from Blender->X3D does not export Blender 
animations in any way to X3D... As a solution, for now, you can export 
Blender animations to KAnim ( 
http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/blender.php ), which is really just 
a sequence of 3D models that is intelligently merged by engine when 
loading. IOW, that is a short-coming of the current Blender X3D exporter 
(which I hope will be fixed one day, maybe even by me :)).

So, if you wonder about using the existing Blender->X3D exporter: it 
currently just does not export animations. If you think about writing 
your own Blender->X3D exporter (or improving the existing one), then you 
could export the animation from Blender however you like to standard X3D 
and the engine will take them :)

However, like said above: the integration with physics engine is not 
done yet, so you will not get physics-based animation (like rigid 
bodies) anyway. For now!

Regards,
Michalis