Object Pascal games engine

Castle Game Engine

In the 1990s, Pascal and its cousin Modula-2 were often the languages of choice when studying for a computer science degree. This was because, at the time, Pascal was a good bridge between the pseudo code language of theory and the concepts, functions, and ideas that preempted object-oriented programming. The move away from those old ideas has almost killed off Pascal, but it still exists within Object Pascal (aka Delphi), which is itself a bridge between the old way of doing things and object-oriented programming. Object Pascal survives because its community keeps it going, and this project, the Castle Game Engine, is a good example of that community's tenacity and inventiveness.

The Castle Game Engine helps you to build games with Object Pascal. It can import a huge number of 3D and 2D image formats, but it's primarily built around Scene graph (X3D), which is the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, commonly used a decade ago to display and interact with 3D environments from your browser. X3D encapsulates these models and interactions and takes the heavy lifting out of the code. Castle can even build and edit these scene graphs at run time to create processing and visualization tools. The games engine also includes plenty of graphical effects, such as shadows, mirrors, and shader effects, and an API to link against other toolkits. The results look fantastic, and perhaps in a nod to VRML, it's even possible to run generated games in a web browser. It may seem arcade, but you can learn a lot about games development, and 3D in particular, by looking at these concepts through the lens of a different programming language, which is exactly what Object Pascal excels at being.

Project Website

https://castle-engine.sourceforge.io/

Despite, perhaps, the use of Object Pascal being an anachronism, there are plenty of C modern games developed with the Castle Game Engine.

2D games engine