Gorilla3D 1.5 is out now, and it’s an important update again!

The highlights:

🚀 More performance – up to +19% draw throughput, much faster picking, and no more framerate drops caused by RecalcAbsolute
🗜️ Texture compression – up to 6:1 less GPU memory with a single line of code
🗣️ Voice in, voice out – built-in Text-to-Speech (Piper) and Speech-to-Text (Whisper, Vosk)
🎮 Arena Multiplayer – a new framework for multiplayer games via Tethering and game server support
📐 Orthographic & isometric camera projection
💻 New platform: WinARM64EC
🧩 Project templates to get you started (thanks, peardox!)

Plus loads of bug fixes for glTF, FBX, DAE, instancing, animation and Android (now with EGL 3).

⚠️ Heads-up for custom shaders: “_ModelViewProjectionMatrix” has been removed. Please use “_ProjectionMatrix * _ViewMatrix * a_ModelMatrix” instead.

You’ll find the full changelist and the download at gorilla3d.de.

Happy building – we can’t wait to see what you create!

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Changelist

✨ New Features

Platforms

• WinARM64EC platform support added
• New Linux compiler verification

Texturing

• Texture compression: global setting by “GorillaTextureCompression := tcFast;” with 3 modes tcNone|tcFast|tcQuality
  Reducing memory usage in the GPU RAM up to 6:1.
  You need to call that before “Application.Initialize;” and need to include “Gorilla.Context.Types” in uses.
• Fixed anisotropic texturing filtering, by using the global setting “GorillaDefaultMaxAnisotropy := 16;” and “TGorillaTextureBitmap(LTex).MaxAnisotropy := GORILLA_ANISOTROPY_DEFAULT;” specific texture setting.

Camera

• New orthographic and isometric projection settings

Animation

• Put the play head at ATime WITHOUT computing a pose by the SeekTo method
• TGorillaRenderClock.Tick() introduced to control animation update independently

Audio

• TTS (Text To Speech) Engine, using Piper, added for Windows, Android, Linux and OSX platforms
• STT (Speech To Text) Engine, using Whisper, added
• FMOD and OpenAL with recording sound support

Network

• Arena multiplayer framework added using Tethering and gaming server connection support

GPU & Backend

• New function in Gorilla.Context.Backend to force setting high performance GPU (NVIDIA / AMD)
• New function in Gorilla.Context.Backend to check for hybrid-copy-back state, when display GPU and rendering GPU differs
  This leads to much less performance and can now be detected and shown to users by message or exception.

Templates

• Thanks to peardox, we have started to provide project templates as starting point

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🐞 Bug Fixes & Stability

Optimization

• ObjectAtPoint/Picking performance issues fixed – FPS dropped massively even on HitTest=false
• RecalcAbsolute() fixed of TControl3D in Gorilla objects – deep loop iterations dropped framerate massively
• TGorillaRedundancyCheck type introduced to detect reapplying the same material

Mesh & Instancing

• BeginInstanceEditing / EndInstanceEditing and BeginUpdate / EndUpdate methods for multiple edits on TGorillaMeshInstance failed or leading to unexpected results
• RingBuffer introduced for faster copy-process and less allocation (+4.3% at 2690 draws)
• Model/mesh duplication failed on different positions, due to optimization in RecalcAbsolute routine

Formats

• glTF/GLB: Import of Quaternius models failed due to unsupported MIME type in buffer data loading
• DAE: WEAKPACKAGEUNIT flag added to reduce the number of exported types – crashing the 12.3 compiler
• FBX: shutdown exceptions on animated fbx models – dead references throwing access violations

Animation

• InPlace extended by a SetInPlace method to re-bake cached animation
• Animation frame detection more closely to the current frame
• Skipping armature computation if called multiple times per frame

Materials & Shaders

• “_ModelViewProjectionMatrix” was removed from the ShaderData in DefaultMaterials, because it’s not correct when using instances
  use instead: “_ProjectionMatrix * _ViewMatrix * a_ModelMatrix” in your shaders
• per-draw shader program handling (+19% at 2690 draws)
  • “ActivateDefault” removed after each shader execution
  • “FindProgram” call optimized
• CSM rendering optimized to reduced the number of rendered objects
• WBOIT transparency sorting adopted by screensize
• InitializeTexture / FinalizeTexture crashed in a few demos due to unlucky setup

Q3 Physics

• Ratio treatment in Q3-Body fixed – led to incorrect behaviour

Android

• EGL 3 context on android introduced