Open Collective
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Castle Model Viewer reimagined for mobile, available for Android now
Published on July 27, 2024 by Michalis Kamburelis

We’re proud to officially release today Castle Model Viewer for Android

It’s a free 3D and 2D model viewer that supports all Castle Game Engine model formats: glTF, X3D, VRML, Spine JSON, sprite sheets, MD3, Wavefront OBJ, 3DS, STL, Collada, and more. It also allows to open a ZIP file that contains a single model and associated media (like textures, sounds etc.). 

The viewer includes a few demo models built-in, but naturally you can also open your own model files. The important thing to remember is that models must be self-contained — we explain exactly what this means in the documentation, but the short version is: you will probably want to pack model with textures into ZIP. 

Features: 
  •  You can change navigation type (walk, fly, examine, 2D), 
  • jump between viewpoints, 
  • play chosen animations, 
  • save a screenshot, 
  • display scene statistics (triangle, vertex count) and more.
  •  Overall, we included the features from our desktop viewer that have been most useful, and adapted them to the mobile UI. 

Have fun! If you find it useful, please support us on Patreon or a number of other ways.

The viewer is free, open-source, and has no ads or tracking naturally. Enjoy open 3D standards!

If you have any feedback, you know where to find me Report bugs as GitHub issues. Oh, and if you like it — we’ll appreciate a 5.0 rating on Google Play 
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Any plans to make it available for F-Droid ?

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Any plans to make it available for F-Droid ?

No immediate plans, though help is welcome.

We like F-Droid, we use it, it makes sense for us (when 100% of the application, including code and data, and the engine, and all dependencies like compiler, is open-source). However, based on initial research a ~year ago, it isn't really trivial. One needs to create a "recipe" for F-Droid to build everything from source, which will include FPC cross-compiler for Android, CGE build tool, and then the actual application. It's easy (we can do it all from command-line)... if one knows F-Droid :)

Until then, if you want to avoid Google Play, note that you can download APK straight from our page on https://castle-engine.io/castle-model-viewer-mobile . Or grab the sources from https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-model-viewer-mobile/ and build them yourself following https://castle-engine.io/android -- the "Castle Model Viewer Mobile" is a regular application using the engine, so once you installed Android tools (Android SDK/NDK and FPC cross-compiler) you just press "Compile and Run" in Castle Game Engine editor and it gets deployed on your Android device over USB.