Book Image

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi

By : David Cornelius
Book Image

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi

By: David Cornelius

Overview of this book

Delphi is a strongly typed, event-driven programming language with a rich ecosystem of frameworks and support tools. It comes with an extensive set of web and database libraries for rapid application development on desktop, mobile, and internet-enabled devices. This book will help you keep up with the latest IDE features and provide a sound foundation of project management and recent language enhancements to take your productivity to the next level. You’ll discover how simple it is to support popular mobile device features such as sensors, cameras, and GPS. The book will help you feel comfortable working with FireMonkey and styles and incorporating 3D user interfaces in new ways. As you advance, you’ll be able to build cross-platform solutions that not only look native but also take advantage of a wide array of device capabilities. You’ll also learn how to use embedded databases, such as SQLite and InterBase ToGo, synchronizing them with your own custom backend servers or modules using the powerful RAD Server engine. The book concludes by sharing tips for testing and deploying your end-to-end application suite for a smooth user experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to deliver modern enterprise applications using Delphi confidently.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Programming Power
5
Section 2: Cross-Platform Power
11
Section 3: Mobile Power
15
Section 4: Server Power

Importing 3D models

So far, we've shown how to add fairly simple objects in our 3D world—objects that can be defined with a few lines or curves. Even the TPath3D component with its array of path points is only a 2D object at its root.

To create a 3D object not constrained to a handful of lines requires a TMesh. Its parent class, TCustomMesh, is actually the base class for all non-extruded 3D shapes, with properties hidden and methods overridden to make them easy to use. A mesh allows a set of connected points and—optionally—textures to define a 3D object. What we want is something even more complex.

Enter TModel3D. This component has a MeshCollection property that connects several mesh objects into one comprehensive object. What's more, MeshCollection can import standard 3D model files built into many kinds of popular 3D modeling software, such as Autodesk or Blender. Three formats are supported: ASE, DAE, and OBJ.

3D modeling software has a...