Ca3D Engine Demo September 2005 description
Ca3DE is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine.

Ca3DE is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine.
It can be used to create a variety of 3D applications, including games, simulations, and training and architectural software.
The development kit is freely available, and the DeathMatch MOD code is open-source.

Here are some key features of "Ca3D Engine Demo September 2005":

· high-quality, real-time 3D graphics,
· a very powerful and flexible Material System,
· cross-platform and cross-compiler portability,
· multi-player network support,
· physically correct lighting (radiosity based),
· dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadows,
· 3D sound effects,
· skeleton based model rendering,
· very large terrain rendering,
· freely available developer kit and MOD source code,
· and easy extensibility by scripts and MODs.
· The Development Kit (see below) is freely available.
· Open source code of the Ca3DE DeathMatch MOD.
· Free developer support via email, IRC chat, and forums.
· Full source code is only available under commercial license. Other use of Ca3DE only costs money if you want to make money with it.
· You're heartily invited to join the developer group. Feel free to ask all your questions at the forums.
· New Ca3DE Material System that handles all (!) rendering.
· The main MatSys components are Renderers, Materials, and Shaders.
· All material surface properties can be controlled by the mapper or texture artist via easy to understand material scripts.
· That is, even after a map or model is finished, the composition, translucency, filtering, modulation, blending, relectiveness and all other properties of any material can be modified.
· This even works while the engine is running!
· Designed to be implemented on virtually anything:
· Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, MacOS, Pocket PC, Palm, DOS, ...
· APIs: OpenGL 1.2 to 2.0, DirectX 7 to 9, Cg, GLSL, Mesa, software renderers, ...
· Hardware: NVidia, ATI, 3Dlabs, consoles, ...
· Ca3DE demo packages currently come with complete sets of renderers for Windows and Linux, each containing variants for:
· OpenGL 1.2 (mostly used as fall-back renderer for the Ca3DE demo),
· Cg with fp20/vp20 profile (for NV2X and higher GPUs),
· Cg with arbvp1/arbfp1 profile (for NV3X and higher GPUs),
· OpenGL 1.4+ extended with ARB vertex/fragment program (all modern GPUs from ATI, NVidia and others), and
· a "Null" renderer that is useful e.g. for performance profiling or dedicated Ca3DE servers.
· On start-up, Ca3DE automatically determines and loads the best renderer that is supported on the current system, so that highest image quality is obtained without user query.
· New special effects on the latest hardware can easily be exploited, while at the same time fall-back solutions for older hardware can always be provided.
· Direct import of jpeg, bmp, tga and png image file formats.
· Global resource management for efficient sharing of common textures and meshes.
· Powerful Pre-Caching System of all rendering resources for stutter-free animations.
· Client/server architecture for multi-player support, implemented in very well designed C++ code.
· New, amazingly fast internet network code!
· Optimized for minimum bandwidth requirements.
· Based on Berkeley Sockets (highly portable, and no unnecessary overhead of general-purpose network libraries).
· Full client prediction (for movement, events, and weapons).
· Delta compression for network packets.
· Very thoroughly designed and well documented C++ source code.
· The C++ standard compliance of the entire code base makes ports to other compilers, platforms and architectures easy.
· Available for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP.
· Available for Linux (currently for the Intel 686 processor family only).
· A port to the Mac OS is in preparation.
· Supports the Microsoft VC++ 6.0 and OpenWatcom compilers on the Win32 platform, and the GCC 3.3.x on Linux.
· First engine ever to combine light-maps with dynamic lighting effects!
· Radiosity-based, physically correct lighting.
· Dynamic, shader-driven, per-pixel lighting for both worlds and models.
· Stencil buffer shadow volumes (everything casts shadows on everything!).
· Support for diffuse-, normal-, bump-, specular-, and luminance-maps.
· Support for ATI and NVidia programmable GPUs and shaders.
· Smooth-Group support even for world brushes, easily controlled in the map editor!
· Shader-driven, multi-textured or 2-pass LightMap rendering.
· Spherical Harmonic Lighting available as presented in my diploma thesis (the thesis is also available in the Downloads section).
· All this is implemented in the Ca3DE Material System.
· Employs fmod for all sound, audio and music effects.
· 3D stereo sounds for all audio sources (e.g entities, explosions, etc.).
· Doppler effects that distort all sounds according to the relative velocity of the listener.
· Can play mp3 and ogg-vorbis music files.
· Available on all currently and future supported platforms.
· Can directly import models in ase and mdl (Half-Life 1) model file formats.
· Importers for 3ds, lwo, obj, md5 (Doom 3), mdl2 (Half-Life 2) file formats are in preparation.
· The object-oriented model code design makes adding new or own file formats very easy.
· A discrete-level-of-detail (dlod) technique allows artists to easily create and combine models that dynamically reduce their level-of-detail when the viewer gets farther away. This way, a huge number of highly detailed models can be on the screen all at the same time.
· An effective proxy mechanism makes sure that resources are optimally managed: No model and no texture is ever instantiated more than once. Whenever multiple models can share any resources, they are shared.
· All models consistently employ the new Ca3DE Material System for rendering, can exploit all of the MatSys's advantages, and thus obtain optimal results and perfect integration with the other objects on the screen.
· For animated models, both vertex-blending (morphing) as well as skeleton-based animation are supported.
· If the file format supports it, Ca3DE can hierarchically combine sub- and super-models and blend animations (e.g. the mixing of different upper and lower body animations).
· Static Detail Models for adding a rich and immersing amount of detail to the worlds.
· A model (pre-)viewer that displays models with per-pixel lighting and shadows is included with the MDK.
· Implements the excellent SOAR algorithm by Peter Lindstrom and Valerio Pascucci.
· Provides continuous-level-of-detail, permitting very large out-door scenes.
· Employs geo-morphing for perfectly smooth transitions between levels of detail.
· View-frustrum culling yields an optimal terrain approximation.
· Can directly load terrains from Terragen (ter) and portable graymap (pgm) files in full 16 bit precision or from any bmp, tga, png or jpeg image file in 8 BPP precision.
· Integrates fully into the rest of Ca3DE (i.e. terrains are in the PVS, use optimized code for collision detection and physics, etc.).
· Even all compile tools are aware of terrains, and act accordingly.
· There are no restrictions in combining terrains with other elements of Ca3DE worlds.
· Full integration with the new Ca3DE Material System - you can apply arbitrary materials to terrains (e.g. with detail-maps and so on).
· Direct terrain support and terrain preview in the Ca3DE world editor CaWE.
· A terrain (pre-)viewer is included with the MDK.
· Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) control the engine.
· Simple to use C++ code interfaces make it easy to create entirely new games or applications (MODs) with Ca3DE.
· Also the Material System can easily be augmented with new effects, or ported to new platforms via clean and well-documented C++ interfaces.
· New Materials Development Kit (MDK) is freely available (see Downloads site), including all required tools and detailed documentation.
· An example: the United States Air Force, Research Labs for Human Effectiveness employ the Ca3D-Engine in warfighter simulation experiments to study the visuo-spatial working memory of their pilots.
· MDK freely available for developing new worlds or even entirely new games (MODs).
· Includes the complete source-code of the Ca3DE DeathMatch MOD.
· Includes CaWE, the Ca3DE World Editor, a comfortable editor for editing worlds for Ca3DE. CaWE is included both in the Windows and the Linux package of the MDK!
· Includes documentation (User Manual, Making New Materials, Material System), and all tools that are required for Ca3DE game development: CaWE, CaBSP, CaPVS, CaLight, CaSHL, Model Viewer, Material Viewer, Terrain Viewer.
· Full support for curved surfaces (Bezier Patches) as seen in Doom 3, from the CaWE editor through preprocessing to dynamic lighting and shadows.
· The vegetation of large eco-systems as implemented in one of my university projects is soon to be integrated.
· In-game command console. For example, the display resolution and mode (full-screen or windowed) can be changed "in-game".
· Realistic physics modeling for all world entities: natural player movement, accurate collision detection, 6 degrees of freedom, acceleration, friction, gravity, water, ladders, ...
· In addition, the integration of a physics engine is planned for one of the next releases.
· Particle Effect Engine (for explosions, smoke, muzzle flashes, fog, rain, snow, blood, ...)
· BSP, PVS and Portal-based rendering.