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Feature List |
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3D Rendering and Material System Features
 
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- New Cafu 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, reflectiveness 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, ...
- Cafu 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 Cafu 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 Cafu servers.
On start-up, Cafu 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.
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Multi-Player Network Support
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- Client/server architecture for multi-player support, implemented in very well designed C++ code.
- The server can run on Windows or Linux (both client-integrated as well as dedicated servers are available).
- The client is available both for Windows and Linux. Clients can also act as servers (e.g. for LAN games)!
- 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.
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Cross-Platform and Cross-Compiler Portability
Windows
 32-bit
64-bit |
Linux / Unix
32-bit
64-bit |
Mac OS X
coming
soon! |
- Use the same source code on Windows, Linux, and (soon!) Mac OS X.
- Full support for native 32- and 64-bit code on all platforms.
- Supports the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005, 2008 and 2010 compilers on Windows, and the GCC 3.x and 4.x on Linux and Unix.
- Carefully designed, easy to read, standards compliant, portable and well documented C++ source code.
State-of-the-Art Lighting Technology
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- 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 Cafu Material System.
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3D Sound Effects and Audio Support
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- 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.
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Graphical User Interface System
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- A powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) System (or short: GuiSys) is integrated with the engine.
- GUIs can be 2D (regular GUIs for game menus etc.) as well as 3D for world (entity) GUIs. This provides a maximum of flexibility in functionality and design for all in-game interactive elements like for example call-lift buttons, doors with access control, computer displays of all kinds, etc.
- GUIs can fully be scripted by the Lua-based Scripting system!
- The GuiSys C++ interfaces can also be accessed from the game code directly, e.g. in order to implement all kinds of HUDs (Head-Up Displays) for the player.
- An easy-to-use tool for creating own fonts for use with the Gui System is included with the SDK.
- As examples, the current SDK implements the in-game console, the chat input, the "Really Quit?" dialog, the HUD and a world (entity) GUI all with the GuiSys.
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Model Features
- Animation blending allows smooth transitions from one animation sequence to the next.
- With animation channels you can play different animation sequences on different parts of the model (e.g. head, torso, legs).
- Multiple skins: Re-use the same mesh with different surface materials.
- Submodels: Each player is easily combined with any weapon.
- Level-of-Detail: Automatically switch to lower-res meshes when the model gets farther away from the player.
- Full integration with the Cafu Material System for per-pixel lighting and shadows.
Model Editor
- Use the graphical Model Editor to import many model file formats.
- A complete toolbox for inspecting, transforming and texturing your models.
- Adjust and tweak any Cafu-specific model feature to prepare your models for use in the Cafu Engine.
- Attach graphical, interactive GUIs to any model.
- Check out the Gallery.
- Learn more at the Documentation.
Very Large Terrains
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- 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 Cafu (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 Cafu worlds.
- Full integration with the new Cafu 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 Cafu world editor CaWE.
- A terrain (pre-)viewer is included with the SDK.
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Easy Extensibility and Great Flexibility
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- Supports Scripting based on the Lua programming language!
- Several forms of scripting are supported by the Cafu engine (e.g. cmat material definition files), the most important of which are GUI scripting and entity (map) scripting. For example, a lift that stops at several floors with each floor having a call button can completely be implemented by GUI and map scripts.
- Many relevant interfaces are available to (have bindings to) both the C++ game code as well as the Lua scripts.
- 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 Cafu.
- Also the Material System can easily be augmented with new effects, or ported to new platforms via clean and well-documented C++ interfaces.
- An example: the United States Air Force, Research Labs for Human Effectiveness employ the Cafu engine in warfighter simulation experiments to study the visuo-spatial working memory of their pilots.
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Software Development Kit
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- The live demos include all binaries for developing new worlds or entirely new games.
- Includes the sample source-code of the Cafu DeathMatch game.
- Includes CaWE, the Cafu World Editor, a comfortable editor for editing worlds for Cafu.
- CaWE is included both in the Windows and the Linux packages!
- The user interface is intuitive and easy to learn for beginners. For experts, it has powerful features for fast and comfortable editing.
- Real-time preview of all models and Material System effects.
- Auto-save and recovery feature for crash-safe editing.
- Can import Doom 3 and Half-Life 1+2 maps.
- Includes all binary tools that are required for Cafu game development: CaWE, CaBSP, CaPVS, CaLight, CaSHL, Model Viewer, Material Viewer, Terrain Viewer.
- Exhaustive documentation and support is available online.
- Reasonably priced source code licenses are available at the Licensing page for independent developers, students, professional teams and academic institutions.
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Special Features
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- 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 Bullet Physics Engine has been integrated.
- Particle Effect Engine (for explosions, smoke, muzzle flashes, fog, rain, snow, blood, ...)
- BSP, PVS and Portal-based rendering.
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