After having made Cafu available as free software, we have upgraded our website and added a bug and issue tracker, a new developers starting page, and new mailing lists.

The new bug and issue tracker is available at http://trac.cafu.de. Everyone can use it to file bugs, enhancement and feature suggestions, and source code patches for integration into the Cafu code base.

The mailing lists complement the Cafu forums for support, discussions and getting help. Being a bit more technical in nature than the forums, the mailing lists also receive information about changes to tickets in the issue tracker.

Last but not least, the new Developers page summarizes our resources specifically available to all Cafu developers.

We're much looking forward to your feedback about Cafu - let us know at the forums, the mailing lists, or via email!

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During the past few months, we've got many questions about upcoming features, the latest code changes, and the status of the current developments around the Cafu Engine. Well, to be perfectly honest, we had some trouble with providing new features and even with answering all the questions, but only because we were secretly working on something else: making the Cafu engine open-source!

Yes, you've read right - we have prepared the greatest Christmas present that we could ever give you, our fellow community, developers and friends:


All source code has been put under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3). The GPLv3 guarantees that from now on, Cafu is and will always be free software in the spirit of the Free Software Foundation.
In parallel, the source code will be available under custom commercial licenses as well (dual licensing), thus if you want to develop software that is free from the restrictions of the GPL, you can contact us for a custom license that is tailored to your needs.

Specifically for making the source code available for everyone, we've replaced our internal Subversion server with a new one that is powerful enough in order to provide you with proper repository access.

If you have Subversion installed, you can checkout the source code now via

svn checkout https://svn.lcube.de/dev123/projects/cafu/trunk Cafu

We will soon (before New Year) provide the source code in zip packages for download as well, and add documentation on how to access it via Subversion and how to compile it. All this will here be announced in another news post soon.

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We have long been preparing it, long been pondering it, and finally we're ready and happy to make the official announcement:


The name Ca3D-Engine, as well as its frequently used short form Ca3DE, has been used for the project almost since its invention many years ago.

However, it turned out that this name - a mix of capital and lowercase letters as well as a mix of letters and digits - also confused many people:


Well, you can probably imagine how difficult it is to find a new name for a project as large as this, a name that meets all our requirements: short, concise and timeless; somewhat fashionable, easy to speak in most languages, easy to write and to type, easy to remember; compatible with the old name (keeping some continuity); well suited for program and website logos, program names, etc. Oh, and without dash, with readily available domain names and no trademark conflicts or collisions with anything else.

We believe that we found the answer to all these issues with the new project name Cafu. As Cafu today does not only consist of a game engine, but in its entirety also of many tools such as map compilers, world editors, GUI editors, scripts, code and many other assets, we now use Cafu to refer to the project as a whole.

When we talk about specific components of the project, its easy to get more specific: Cafu maps, Cafu scripts, Cafu engine (very much like before, but without dash!), and so on. In fact, as the 3D engine is and stays the center of the project, we sometimes keep the two words Cafu Engine together. This is useful when the whole project is meant, but the thematic focus should also be communicated, as in the logo of this website.

We hope that you find the new name as much better as we do! The renaming-related changes cannot all be accomplished in one big step, but have already begun a while ago (most of the work is finished already) and will continue as we make new program releases and website updates.

By the way, the new name also helps us with something else: Cafu will become ... oh! wait! This is for the Christmas news!

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Another feature that we recently completed for the next release is the completely rewritten "Groups" support in CaWE.

Finally removing the confusing and unnecessary distinction between "visgroups" and normal (but funnily enough, invisible) groups, finally cleaning up the awkward user interface for temporarily ignoring the grouping feature ("select as a whole" vs. "select members individually"), finally loading and saving groups in the map files and having modifications to them recorded in the Undo/Redo system, finally removing many other inconsistencies and adding the new "lock for editing" feature, we believe that the new Groups support in CaWE has been a worthwhile enhancement.

For more information, please read the updated Groups section in the documentation.

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Last week we completed a new BSP tree implementation for the Cafu World Editor CaWE: The new BSP tree is orthogonal, meaning that it only uses axis-aligned planes for its split planes, so that it can be build, updated and traversed very quickly.

The new tree is used for accelerating the 3D rendering, that is, culling the map elements against the camera view frustum quickly and for sorting them front-to-back or back-to-front (for translucent surfaces).
In the future, the new BSP tree implementation can be used for other purposes as well, such as accelerating ray traces through the world.

For development and debugging, we've also added some code to CaWE that optionally visualizes the BSP tree split planes graphically. Here are some screenshots from the TechDemo map:

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As most of you already know, the Cafu World Editor "CaWE" comprises all our graphical editing tools like the map editor, the GUI editor, the font wizard, the material editor, and (soon) the model editor.

CaWE, and thus all its editors, employs the wxWidgets library for its graphical user interface, which makes our code easy to write, easy to maintain, and - very importantly - portable across many platforms: With a single code base, CaWE looks and feels like (in fact, it is) a native application on Windows, Linux, and (soon) Mac OS X.


As the latest 2.9 version series has recently been released, we've spend some quality time on migrating to the latest version. You can read in detail about the new features of the latest series in the wxWidgets changelog.txt. We especially benefit from the integrated and improved AUI (advanced user interface) classes, the Unicode support, the new event binding, and many enhancements in the wxGTK component. In addition to all the new and improved features, as a nice and free side effect we also got a simpler and faster build system and a more correct linking strategy under Linux.

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