We're happy to release new and updated development packages today!

The current revision in the SVN source code repository is r49 (timeline), and thus the source code archives (zip and tar.gz) at the Downloads page have been updated accordingly.

Also at the Downloads page is the new binary development release. Just like the older stable release 9.06, it contains – at r49 – the ready-to-run binaries.

Regarding their content, these releases are mostly maintenance releases. They contain many fixes and enhancements as listed at the timeline and our news.
A very recent addition is the ability to record the paths of a players movement, and to load them as pointfiles into CaWE (details).

You start the recording of a path by typing
at the in-game console. The recording starts immediately and writes the path into file mypath.pts.
The recording is stopped by quitting the map, by starting a new recording into another file, or by entering
at the in-game console.

The resulting file can then be loaded into CaWE just like pointfiles for leak detection.

This feature has been specially implemented for another research project at the University of Applied Sciences of Dortmund, where the Cafu Engine is employed for simulating lighting conditions in urban environments.

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Hi all, today I'm happy to be able to say that more administrative tasks have largely been completed:

First of all, we now have a Roadmap page that outlines the Cafu development process and refers to the list of open tickets that are scheduled for implementation. The Roadmap items itself are kept as tickets in the issue tracker in the future and asap ("as soon as possible") milestones, and are thus easily accessed via the tracker reports. For example, this one lists all tickets, ordered by milestones.
As always, you're welcome to add your own ideas to the Roadmap, and/or to help with implementing them!

I think that the list already contains several very interesting items, such as OpenGL 3.2 and DirectX 11 renderers for Cafu, work on plants and vegetation, port to Mac OS, and many more. Accordingly, this year we will apply as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2010. I don't know if we have any chances of being accepted, but the GSoC is definitively a great project and worth a try - after all, we have great technology with Cafu, and I hope that both students and Google are interested in further improving it. We will post more information and especially a more detailed list of ideas here soon.

Finally, thanks to Gmane, all our mailing lists are now available as Usenet newsgroups for reading with a newsreader as well. Gmane provides mail-to-news gateway in both directions, so that you can both read and post messages to the newsgroups.

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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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