The open-source game engine and graphics engine for multiplayer, cross-platform, real-time 3D action

We're happy and proud to announce immediate availability of Cafu 12.05, the May 2012 binary release of the Cafu Engine!

Cafu is an open-source 3D game and graphics engine. The new version 12.05 culminates three years of exciting work into a new stable demo release: It marks the completion and first release of the new Cafu Model Editor, many structural enhancements for game developers, and the beginning of our work on the next version (which in fact already has begun — we just couldn't wait).


New Features

For game developers, we cleaned up the source code, revised the code design, improved the directory layout, added new C++ and scripting reference documentation, fixed many bugs, added support for new compiler versions and platform variants, speeded up the release cycle for source archives and development binary releases, and much more.

Several hundred changes to the source code were made, see the complete changelog for details.


The Model Editor

The highlight of the release is the new Cafu Model Editor and the new models program code. The Model Editor answers the question:


It can import many file formats and provides a graphical user interface for making Cafu-specific settings and adjustments to the imported model.

The related new model code implements advanced features like automatic resource sharing, skeletal animation, seamless blending of several animation sequences, animation channels, skins, level-of-detail, submodels, GUI fixtures, and a lot more.

For more information about the Model Editor, please see:



We'd like to thank everyone who participated in development of Cafu 12.05: programmers, documentation writers (a work in progress), and testers. We also thank our user community for the dedication and support — we needed it more than ever.

Now that this version is finally released, we are grasping the future with both hands: A new series of improvements has already been prepared, and we're now eager to implement them as quickly as possible!

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Our preparations for the upcoming stable release are almost complete:

We've just uploaded the second set of release candidates. They are available at the Downloads page in section "Development Releases", where the files of the release candidates are named Cafu-bin-r525...

As one of the core features of the release will be the new Model Editor, we've also finished the related documentation, which you find at



The Model Editor How-Tos have a tutorial video that also serves well as introduction:



If you want to help with ironing out the remaining issues before the new stable release is officially announced and download mirrors are equipped, please

• get and test the release candidates,
• proof-read the documentation (edit the pages if you like!),
• check the updated Feature List (sections "Model Features" and "Model Editors"),
• the Gallery has a new section dedicated to the Model Editor as well,
• watch the above video,
• report all feedback, issues and questions at the support forums.

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The newly developed Model Editor is rapidly approaching completion, and we will take the occasion to create a new stable, binary Cafu Engine demo release as well.

As creating precompiled, binary Cafu releases has been a lengthy and tiresome process in the past that involved many manual steps and was prone to errors -- this is also why you typically saw so few of them -- we've spent some work to create new scripts that automate all steps for creating, uploading and publishing new source and binary releases of the Cafu Engine:

• export_zip.py prepares new source code releases,
• make_binary.py prepares new binary releases.

Additionally, the website is more clever now: it assembles the list of available files automatically, so that we no longer have to hand-edit it every time. As a result, making new releases is a lot easier now than it was before.

You can already see the fruits of these changes at the Downloads page, where the r514 releases have all been created as outlined above. (I will soon post another News announcement that addresses the newly released files and the Model Editor itself.)


Cafu Engine support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP pre-SP2

Unfortunately, it's getting more and more difficult to continue support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pre-SP2 in the Cafu Engine.

I'm still using Windows 2000 on one of my development machines, and never found that it's lacking any crucial features compared to the Windows 7 system I'm currently writing this post with. So I'm still perfectly happy, and if it was for me, I'd continue using Windows 2000 for Cafu Engine development. However, it's getting increasingly difficult to get recent drivers, software and support for Windows 2000. Worse, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 cannot build program executables that run under Windows 2000 and Windows XP pre-SP2, so we're stuck with Visual Studio 2005.

Well, all good things must come to an end, and so we've decided to officially drop Windows 2000 support in the Cafu Engine. (Inofficially, for my private builds, I'll continue using it for another while.) In fact, the recent r514 Windows releases have already been built with Visual Studio 2010.

I guess it is worth noting that the Cafu Engine has supported Windows 2000 longer than Microsoft itself, and far longer than most projects or companies would have done.

It may be possible to continue building for Windows 2000 using either Visual Studio 2005 or the GCC, but with newer compilers for the latest C++11 standard being just around the corner, we will eventually migrate to C++11 and take advantage of the new compiler and language features.

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A group of currently 13 students (and growing) at the University of Applied Science of Ingolstadt is using the Cafu Engine for developing a game project in the course of their computer science lectures.

Their goal is to create a platform independent MMORPG whose gameplay does not involve gun battles, but requires the player to make economic decisions to win.

The project uses high-definition textures and is set in a medieval architecture, thanks to a texture artist and a map architect among the group members.

The project team is currently negotiation a sponsoring contract with EPOS CAT GmbH in Ingolstadt.

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I'm happy to announce that the Cafu Engine project is now mirrored at SourceForge:



Please take a minute to post a review about Cafu at the SourceForge mirror site!

Many thanks to the SourceForge team who made this possible!

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Dear friends,

first and above all, I wish you all a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year! I hope that everyone is up and well, and has some good and peaceful holidays.

For Cafu, it has been an exciting year that was centered around the development of the new Model Editor (Introduction), which is a component build into CaWE next to the Map Editor, the GUI Editor and the Font Wizard.

The work on the Model Editor is almost complete now, and early in the new year, we will conclude it with a new stable binary release of the Cafu Engine.

There are only two issues left to be implemented before the release:

• The automatic computation of the tangent-space vectors should be user tweakable. Right now, the Cafu model code implements a very good compromise for computing these vectors, but sometimes you just need a slightly different method, e.g. one that implements the hard, faceted shading that sometimes comes with models that need no smoothing, or the smoothing method should do the averaging computations a bit differently than normally.
  
  
• The other feature has been mentioned in my previous news post Of animation channels, blending and poses:
  It turns out that animation channels, blending and poses are just different ways to apply and combine weights to the individual bones of a model (analogous to the way how weights assign mesh vertices to one or several bones). All this can naturally be described in "expressions" that are easy to write in C++ code, script code, and if necessary even in a graphical editor.
  Here are some examples (they are very abstract pseudo-code though):
  
  
  Code:
  a = AnimExpressionT(Apply the "walking" animation to channel "legs")
  b = AnimExpressionT(Apply the "shooting" animation to channel "torso")
  c = a + b
  
  Now play "c" on the model.
  Note how the "+" operator naturally combines the individual expressions a and b, yielding a new composite expression c.
  
  A slightly more complicated example:
  
  Code:
  walk  = AnimExpressionT(Apply the "walking" animation to channel "legs")
  run   = AnimExpressionT(Apply the "running" animation to channel "legs")
  shoot = AnimExpressionT(Apply the "shooting" animation to channel "torso")
  
  c = cross_fade(walk to run) + shoot
  
  Again, play "c" on the model.
  Similar to the "+" operator, the cross_fade() function in the above example is actually a way to construct a new composite expression from its child expressions walk and run.
  
  You'll hear more about this soon.

Finally, as we changed the way how GUIs are fixed to models, we recently added new terminal models as well (using the Model Editor, of course ).
Here is a screenshot of the new teleporter stations in map BpWxBeta:

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