I'm proud to announce that all the work in the past year has finally culminated
in the
release of a new Ca3D-Engine demo!
Many new, exciting features have been added to the Ca3D-Engine, and it's a real
pleasure to see it grow into an ever more powerful and under the hood more
flexible engine. In fact, I've had so much fun with the recent updates that I
had to make an effort to interrupt the current work to prepare and release the
latest version.
Anyways, I'm happy to be able to put the latest and greatest release of Ca3DE
so far into your hands now. Most of the new features have already been
mentioned here in former News articles, or discussed at the forums.
Nonetheless, here is an overview over the most crucial enhancements since the
prior release:
- Augmented lightmap technology: Precomputed Radiosity
illumination and dynamic lighting techniques have
now been combined in new GPU shaders to obtain the best aspects of both
worlds all-in-one: the high quality lighting with soft
shadows of Radiosity, the great surface detail of
normal-mapping and moving specular highlights, combined at
the very high performance of only one virtual
lightsource!
Make sure that you don't miss the new screenshots, but keep in mind
that the screenshots only show still snapshots - the best demonstration
is to move around the map in real-time.
- Very large map support: The "TechDemo" example map that comes with the
demo features an outdoor terrain of 1 km^2 in size plus
a multi-story underground building, all in one big,
continuous map. All the
screenshots of this release have been taken in the
same map!
- The new Ca3DE GUI System is a window manager inside
the engine. It is used to implement all kinds of interactive controls, like
the console window, chat dialogs, Head-Up Displays, user settings etc. One
great aspect of the GuiSys is that it can also be used for 3D world
GUIs (as known from Doom3), so interactive in-game panels are
easily added to any map.
Moreover, the GUIs are defined and controlled by scripts based on the
famous Lua programming language, making them
easy to write yet powerful and flexible.
The font-rendering subcomponent of the GuiSys produces high-quality,
typographically pleasing results that even take font
kerning into account.
- The new File System allows to virtualize all file
access of the Ca3D-Engine. That means that similar to Linux operating
systems, it is now easy to "mount" arbitrary devices into the Ca3DE
directory tree. For example, zip archives or encrypted
containers can now be accessed like files in a local path, local paths can
be superimposed into other paths like hardlinks (useful for MODs that share
assets from other MODs), and future releases will be able to show
remote FTP or HTTP conntections like local files, a nifty
feature useful e.g. for auto-updates.
-
Bezier patches are now a fully supported map primitive
- a feature that is prominently demonstrated throughout the new
TechDemo map.
-
Scene graphs have been introduced as the internal
datastructural representation of Ca3DE worlds. This makes the code
design a lot more flexible for future enhancements.
- The in-game console has been thoroughly revised. Well,
in fact, it has been entirely rewritten. It too is Lua-based now, which
means that now you can even write small Lua programs "online" at the Ca3DE
in-game console. The possibilities are endless, and I'll continue in the
next release to employ and refine them.
- Support for texture compression. This has been
implemented in a way to always employ the latest compression
technique that the graphics driver offers - even if it has been
developed and released after the Ca3D-Engine!
The Ca3DE SDK with the latest modding and mapping tools and source code will be
released soon.
Although it is certainly too early to talk about the release after this, here
is a brief outlook on the upcoming features:
- To be released in early summer 2007.
- Will have map- and entity-scripting, based of course on the
Lua programming language.
- Will have vegetation for the island.
- And anything else I can think of in the meanwhile.
I'd much appreciate your feed-back and comments about the latest release, so
please let me know what you think! The Ca3DE forum is found
here.