We wish you a merry
Christmas, peaceful holidays and a happy New Year!
While we too keep our offices closed until 2009-January-05, we made great
progress with the continued development of the Ca3D-Engine in the last few
weeks, and expect to finish some important changes early in the new year (in
fact, Carsten continues work over the holidays from his home office
).
Over the past few weeks, we frequently got inquiries like
"I want to make my new commercial game
with the Ca3D-Engine, and keep my source code closed. How will the external
libraries (and their licenses) that the Ca3D-Engine employs affect
me?"
The answer is: Hardly at all. We carefully considered the license of each
external library before it was integrated for use with the Ca3D-Engine: You can
develop your new product with the Ca3D-Engine, keep the external libraries in
as-is, and still keep your source code closed. You have to mention all the
libraries in your documentation, but we have prepared complete ready-to-use
lists for your convenience.
A detailed list of the external libraries employed by the Ca3D-Engine is given
here.
In order to make sure that our licensees can actually employ the external
libraries without being surprised by additional licensing issues later, we
spent the past few weeks reviewing each and every license again, verifying the
details. This was and is tedious work, and it turned out that we had to make a
few chances regarding some libraries in a few occasions. Good news is that the
Ca3D-Engine source code is organized in a highly modular fashion, and so
replacing one library with another is never a problem.
In many cases we even already provide the Ca3D-Engine with several alternatives
for the same task, so that you can easily choose according to your own
preferences (e.g. prefer FMOD or OpenAL? prefer OpenGL or DirectX? prefer
Bullet or PhysX? ...), usually with little or no additional work involved.
It turned out that for licensing issues, we had to provide another .zip file
decompressor library, and an alternative to the SOAR terrain algorithm when the
use is commercial. You can still use the original algorithms at the cost of
arranging extra licenses with the respective authors, but this is not required
at all and purely optional.
As it is our philosophy to provide you in the Ca3D-Engine a convenient,
out-of-the-box, no-extra-efforts-required, great developers package, we're
currently adding additional implementations to the above mentioned libraries,
e.g. the great
SOAR terrain rendering
implementation by Andras Balogh.
This important kind of work will be completed very soon, in early January, and
we're looking forward to resume the development of new features for the
Ca3D-Engine. After all, there is an exciting set of new features in the queue,
only waiting to be finished!!