Crystal Space 3D Engine v0.92 (Windows)

Crystal Space 3D Engine v0.92 (Windows)

This program is an open source 3D engine for the Linux, Windows, Apple/NeXT, BeOS, and Macintosh platforms. It renders in OpenGL, Direct3D, or software and includes curved surfaces, volumetric fog, dynamic colored lighting, terrain engine, and LOD features and more. See additional information on what's included with this release.

General Architecture:

True 6DOF engine with arbitrary sloped convex polygons.

Flexible plugin system which allows for plugging in other modules including scripting languages. Python and LUA scripting plugins are already included. There are also various other plugins (fonts, sound, ...).

Crystal Space uses SCF for communication between several layers (like between the 3D Engine and the 3D Rasterizer). This allows plug-and-play capabilities and other nice stuff.

Support for 8-bit (palette), 15/16-bit (truecolor), and 32-bit (truecolor) displays.

Crystal Space has commandline arguments and can run at many resolutions (320x200, 640x480, 800x600, ...).

Very configurable via commandline or configuration file.

C++ source (and optional assembler) is available. Crystal Space falls under the LGPL GNU copyleft license for libraries which means that the engine can be used in commercial products provided you can conform to the LGPL license (no, you DON'T have to release the source of your game if you use CS).

cs-config script to make it easier for external applications to use CS.

Textures and Texture Mapping:

Textures can have any size which is a power of two and they need not be square.

Crystal Space supports textures with various formats including GIF, TGA, PNG, BMP, JPG, and others.

It is possible to map a texture on a polygon in various ways (rotated, scaled, mirrored, ...).

Perspective correct texture mapping with interpolation every 16 pixels.

Transparent and semi-transparent textures allowing for see-through water surfaces and windows.

In addition to the usual lightmapped textures you can also use triangles which are gouroud shaded.

Mipmapping to minimize memory strain on the texture cache and to have nicer looking textures when a polygon is far away.

Support for dynamic textures (i.e. texture that you can render on and put on a polygon as well as normal textures).

Support for internal 24-bit textures with a private colormap for every texture or true 24-bit.

Multi-texturing with OpenGL.

Engine Features:

Dynamic gouroud shaded sky dome (half-sphere) for a very realistic and nice looking sky. With very little programming it is possible to have a moving sun which actually modifies the color of the sky in real-time.

Support for multi-layered and animated skyboxes and skydomes.

Landscape engine.

Crystal Space supports mirrors!

With mirrors and alpha mapping you can create really nice shiny or reflecting surfaces.

Static colored lights with real shadows. Lighting and shadows are precalculated before the world is displayed.

Dynamic colored lights with soft shadows!

Precalculated Radiosity on the Lightmaps!

3D triangle mesh sprites with frame animation. Convertors for Quake MDL and Quake II MD2 formats to Crystal Space are included. Importers for 3DS, MDL, MD2, OBJ, POV, and ASE are also included. The meshes are actually progressive meshes allowing for dynamic LOD (level of detail) changes. There is also support for skeletal sprites.

2D sprites and a particle system using those 2D sprites.

Depth-correct colored volumetric fog in sectors (both software and hardware renderers).

Optional halo's around lights for nice atmospheric effects. Also support for lens-flares.

Support for curved surfaces (Beziers, ...).

Visibility system based on a combination of portals, octrees, BSP trees and c-buffer (coverage buffer).

Hardware accelerated transforms (if available and with OpenGL) for 3D triangle mesh sprites, curved surfaces, and terrain engine.

Portability:

Currently Crystal Space has been ported to DOS (DJGPP), Unix (X Windows, OpenGL), GNU/Linux (X Windows, SVGALIB, SDL, and OpenGL) Macintosh (also with OpenGL), Windows 32-bit (DirectDraw, Direct3D (in progress), and OpenGL), BeOS (also with OpenGL), NextStep, OpenStep, Rhapsody, and OS/2 (also with OpenGL).

Optional Direct3D hardware accelaration on Windows for DX8 is in progress.

Optional OpenGL hardware acceleration on Windows, GNU/Linux, BeOS, Macintosh, and OS/2. The OpenGL port has been tested with Mesa on GNU/Linux and works very well. The other OpenGL ports will also work well.

Optional MMX support for processors that support it.

File Format Support:

Crystal Space can directly load 3DS, MDL, MD2, ASE, OBJ, or POV objects.

Powerful ASCII world file format allowing you to easily redefine the world (a real editor is in development (MazeD)).

Levels can be stored in standard compressed ZIP archives so that you can easily make a bundle of one level.

It's possible to make libraries of objects, textures and other game related stuff and put it all in a seperate ZIP file.

A convertor to convert MAP files (from Quake/HalfLife) to CS is also included. You can use this to edit levels with QuarK/WorldCraft or other editors.

A convertor to convert 3DS to models or levels is included.

Several Blender scripts (Python) are included to export models and levels from within Blender.

Various Other Features:

Font system plugin to support other font types. Currently CS fonts and truetype fonts are supported.

Moving objects and a (currently limited) script language controlling the movement.

Hierarchical bounding box collision detection system.

Powerful physics library is included too. It is a dynamics modeling and simulation engine.

Sound support (for Windows, GNU/Linux and Macintosh only currently).

Support for 3D sound (DS3D, EAX, A3D, ...).

Support for various sound formats: WAV, MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, AU, AIFF, IFF, and MOD (using MikMod).

Simple networking support for Windows, GNU/Linux and Unix (sockets based).

There is also an input/output console (like in Quake) that can be activated with the 'tab' key.

Here are things which are currently in progress:

Work on all 3D rasterizers (Direct3D, and OpenGL). Trying to improve them every day. Better support for hardware accelerated transform and lighting is one of the things we're working on all the time.

Continue work on curved surfaces (add Nurbs and other types of curves, improve lightmapping, ...).

More work on the sound system (like sounds which are influenced by the 3D position of an object and so on ...).

Start work on PVS (Potentially Visible Set).

Here are several things that we plan to do for Crystal Space in the near future:

We will start working on a general LOD (Level Of Detail) manager in CS.