C4 Engine (commercial)

[Tami]

[url=\"http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/index.php\"]The C4 Engine[/url] is one of the most technologically advanced 3D game engines available today for the Windows and MacOS X platforms. Its architecture is the product of many years of careful and clean design led by computer graphics author Eric Lengyel, making it one of the easiest and trouble-free engines to program.

The C4 Engine contains a comprehensive suite of robustly implemented game programming tools. Not only is it a powerhouse of a graphics engine, but it also includes integrated support for sound, music, networking, input devices, resource management, and much more.

The engine is reasonably priced for independent developers at $200 (US) per programmer, and the source code for the engine, demo game, and all tools are included with the license. Educational site licenses are also available to institutions who wish to use C4 as a teaching tool. Each C4 Engine license includes all of the following:

* The complete source code for the C4 Engine.
* The source code for the demo and sample game modules.
* The source code for the all of the tools, including the World Editor and import tools.
* Project files for Visual Studio 7/8 (Windows) and Xcode 2 (Mac).
* Access to private forums where they receive support directly from the engine programmers.
* Full access to the C4 Engine wiki with editing privileges.
* The C4 Engine API documentation.

All license types include free updates forever. The professional license reverts to a standard license after a game title has been shipped and must be renewed for another game. There is a total of 4 license versions: Standard, Professional Site, Educational Site and Serious Games.

Features:

Full-scene dynamic lighting and shadows

* Support for five different fundamental light source types.
* All lights and shadows rendered in real time at global scale.
* Spot and cube light texture projections.
* Precomputed ambient light volumes.
* Four fully orthogonal shadow rendering techniques.
* Penumbral soft shadows for area light sources.
* Shadow volume clipping and scissor optimizations.

Advanced per-pixel shading capabilities

* Comprehensive bump mapping support.
* Enhanced parallax mapping.
* Horizon mapping.
* Ambient occlusion mapping.
* Gloss-mapped specular reflections.
* Cube environment mapping.
* Cook-Torrance microfacet surface reflection.
* Bumpy reflection and refraction.
* Realistic water shading.

Scene graph

* Extremely clean class hierarchy for scene graph nodes, including geometries, cameras, lights, sounds, zones, portals, triggers, markers, and special effects.
* General state serialization support for saving worlds.
* Quick save and quick load capabilities.
* Separation between per-instance and shared data.
* External scene graph referencing from within another scene graph.

State-of-the-art portal system

* Efficient large-scale visibility determination.
* Advanced interzone lighting analysis performed in real time.
* Special support for mirrors and remote portals.

High-level controller system

* Powerful hierarchical animation blending system.
* Handles state messaging in a multiplayer environment.
* Powerful scripting system that can be extended with custom actions.
* Cleanly extensible design and integration with the tools.

Special effects

* Full-scene cinematic motion blur.
* Volumetric fog with multiple density functions.
* Interactive in-game interface panels.
* High-quality procedural fire effects.
* Fully extensible particle systems.
* Real-time fluid surface simulation.
* Real-time cloth simulation.
* Surface markings on arbitrary geometry.

Sound manager

* Fully spatialized 3D sound effects.
* Doppler shift and other frequency effects.
* High-precision sound travel delay.
* Atmospheric absorption effects.
* Reverberation with multiple simultaneous environments.
* Directional sounds with cone attenuation.
* Obstruction attenuation applied to direct and reflected paths.
* Frequency-dependent volume settings for all effects.
* Permeation system determines how far sounds travel through interiors.
* Unlimited streaming music channels with seamless looping and concatenation.

Network manager

* Fast, reliable network implementation using UDP/IP.
* Solid fault tolerance and hacker resistance.
* Advanced security measures, including packet encryption.
* Automatic message distribution to entity controllers.

Core system

* Flexible resource management with configurable caching.
* Mathematics and geometry library.
* Extensible system commands and variables.
* Tool module plug-in architecture.

Full-featured integrated world editor

* World editor is part of the engine itself and runs within the engine's own windowing system.
* Powerful and intuitive interface design that allows fast level creation.
* Zero build time, so results are immediately visible while editing a level.
* Palettes for geometries, lights, sound sources, zones, portals, markers, and special effects.
* Support for multiple undo.

Graphical script editor

* Scripts are edited graphically for easy artist/designer access.
* Games can easily define custom script components, and these automatically appear in the editor.
* Controllers can advertise custom function calls that can be accessed from scripts.

Interface panel editor

* Fully interactive in-game interface panels can be created graphically.
* Custom scripts can be attached to panel items for limitless interactivity.
* Panels have an extensible animation system with many built-in techniques.

Model, animation, and texture import tools

* Support for the Collada scene format, enabling models to be imported from 3D Studio MAX, Maya, XSI, Blender, and other content creation packages.
* Full skeletal hierarchy support for skinned meshes.
* Bump map, parallax map, horizon map, and ambient occlusion channel calculations.
* Texture compression and automatic mipmap generation.