Elflight Engine [beta]

[Tami]

[url=\"http://www.codededge.com/\"]Elflight Engine[/url] - a high performance games engine designed with the web in mind.

Hardware accelerated 3D games can be streamed into a web browser window, a seperate application window or full-screen. In addition, the streaming aspect of the engine allows games to be developed that are near 'instant play' and zero hastle.

When a player first runs a game only the minimum of data is downloaded to their machine. Additional data such as 3D models, terrain and sound are then seamlessly streamed over the Internet as and when required and cached on the user's local machine.

The Elflight Engine is particularly well suited to the development of MMOs and Virtual Worlds. Data can be incrementally downloaded as the player explores the world around them.

Multiple worlds are supported and each world can be seamlessly spanned across multiple servers allowing all players to share the same world if desired.

Everything is designed for the best user experience.
Technical Requirements

Since the engine is based upon industry standard OpenGL and Java (1.5+) technologies, most major platforms are supported including Mac OS X 10.4+, Windows and Linux. JSR 231 (JOGL) provides the Java Binding for the OpenGL API.

Features
Display Modes

* Web Browser (resizable)
* Application Window
* Full Screen

Overall Architecture

* Optimised for high frame rates
* Works well on modest hardware
* Object-oriented, robust and highly extendable

Scene Graph

* Object-oriented 3D Scene Graph, nested transforms
* Bounding-volume based camera frustum culling
* Discrete LOD (Level of Detail) support
* State management (eg. lights, fog, materials)
* Support for controllers (eg. joint controllers, node controllers)
* Scene Queue for thread-safe real-time updates (such as background model loading)

Camera

* Standard Camera
* First Person Perspective Camera (mouse & keyboard)
* Third Person Perspective Camera (mouse & keyboard)

Texturing

* Supports BMP, TGA, JPG, PNG, GIF
* Mip mapping (hardware or software generated)
* Multitexturing
* Dot3 Bump mapping (fixed function pipeline or shader)
* Specular mapping (fixed function pipeline or shader)

Geometry

* Triangle Meshes
* Quad Meshes

Bounding Volumes

* Bounding Spheres
* Bounding Ellipsoids
* Bounding AABBs
* Bounding OBBs
* Bounding Models

Picking

* Bounding Volume Picking
* Triangle Picking
* Edge Picking
* Vertex Picking
* Mouse Support

Collision Detection

* Static Collision Detection
o Bounding Volume to/from Bounding Volume
o Bounding Volume to/from Geometry
o Geometry to/from Geometry
* Dynamic (Swept) Collision Detection
o Bounding Volume to/from Bounding Volume
o Bounding Volume to/from Geometry
o Geometry to/from Geometry

Collision Response

* Sliding player to geometry collision response w/ gravity
* Flexible API for adding custom collision responses

Terrain

* Optimised for high frame rates
* Quad-tree based
* Streamable over the Internet, virtually any size
* Sun and Moon, Clouds, Sunset, Dawn
* LoD Support
* Base texture + N detail textures
* Light map support

Animation

* Jointed skeletal animation
* Rigid skin binding
* Smooth skin binding
* Fixed function pipeline or shader

Import

* Wavefront OBJ (for static geometry)
* Milkshape MS3D (supports skeletal animation)
* Autodesk Maya (bespoke pipeline, supports skeletal animation)
* Elflight Binary Format (supports skeletal animation)
* Custom Imports

Export

* Wavefront OBJ (for static geometry)
* Elflight Binary Format (supports skeletal animation)
* Custom Exports

Resource Handling

* Streaming support
* Local disc or remote server
* VFS - 'Virtual Filing System'
o Provides a unified mechanism for requesting game file regardless of physical location
o Automatic caching of data with versioning support
* EFS - 'Elflight Filing System'
o A virtual hard disc for securely reading and writing game files
o Storage is one or more '.efs' files

Resource Server

* Stores game files for remote retrieval by clients
* Support for multiple resource servers

Game Server / Simulation Framework

* Object oriented simulation framework
* Virtual clock and automatic synchronisation of clock between server and client
* Automatic synchronisation of game objects between client and server
* Player interaction, movement (with dead reckoning support)
* Game object persistence
* Support for multiple game servers

Networking

* Non-blocking IO-based framework
* Efficient and scalable
* Automatic message assembly
* Message tampering detection

GUI

* Object oriented 2D framework
* Support for TrueType fonts
* Anti-aliasing support
* Images, Buttons, Labels, Text Boxes, Text Areas etc.
* Suuport for custom controls

Special Effects

* Vertex shader support
* Fragment shader support

Sound Effects / Music

* OpenAL Support

Elflight World Builder

The Elflight World Builder is a real-time 3D editing tool that allows the developer or artist to edit the world from within the world itself. This world can either be a live world or a parallel development world.

Any changes made to the world are instantly visible to anybody online, enabling rapid collaborative development of 3D environments. An offline mode is also provided.

The software has been designed to make efficient use of the Elflight Engine.

We have incorporated standard functionality such as importing and transforming geometry together with more advanced features such as collision detection and game-server simulation integration.

As this product is currently in BETA, they are accepting beta testers. Fill in their application form [url=\"http://www.codededge.com/betasignup/\"]here[/url]