Crystal Space **AWOL**

Last Updated on July 22, 2020

Crystal Space is a free 3D game toolkit. It can be used for a variety of 3D visualization tasks. Many people will probably be interested in using Crystal Space as the basis of a 3D game, for which it is well suited.

It is divided in a main package containing an engine, a development package containing development related utilities, a documentation package containing extended HTML information.

It can optionally use OpenGL, SDL, X11and SVGALib. It can also use assembler routines using NASM and MMX extensions.

Features include:

• Generic
  • Highly platform independent with good platform abstraction.
  • Modularized using a lightweight component framework, SCF, based upon the COM model.
  • Self contained so that many modules requires no or few external dependencies.
  • Written in standard C++ using very few non*standard extensions.

• Comprehensive and competent
  • Contains modules for 2d and 3d graphics, sound, collision detection and dynamics via ODE and bullet as well as support modules for filesystem abstraction, xml loading etc.
  • Graphics subsystem:
    • Generic renderer abstraction with main implementation being OpenGL based
    • Supports hardware accelerated rendering on all supported platforms and cards from all well known vendors.
    • OpenGL renderer uses acceleration techniques such as vertex buffers in AGP or VRAM and asyncronious uploads.
    • Shader centric design with shaders defined in xml markup and shader programs implemented using Cg, assembly language or fixed function operations.
    • Complicated shaders can be constructed using a meta syntax as composed by simpler modules that gets combined on load.
    • Library of common shaders such as normal mapping, parallax (virtual displacement) mapping and hardware skinning.
    • Contains a software renderer with scaled down features for platforms without OpenGL and/or debugging.
  • Mesh objects:
    • Plugin based mesh object system.
    • Generic triangle based mesh with support for frame and bone based animation.
    • Terrain mesh with fast block based LOD system.
    • Configurable and extensible particle system mesh.
    • General system for static LOD on all types of meshes.
    • Bone based animation mesh using the cal3d library.
  • Collision detection and dynamics:
    • Provides bindings for ODE and bullet dynamics systems.
    • Automatic setup of collision detection meshes and synchronization of position and orientation of meshes.
    • Simplified collision detection when you don’t need the full dynamics simulation.
  • Sound system:
    • 2D and 3D sound rendering via DirectSound, Alsa, OSS and CoreAudio
    • Provides both one*time playing of effects and streaming playing in the background for music.
  • Other:
    • Filesystem abstraction layer, VFS, that handles both physical files on disk and files within ZIP files, giving virtual layout independent from platform and physical layout
    • Abstracted configuration layer with support for settings in configuration file, system dependent storage such as the registry and command line.

• Compatible
  • Custom model and scene file format with exporters for Blender and 3d studio max and model importers for common file formats such as 3ds and md2.
  • Supports all common texture file formats including dds, jpg, png as well as some more exotic ones such as mng (animated texture format).
  • Sound loaders for wav and ogg formats.
  • All subsystems easily extendable for new file formats.

PROJECT CLOSED

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