Current revision

The Crystal Space SDK

• Portability
  • Highly platform independent with good platform abstraction. Supports GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows operating systems, and x86, PowerPC, ARM and SPARC processor architectures.
  • Support of a wide range of compilers and IDE, including Visual C++ 8, 9 & 10, gcc, MinGW/MSYS, Code::Blocks.
  • Written in standard C++ using very few non-standard extensions.
  • Self contained so that many modules requires no or few external dependencies.
  • Virtual File System handling both physical files on disk and files within ZIP files.
  • Abstracted configuration layer with support for settings in configuration file, system dependent storage such as the registry and command line.
  • Platform specific optimizations (MMX/SSE/Altivec).

• Modularity
  • Modularized using a lightweight component framework, SCF, based upon the COM model. Components can be easily loaded or switched dynamically.
  • Bindings for other programming languages through SWIG: Java, Python, Perl, dedicated bindings for Python.
  • All subsystems easily extendable for new file formats.

• Rendering & Lighting
  • OpenGL-based engine, supports hardware accelerated rendering on all supported platforms and cards from all well known vendors.
  • Rendering loops for custom rendering of objects.
  • Unshadowed, parallel-split shadow maps, and deferred lighting render managers.
  • Static lighter with radiosity and caustic.
  • Lightmap and per-vertex lighting.
  • Rendering to textures.

• Shaders
  • Can be written in Cg and ARB. Shader description and mappings are defined in a XML compliant language.
  • Support for multiple passes, vertex and fragment programs. Light selection and multiple lights in one pass possible.
  • Shader weaver for combination of shaders and post-processing effects.
  • HDR rendering, tone mapping and eye adaptation.
  • Fallback system of shader techniques for hardware compatibility.
  • Library of available shaders and post-processing effects: diffuse, specular, bump map, glow, parallax, fur, bloom, blur, water, glass, and many others.
  • Automatic environment mapping.

• Scene & Level Of Detail Management
  • Scene node system for easy composition of objects
  • Decomposition of a world in sectors with portals connecting them. Portals can be used for effects such as LOD management, streamed loading, mirrors or space warping.
  • Three different cullers: hardware occlusion culling (Occluvis), frustum culling (Frustvis), and dPVS (Dynavis).
  • General system for static LOD on all types of meshes, progressive LODS.
  • Impostors for replacement of far meshes with a 2D object.
  • Threaded loader for streamed loading of levels and objects.
  • Instanciation of meshes and objects.

• Meshes
  • Many different type of meshes: general triangle mesh with multi-materials, cal3d meshes, sprite 2D, sprite 3D, ocean,...
  • Terrain mesh with paging, multi-splatting, deformations and automatic loading and unloading of terrain cells.
  • Mesh generator to dress up a scene with objects such as flora and rocks,...
  • Decals to be added on top of other meshes, even animated.
  • Configurable and extensible particle system mesh with billboards, emitters, physical effectors,...
  • Halos and lens flares.
  • Automatic triangulation of shapes.

• Animation
  • Specialized and powerful mesh for advanced skeletal animation with animation blending trees, volume preserving dual quaternion skinning, morphing, and sockets.
  • Many types of animation nodes can be combined to generate dynamically complex animations: multi-blending, Finite State Machine, random, priority, LookAt, Inverse Kinematics (Quaternion-CCD and physically-based), speed (time warping), debug.
  • Ragdoll animation and animation of hairs & equipment.
  • Transparent import of BVH motion capture data, with real-time retargeting to a different (but similar) skeleton.
  • Motion capture viewer with integrated Point Light Display system.
  • Generic animation system for management of sequences of time events.
  • Coherent noise generation through the libnoise library.

• Audio
  • 2D and 3D sounds with OpenAL.
  • Audio codecs: speex, ogg, wav (8- and 16-bit PCM).
  • Provides both one-time playing of effects and streaming playing in the background for music.

• Physics & Collisions
  • Physics of rigid bodies and joints, made through a wrapper for two physics libraries: Bullet and ODE.
  • Support of kinematic bodies for interaction between classical animation and the physical simulation.
  • Transparent integration with the terrain system.
  • Soft bodies to simulate ropes, clothes and other volumetric deformable objects. General meshes can be animated automatically through them.
  • Debug plugin to visualize the physical simulation.
  • Simplified collision detection when you don't need the full dynamics simulation.

• Data Representation
  • XML language for the description of each object and plugin of the whole CS. XML files can be set binary for faster loading.
  • Procedural, dynamic and animated textures.
  • Support for many image formats: png, jpg, dds, bmp, gif, tga, mng, jng, (binary) alpha, transparency, non 2n sized images,...
  • Generic importer for static and animated models for many 3D file formats.
  • Dedicated Exporters for many 3D file formats: Blender up to 2.49b through blender2crystal, Blender 2.5x through B2.5CS, 3D Studio Max, Maya, and model importers for common file formats such as COLLADA, 3ds, cal3d and md2.

• User Interface
  • Event system & peripherals: mouse, joystick, keyboard.
  • Graphical user interface system through CEGUI.
  • User interface widgets for wxWidgets.
  • Text localization.
  • Plugin fo easy video recording and uber-screenshots.
  • Font servers, FreeType2 and glyphs fonts.

• Project Management
  • Debugging tools: generic plugin for visual debugging of scenes, support for Valgrind and CppUnit.
  • Scripts for generation of new projects.
  • Easy compilation and customization of the whole project thanks to Jam.

The Crystal Entity Layer

• Entity System
  • Each object in CEL is an entity. Entities are defined by adding them a list of property classes that defines their attributes and their behaviour.
  • Generic event system for communication between entities and property classes.
  • Persistence layer for saving and loading world states.
  • Experimental FTP-based network layer.

• Runtime Package Environment
  • CELStart: generic executable for all CELStart packaged applications, only the packed data files of the applications have to be installed on the user machines.
  • The whole logic may be written with bindings for Python, or in a XML scripting language.

• Artificial Intelligence
  • Behaviour trees to build complex artificial behaviours by combination of single decision nodes.
  • Hierarchical path finding upon Recast & Detour, steering behaviours.
  • Neural networks and genetic algorithms.

• World Management
  • Avatar and Non Player Character management: synchronization of the user actions with the mesh, its animations, its position and its collisions.
  • Camera management with many different modes: first person, third person, tracking, isometric, horizontal.
  • Region management: decomposition of a complete world in regions, with zoning between regions.
  • Advanced management of portals, e.g. for closing portals that are occluded.
  • Spawning of entities.
  • Triggering of proximity events.

• Inventory & Interaction
  • Key and peripherals events bindings.
  • Billboards and tooltips.
  • Inventory system.
  • Selecting and grabbing objects.

• Advanced Physics
  • Projectiles and damages to entities.
  • Collision management with the ground.
  • Advanced physical effects: fluids, thrusters, steering, explosions, attractors and repulsors.
  • Vehicles and their physics: bikes, cars, tanks, hovercrafts, or any wheeled vehicle.
  • Mesh deformation, e.g. for destroying gradually an object.