3D Game Engines
Contents
3D Game Engines ..........................................................................................................................................................1
C4 ..................................................................................................................................................................................3
Neo Axis ......................................................................................................................................................................10
OGRE ...........................................................................................................................................................................12
Irrlicht .........................................................................................................................................................................14
Panda 3D.....................................................................................................................................................................20
Crystal Space...............................................................................................................................................................23
Torque Game Engine ..................................................................................................................................................25
3D Game Studio ..........................................................................................................................................................27
Unity ...........................................................................................................................................................................29
3D Engines & SDKs

NeoAxis: Looks a good one (based on Ogre engine). Tried a quick evaluation, seems you have to use the presupplied project code framework for your project, which isn't the best if you want to make a serious project, also
documentation is sparse with little information.

C4: Sounds pretty good, OpenGL support only. Recommended by many and good documentation and support.
Need to purchase a license, but fairly cheap if for a serious project. Evaluation ongoing...

Quake 3: Commercial Game Engine.

Id Tech 4 : Commercial Game Engine.

Torque 3D: Recent reviews pretty bad.

Dark GDK: Developed by TGC. Apparently very slow in 3D, but good for 2D.

Ogre: A highjly rated graphics engine (but not entire game engine)

Unity: Apparently pretty good

Abyssal: Apparently pretty good

Panda3D: Open Source

Irrlicht: Open Source

Blitz3c: Blitz SDK, DirectX 7, lot faster than GDK?, e.g. TECNO BASE.

TrueVision: Decent, easy to use.

DX Studio: ?

Genesis 3D: ?
C4 Engine
It's a multi-platform operating system for games. It includes a comprehensive suite of game technologies including 3D
sound and music, network communications, input devices, memory and resource management, and a lot more
(Licenses
- Standard: $250/usr, Basic: $100/usr).
Graphics API
OpenGL
Operating Systems
Windows, MacOS, PS3
Programming Language
C/C++
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
Terathon Software (Eric Lengyel)
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:
•
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
•
Support for pack files and a virtual directory hierarchy
•
Skinable GUI's
Scripting:
•
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
•
Scripts support variables, looping, and conditional execution, all shown in a concise graphical manner
Built-in Editors:
•
Full-featured integrated cross-platform world editor
•
Interface panel editor
•
Advanced surface attribute manipulation and material management
•
Complete built-in windowing system
•
Powerful and intuitive interface design
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body:
•
Built-in character and projectile controllers.
•
Real-time fluid surface and cloth simulation.
Lighting: Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping, Radiosity, Gloss maps, Anisotropic:
•
Support for fully dynamic infinite, point, and spot lights
•
Gloss-mapped specular reflections
•
Ambient radiosity
•
Projected cube and spot textures
•
Cook-Torrance microfacet shading
Shadows: Shadow Mapping, Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
•
All shadows are rendered in real time at global scale
•
Three types of shadows are seamlessly combined in one world
•
True penumbral soft shadows for area light sources
Texturing: Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Projected:
•
Comprehensive bump mapping capabilities
•
Enhanced parallax mapping
•
Ambient occlusion channels
•
Emission/glow maps
•
Horizon mapping
•
Realistic water shading
Shaders: Vertex, Pixel, High Level:
•
Extensive support for vertex programs and pixel shaders
Scene Management: General, Portals, Occlusion Culling, LOD:
•
Efficient large-scale visibility determination
•
Advanced inter-zone lighting analysis at runtime
•
Special support for mirrors and remote portals
•
Object instancing and external scene referencing
•
Scene data can be imported from Collada format
Animation: Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:
•
Full skeletal hierarchy support for deformable meshes
•
Powerful hierarchical animation blending system
•
Forward and Inverse kinematics
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive:
•
Support for Collada scene format, models can be imported from 3D MAX, Maya, XSI, Blender, and other...
Special Effects: Enviro Mapping, Lens Flare, Billboarding, Particle System, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Fire, Decals,
Fog, Mirror:
•
Cube environment mapping
•
Environment-mapped bump mapping
•
Fully extensible particle systems
•
Surface markings on arbitrary geometry
•
Bump-mapped (fully lit) surface markings
•
Real-time fire and electrical effects
•
Transparent warping effects (heat haze, etc.)
•
Bumpy reflection and refraction
•
Postprocessed glow, Fog volumes
•
Full-scene cinematic motion blur
•
Interactive in-game interface panels
Terrain: Rendering:
•
Voxel-based
Networking System: Client-Server:
•
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
•
Cross-platform internet voice chat
Sound & Video: 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
•
Fully spatialized 3D sound effects
•
Unlimited streaming music channels with seamless looping and concatenation
•
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
•
Apple's QuickTime technology can be used to play movies or soundtracks from numerous formats
Rendering: Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture:
•
Antialiasing (up to 8x), Bilinear and trilinear filtration, Anisotropic filtration (up to 16x)
•
Vertical Sync control
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Mon, 19 Jul 2004
Last Updated: Tue, 23 Nov 2010
Stability:
Support:
Game Engine Architecture
The C4 Engine is highly regarded in the industry for its well-designed architecture.
It is also known for having extremely clean source code with a well-thought-out class hierarchy.
Everything in the engine has been done the right way, and never rushed to meet a deadline.
C4 has been in development for over 11 years and has undergone a continuous series of meticulous refinements during that
time.
Lighting and Shadows
Full-scene dynamic lighting and shadows.
Point, spot, and infinite light sources.
2D and cubic texture projections.
Conventional and cascaded shadow mapping.
Highly robust stencil shadow volumes.
Shaders
Large variety of built-in shading features.
Support for arbitrary custom cross-platform shaders.
Latest 3D hardware features are used by the engine.
Comprehensive bump/normal mapping capabilities.
Parallax bump texture mapping.
Horizon bump shadow mapping.
Bumpy reflection and refraction.
Cook-Torrance microfacet shading.
Ambient lighting volumes.
Cube environment reflections.
Realistic water shading.
Voxel Terrain
Terrain is based on voxel maps that can be edited in real time.
Direct support for vertical cliffs, overhangs, caves, arches, etc., that are impossible with height-based terrain systems.
Seamless levels of detail are automatically created using our exclusive multiresolution Transvoxel™ stitching technology.
Editor provides sculpting and texture painting tools.
Special Effects
Full-scene cinematic motion blur.
Distortion effects such as heat haze and shockwaves.
High-quality and high-performance procedural fire effects.
Volumetric fog with multiple density functions.
Interactive in-game interface panels.
Fully extensible particle systems.
Voxel-based blob (metaball) particle systems.
Surface markings on arbitrary geometry.
Emission glow and specular bloom effects.
World Manager / Scene Graph
Clean class hierarchy for scene graph nodes, including geometries, cameras, lights, sounds, zones, portals, triggers, markers,
and special effects.
State-of-the-art portal system used for indoor visibility determination and lighting analysis.
High-quality impostor system for rendering large numbers of instanced objects like trees with fully dynamic lighting and
shadows.
General state serialization support for saving worlds.
Quicksave and quickload capabilities for fast delta saves during gameplay.
Separation between per-instance and shared data.
External world referencing / instancing (for prefabs, etc.). Nested worlds supported.
Powerful hierarchical animation blending system.
Full skeletal hierarchy support for skinned meshes.
Extensible controller design with tool integration.
Substance registration system for identifying stone, metal, wood, etc.
Physics
Rigid body simulation.
Real-time cloth simulation.
Real-time large-scale fluid surface simulation.
Continuous collision detection.
Contact forces and friction.
Precise buoyancy forces.
Customizable force fields.
Joints (spherical, universal, discal, revolute, cylindrical, and prismatic).
Full networking support.
Audio
Fully spatialized 3D sound effects.
Doppler shift and other frequency effects.
Reverberation with multiple simultaneous environments.
Atmospheric absorption effects.
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.
Audio capture capabilities.
Networking
Fast, reliable network implementation using UDP/IP.
Solid fault tolerance and hacker resistance.
Advanced security measures, including packet encryption.
Automatic routing of messages to object controllers.
Support for different delivery types (reliable, unrelaible, unordered).
Extensible and customizable message classes.
Supports heterogeneous clients—PCs, Macs, and consoles can all be connected to the same game.
Cross-platform internet voice chat.
World Editor
World editor runs as an engine plugin and uses the engine's own user interface system.
Powerful and intuitive interface design that allows fast level creation.
Zero build time, so results are immediately visible while editing a level.
Includes a large variety of tool palettes.
Support for multiple undo.
Shader Editor
Shaders are edited graphically and work on all platforms without modification.
A wide variety of packaged components are provided for easy shader design.
Shaders automatically work with all types of light sources and atmospheric effects without having to explicitly create
variations.
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.
Scripts support variables, looping, and conditional execution, all shown in a concise graphical manner.
Support for arbitrary expression evaluation in scripts.
Panel Editor / User Interface
Built-in user interface system includes windows, buttons, menus, scroll bars, icons, list boxes, sliders, etc.
Complete support for Unicode text rendering and user input.
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.
Art Pipeline / Tools
Support for the Collada scene format, enabling models to be imported from 3D Studio MAX, Maya, XSI, Blender, and other
content creation packages.
Collada importer can automatically import textures and merge materials with existing scene.
Textures imported from TGA format, (16/24/32-bit with or without compression).
Texture tool generates mipmaps and applies S3TC compression.
Normal maps, parallax maps, horizon maps, and ambient occlusion channels calculated by texture tool.
Font generator creates Unicode font textures from system fonts.
Resource packer utility generates PAK files to optimize and conceal resource access.
Input Devices
Generic treatment of keyboards and mice.
Broad support for USB devices (joysticks, gamepads, steering wheels, etc.).
Direct support for Xbox 360 controllers under Windows.
Events reported to game through an action binding system.
Core System
Cross-platform multiprocessor / multithreading support.
Resource management with support for pack files and caching.
Containers library (arrays, lists, maps, trees, graphs).
Mathematics and geometry library.
Extensible system commands and variables.
Tool module plugin architecture.
Plugins
Extra controllers and effects plugin.
Browser plugin, based on Awesomium, can display and interact with web browsers in windows or panels.
Movies plugin, based on QuickTime, can play movies to textures, windows, or panels.
Logitech plugin can display images on G15 keyboards.
Plugins can depend on other plugins and load in the correct order.
New plugins can be created with Standard Edition or better.
Neo Axis
NeoAxis Engine is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine for 3D simulations, visualizations and games. NeoAxis
Engine is a complete integrated development environment for creating interactive 3D graphics including 3D virtual
worlds, AAA games, and realistic simulations. The system comprised of both a real-time 3D engine and a suite of full
featured tools.
Graphics API
OpenGL, DirectX
Operating Systems
Windows
Programming Language
C/C++, C#
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
NeoAxis Group Ltd.
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System, Other:
•
Entity and logic systems
•
UI System: unified system for creation user controls, the menu, dialogues, windows and HUD screens
•
Unicode support
•
Language localizations support
•
Complete Game Framework
•
Windowed Application Framework For 3D Applications
•
All-in-One Toolset
•
AAA Graphics
•
Powerful .NET based API
•
Executing engine on two .NET platforms: .NET Framework and Mono Runtime
•
Rapid .NET development with internal power of unmanaged C++ components such as rendering, physics and
audio
Scripting:
•
Visual game logic writing
•
C# like syntax
•
Scripting on any .NET language is supported
Built-in Editors:
•
Expandable Resource and Map Editors
•
Material Editor
•
Particle System Editor
•
Physics Model Editor
•
GUI Editor
•
Game object types Editor
•
Static lighting (lightmaps) calculation tool
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body:
•
Abstract wrapper for a physics
•
ODE implemented
•
Ageia PhysX implemented
•
Format of files for declaration of physical models
Lighting: Per-vertex, Lightmapping:
•
Can have an unlimited number of lights in the scene
•
Supported through vertex and fragment programs
•
Per pixel lighting
•
64-bit color high dynamic range (HDR) rendering
Shadows: Shadow Mapping, Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
•
Techniques supported: modulative stencil, additive stencil, modulative projective
•
Shadow maps
•
Soft shadows
•
Self-shadowing
•
Correct shadows from alpha test objects
•
Stencil shadows
Texturing: Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Volumetric, Projected:
•
Projective texturing automatically links with texture unit to a Frustum instance
•
Can register external texture sources in order to feed texture data in from another source
•
Parallax mapping, Cubemap reflections, Lightmap support
Shaders: Vertex, Pixel, High Level:
•
Supports vertex and fragment programs (shaders), both low-level programs written in assembler, and high-level
programs written in Cg or DirectX9 HLSL, provides auto support for many commonly bound constant parameters
•
Supports GLSL
•
Procedural generation of a shaders
•
Shader model 3.0 support
Scene Management: General, Octrees:
•
Hierarchical scene graph
•
Scene querying features
•
Indoor/outdoor portal system. Work in mixed indoor and outdoor scenes.
•
Occluders, Octtree scene split
Animation: Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:
•
Skeletal animation, including blending of multiple animations, variable bone weight skinning.
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Skinning:
•
Hardware-accelerated skinning
•
Flexible mesh data formats accepted
•
Export from many modelling tools including Milkshape3D, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender and Wings3D
Special Effects: Enviro Mapping, Billboarding, Particle Sys, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Explosion, Decals, Fog, Mirror:
•
Particle Systems, including easily extensible emitters and affectors
•
Support for skyboxes, skyplanes and skydomes
•
Post-processing effects including High Dynamic Range rendering (bloom, adaptive exposure, tone mapping) and
motion blur.
Sound & Video: 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
•
Abstract wrapper for a sound
•
FMOD implemented
•
DirectSound implemented
•
Binding sounds to entities
•
3D sound support
•
Ogg Theora video playback
•
Sound recording
Artificial Intelligence: Pathfinding:
•
Path finding based on a grid
Rendering: Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:
•
Material LOD
•
Support for multiple material techniques
•
Transparent objects automatically managed
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Thu, 2 Nov 2006
Last Updated: Tue, 23 Nov 2010
Stability:
Support:
OGRE
OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to
make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce games and demos utilising 3D hardware. The class library
abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface
based on world objects and other intuitive classes.
Graphics API
OpenGL, DirectX
Operating Systems
Windows, Linux, MacOS
Programming Language
C/C++
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
Steve Streeting
Features
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:
•
•
•
•
Simple, easy to use OO interface designed to minimise the effort required to render 3D scenes, and to be
independent of 3D implementation i.e. Direct3D/OpenGL.
Flexible plugin architecture allows engine to be extended without recompilation
Clean, design and full documentation of all engine classes
Support for ZIP/PK3 for archiving
Scripting:
•
•
Scripted material language allows you to maintain material assets outside of your code
Scriptable multi-pass rendering
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body:
•
•
Controllers allow you to easily organise derived values between objects
Includes bindings for multiple 3rd party collision / physics systems (ODE, Novodex and Tokamak)
Lighting:
•
•
Can have an unlimited number of lights in the scene
Supported through vertex and fragment programs.
Shadows:
•
•
•
•
Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Volumetric, Projected:
Projective texturing automatically links with texture unit to a Frustum instance
can register external texture sources in order to feed texture data in from another source
Supports PNG, JPEG, TGA, BMP and DDS image files
Shaders:
•
Shadow Mapping, Shadow Volume:
Techniques supported: modulative stencil, additive stencil, modulative projective
Multiple stencil shadow optimisations, including vertex program extrusion, smart light and shadow caster culling,
integration with mesh LOD, zpass and zfail methods, 2-sided stencilling, scissor region clipping
Texture shadows fade out at far distance
Texturing:
•
•
•
Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Light mapping:
Vertex, Pixel, High Level:
Supports vertex and fragment programs (shaders), both low-level programs written in assembler, and high-level
programs written in Cg or DirectX9 HLSL, and provides automatic support for many commonly bound constant
parameters
Supports GLSL
Scene Management:
•
•
•
Highly customisable, flexible scene management, not tied to any single scene type. Use predefined classes for
scene organisation if they suit or plug in your own subclass to gain full control over the scene organisation
Hierarchical scene graph
Scene querying features
Animation:
•
Inverse Kinematics, Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:
Skeletal animation, including blending of multiple animations, variable bone weight skinning.
Meshes:
•
•
•
Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive:
Hardware-accelerated skinning
Flexible mesh data formats accepted
Export from many modelling tools including Milkshape3D, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender and Wings3D.
Surfaces & Curves:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Fog:
Particle Systems, including easily extensible emitters and affectors (customisable through plugins). Systems can
be defined in text scripts for easy tweaking
Support for skyboxes, skyplanes and skydomes, very easy to use
Rendering:
•
•
•
Splines:
Biquadric Bezier patches for curved surfaces
Special Effects:
•
General, BSP, Octrees, Occlusion Culling, LOD:
Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:
Scriptable multipass rendering
Material LOD
Supports the complete range of fixed function operations such as multitexture and multipass blending, texture
coordinate generation and modification, independent colour and alpha operations for non-programmable hardware
Support for multiple material techniques
Transparent objects automatically managed
Font system: TrueType fonts and precreated textures
2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, Scrollbars, etc.
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Wed, 23 Jun 2004
Last Updated: Wed, 1 Sep 2010
Stability:
Support:
Irrlicht
The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance real-time 3D engine written in C++. It is a powerful highlevel API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications like games or scientific visualizations. It comes with
documentation and integrates all the state-of-the-art features for visual representation like dynamic shadows, particle
systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is accessible through a
well designed C++ interface, which is easy to use.
Graphics API
OpenGL, DirectX, Software
Operating Systems
Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD, Xbox
Programming Language
C/C++, C#, VB.NET
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
Nikolaus Gebhardt
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture
•
Using C++ the engine is completely object-orientated yielding platform independence and graphics API
abstraction
•
Features a plugin-mechanism in that it supports external image and mesh loaders and provides a factory pattern
support to enable automatic loading of those structures.
•
Integrated fast XML parser
•
Unicode support for easy localisation
•
Support for .ZIP files
•
Support for 64-bit
•
Joystick support included in Windows, Linux and OSX
Built-in Editors:
•
irrEdit: a free functional scene editor and lightmap generator
•
GUI Editor
Physics: Collision Detection:
•
Bounding box and triangle based collision detection and response
Lighting: Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping:
•
Supports dynamic lighting and light maps
•
Support bumpmapping / normalmaps
•
Supported through vertex and fragment programs as well as fixed function pipeline
Shadows: Shadow Volume:
•
Dynamic shadows using the stencil buffer
Texturing: Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping:
•
Basic texturing support with texture animation
•
Supported texture formats: BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, PPM, PSD, TGA and WAL.
•
Save textures in BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, PPM and TGA
Shaders: Vertex, Pixel, High Level:
•
Supports low level assembly vertex/pixel shaders and fragment/vertex programs as well as HLSL
•
Support for GLSL: ARB Vertex Programs, ARB Pixel Programs, HLSL, GLSL 100 & 110, VS1.1 - 3.0, PS1.1 - PS3.0
Scene Management: General, BSP, Octrees:
•
Easily extensible hierarchical scene graph
•
Mix indoor and outdoor scene seamlessly together
•
Supports picking
Animation: Skeletal Animation, Morphing, Animation Blending:
•
Meshes are linear interpolated from one frame to the next
•
Mesh is manipulated by animated joints
•
Load Quake 3 BSP Levels
Meshes: Mesh Loading:
•
Supports 3DS, Milkshape, COLLADA, Maya, DeleD, DirectX .X, FSRad .oct, Cartography shop 4 .csm, Pulsar
LMTools .lmts, My3DTools 3 .my3D, Quake 2 models
•
Supports native formats: Irrlicht Mesh (.irrMesh), Irrlicht Scene (.irr), Blitz Basic (.b3d), Alias Wavefront (.obj),
Stereolithography (.stl), Lightwave (.lwo), Quake 3 (.md3, .bsp), Ogre (not animated)
•
Support mesh saving for Collada, IrrMesh, OBJ and STL formats
•
Exporters for common formats are available from third-party sources
Special Effects: Environment Mapping, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Water, Fog:
•
Sphere mapping
•
Realistic water surfaces
•
Customizeable Particle systems for snow, smoke, fire
•
Supports parallax mapping
Terrain: Rendering, CLOD:
•
Provides geo mipmapping with several LODs
Rendering: Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:
•
2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing and mixing 3D with 2D graphics
•
Alpha blending for transparency
•
Transparent objects automatically managed
•
2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, etc.
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:
Date Added:
Fri, 25 Jun 2004
Last Updated: Fri, 11 Mar 2011
Irrlicht Home Page Feature List:
Features
The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It features a powerful
high level API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications such as games or scientific visualizations. It comes with
an excellent documentation and integrates all state-of-the-art features for visual representation such as dynamic
shadows, particle systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is
accessible through a well designed C++ interface, which is extremely easy to use.
Its main features are:
 High performance realtime 3D rendering using Direct3D and OpenGL [more]
 Platform independent. Runs on Windows, Linux, OSX, Solaris, and others.[more]
 Huge built-in and extensible material library with vertex, pixel, and geometry shader support [more].
 Seamless indoor and outdoor mixing through highly customizeable scene management. [more]
 Character animation system with skeletal and morph target animation. [more]
 Particle effects, billboards, light maps, environment mapping, stencil buffer shadows, and lots of other
special effects. [more]
 Several language bindings which make the engine available to other languages such as C#, VisualBasic,
Delphi, Java ...
 Two platform and driver independent fast software renderers included. They have different properties
(speed vs. quality) and feature everything needed: perspective correct texture mapping, bilinear filtering, sub
pixel correctness, z-buffer, gouraud shading, alpha-blending and transparency, fast 2D drawing, and more.
 Powerful, customizeable, and easy to use 2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, ...
 2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing, and mixing 3D with 2D
graphics.
 Clean, easy to understand, and well documented API with lots of examples and tutorials.
 Written in pure C++ and totally object oriented.
 Direct import of common mesh file formats: Maya (.obj), 3DStudio (.3ds), COLLADA (.dae), Blitz3D (.b3d),
Milkshape (.ms3d), Quake 3 levels (.bsp), Quake2 models (.md2), Microsoft DirectX (.X)... [more]
 Direct import of Textures: Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Adobe Photoshop
(.psd), JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg), Truevision Targa (.tga), ZSoft Painbrush (.pcx)... [more]
 Fast and easy collision detection and response.
 Optimized fast 3D math and container template libraries.
 Directly reading from (compressed) archives. (.zip, .pak, .pk3, .npk)
 Integrated fast XML parser.


Unicode support for easy localisation.
Works with Microsoft VisualStudio, Metrowerks Codewarrior, Bloodshed Dev-C++, Code::Blocks, XCode, and
gcc 3.x-4.x.
 The engine is open source and totally free. You can debug it, fix bugs and even change things you do not
like. And you do not have to publish your changes: The engine is licensed under the zlib licence, not the GPL
or the LGPL.
Special effects
There are lots of common special effects available in the Irrlicht Engine. They are not difficult to use, in most cases
the programmer only has to switch them on. The engine is constantly extended with new effects, here is list of effects
which are currently implemented:
 Animated water surfaces
 Dynamic lights
 Dynamic shadows using the stencil buffer
 Geo mip-mapped terrain
 Billboards
 Bump mapping
 Parallax mapping
 Transparent objects
 Light maps
 Customizeable Particle systems for snow, smoke, fire, ...
 Sphere mapping
 Texture animation
 Skyboxes and skydomes
 Fog
 Volume Light
Drivers
The Irrlicht Engine supports 6 rendering APIs, which are 5 more than most other 3D
engines do:
 Direct3D 8.1
 Direct3D 9.0
 OpenGL 1.2-3.x
 The Irrlicht Engine software renderer.
 The Burningsvideo Software Renderer
 A null device.
When using the Irrlicht engine, the programmer needs not know, which API the engine
is using, it is totally abstracted. He only needs to tell the engine which API the engine
should prefer.
There are three reasons why the engine not only focuses on one API:
 Performance. Some graphic adapters are optimized for OpenGL, some simply
run faster with Direct3D.
 Platform independence. Direct3D will not be present on a Mac or a Linux
Workstation, while maybe OpenGL will. And when OpenGL is not available
either, there are still the Irrlicht Engine software renderers, which will always
operate on any platform. In this way, the user will see something on the
screen for sure.
 Driver problems, which are a common problem a user encounters when
using 3D software. There are thousands of hardware configurations out there,
and often games and 3D applications are crashing, because there is an old
driver installed. Letting the user switch the driver might solve the problem.
Materials and Shaders
To be able to create realistic environments quickly, there are lots of common built in
materials available in the engine. Some materials are based on the fixed function
pipeline (light mapped geometry for example) and some are relying on the
programmable pipeline (normal mapped/parallax per pixel lighted materials for
example) todays 3d hardware is offering. It is possible to mix these types of materials
in a scene without problems and when using a material which needs features the
hardware is not able to do, the engine provides fall back materials. However, if the
built in materials are not enough, it is possible to add new materials to Irrlicht at
runtime, without the need of modifying/recompiling the engine. Currently supported
shader languages for this are:
 Pixel and Vertex Shaders 1.1 to 3.0
 ARB Fragment and Vertex Programs
 HLSL
 GLSL
Platforms
The Irrlicht Engine is platform independent. Which means in this case it will run on
more than one platform, which are currently:
 Windows 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, XP, XP64, Vista, CE
 Linux
 OSX
 Sun Solaris/SPARC
 All platforms using SDL
More platforms are planned, but have not yet been implemented. The Engine works
with all supported platforms in the same way. The programmer only has to write the
game/application code once, and it will run on all supported platforms without the need
to change one single line of code.
Scene Management
Rendering in the Irrlicht Engine is done using a hierarchical scene graph. Scene nodes
are attached to each other and follow each others movements, cull their children to the
viewing frustum, and are able to do collision detection. A scene node can for example
be a camera, an indoor or outdoor level, a skeletal animated character, animated
water, a geomipmap terrain, or something completely different.
In this way, the Irrlicht engine can seamlessly mix indoor and outdoor scenes
together, gives the programmer full control over anything which is going on in the
scene. It is very easily extensible because the programmer is able to add his own
scene nodes, meshes, texture loaders, GUI elements, and so on.
The geometry creator gives easy access to simple gemetrical bodies, such as cylinder,
cube, etc. Objects can be renderes as polygons, wireframe, or points, using triangles,
lines, point and point sprite primitives.
Character Animation
Currently there are two types of character animation implemented:
 Morph target animation: Meshes are linearly interpolated from one frame to
the next. This is what is done in the Quake game series, and how the Irrlicht
engine does it when importing .md2 and .md3 files.
 Skeletal animation: A skin is manipulated by animated joints. The Irrlicht
Engine will do this when loading .ms3d, .x, and .b3d files. It is easily possible
to attach objects to parts of the animated model. It is, e.g., possible to attach
a weapon to the hand of a model, which will be moved as the hand moves,
with only one line of code.
The programmer doesn't need to know about all this, if he doesn't want to. All he has
to do is to load the files into the engine and let it animate and draw them.
Supported Formats
Lots of common file formats are supported, and are able to be loaded (and partially
also written) directly from within the engine. In this way, data is never needed to be
converted for using it with the Irrlicht Engine, saving development time. The internal
ressource management of Irrlicht provides simple access to all file formats and takes
care of fetching already loaded meshes or textures from its own cache instead from
disk if the data was already loaded before.
The list of all supported formats is constantly growing. If you need the Irrlicht Engine to
be able to load a file format which it cannot currently handle, simply raise a feature
request and ask for it.
Currently supported textures file formats:
 JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg, r/w)
 Portable Network Graphics (.png, r/w)
 Truevision Targa (.tga, r/w)
 Windows Bitmap (.bmp, r/w)
 Zsoft Paintbrush (.pcx, r/w)
 Portable Pixmaps (.ppm, r/w)
 Adobe Photoshop (.psd, r)
 Quake 2 textures (.wal, r)
 SGI truecolor textures (.rgb, r)
Currently supported mesh file formats:
Animated objects:
 B3D files (.b3d, r, skeleton)
 Microsoft DirectX (.x, r) (binary & text, skeleton)
 Milkshape (.ms3d, r, skeleton)
 Quake 3 models (.md3, r, morph)
 Quake 2 models (.md2, r, morph)
Static objects:
 Irrlicht scenes (.irr, r/w)
 Irrlicht static meshes (.irrmesh, r/w)
 3D Studio meshes (.3ds, r)
 Alias Wavefront Maya (.obj, r/w)
 Lightwave Objects (.lwo, r)
 COLLADA 1.4 (.xml, .dae, r/w)
 OGRE meshes (.mesh, r)
 My3DTools 3 (.my3D, r)
 Pulsar LMTools (.lmts, r)
 Quake 3 levels (.bsp, r)
 DeleD (.dmf, r)
 FSRad oct (.oct, r)
 Cartography shop 4 (.csm, r)
 STL 3D files (.stl, r/w)
 PLY 3D files (.ply, r/w)
Supported Render Features
Irrlicht supports all general render features needed for high quality rendering of
materials and effects. Besides a few exceptions, all features are supported in all
hardware accelerated APIs, and some are supported by the software renderers as well.
The following list contains all supported render features of the current version of the
Irrlicht Engine. Please ask for extending this set to certain features required.
Currently supported render features:
 Predefined materials
o Solid
o Solid with alpha blending 2nd texture
o Light maps with configurable pre-multiplication and additional dynamic
light support
o Detail map
o Sphere map
o Environment reflection
o Transparency by adding the texture
o Transparency by using the texture alpha
o Transparency by using the texture alpha without blending
o Transparency by using the vertex alpha
o Normal maps
o Parallax maps
o Flexible blend mode rendering



















Material Colors (ambient, diffuse, emissive, specular)
Shininess
Line thickness (only OpenGL)
ZBuffer write/test modes
Per mesh anti-aliasing settings
Alpha to Coverage
Color masking
Vertex colors with configurable interpretation
Wireframe/Point cloud rendering
Gouraud/Flat shading
Lighting mode configurable
Backface/Frontface culling
Fog enabling per mesh
Automatic normals normalization
Texture coordinates repeat/clamp modes
Per texture filtering (bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic)
Texture LOD Bias
Texture matrices
Arbitrary number of multi-textures
Panda 3D
Panda3D is a game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs.
Panda3D is Open Source and free for any purpose, including commercial ventures, thanks to its liberal license.
Graphics API
OpenGL, DirectX
Operating Systems
Windows, Linux, MacOS, SunOS
Programming Language
C/C++, Python
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
The Panda Development Group
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Other:
•
Support for ARtoolkit
•
Development in C++ or Python
•
Web plugin for deployment over the web
•
"all-into-one" application packaging system
•
Wide range of user-provided features and examples (PhysX integration, AI, GUI, particle system etc.)
Scripting:
•
Python scripting interface
•
Programming on the fly using interactive scripting in the Python shell
Built-in Editors:
•
Direct tools for GUI-based scene editing
•
Particle effects API and GUI-based particle panel
•
Future plans: An easy to use but powerful and generic scene/level editing tool
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:
•
Very basic physics engine that may apply forces to classes. The physics engine can handle angular or linear
forces, as well as viscosity
•
There are two ways to go about collision detection: Bounding volumes & allow collisions against all geometry
•
Support for ODE physics
Lighting: Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Volumetric:
•
A variety of lights that work by vertex lighting
Texturing: Basic:
•
Animated textures
•
Support for video textures (AVI, MPG, MOV)
•
Pointer textures (direct access to graphics card memory)
•
3D textures
Shaders: High Level:
•
Support Cg
•
GLSL support
•
Shader generator for basic shaders and combinations (bump, parallax, specular etc.)
Animation: Skeletal Animation:
•
Soft skin animation and a sophisticated actor interface for character animation
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Skinning:
•
Supports 3D Studio Max, Maya, and blender models via plug-ins.
•
Low-level mesh manipulation
Special Effects: Particle System, Motion Blur, Fog:
•
Post-effects (bloom, blur, volumetric lighting, cartoon look etc.)
Terrain: Rendering:
• Generate terrain meshes from heighfields.
• GeoMipMapping
Networking System: Client-Server:
• a networking library and a mmo-grade patching system
Sound & Video: 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
• Sound using the FMOD library
• Support for OpenAL
Artificial Intelligence: Finite State Machines:
• Built-in AI library with basic behaviours
• Two different finite state machine systems: FSM & ClassicFSM
Rendering: Fixed-function, Stereo Rendering, GUI:
• Rendering for red/cyan stereo glasses
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:
Date Added:
Tue, 7 Sep 2004
Last Updated: Fri, 11 Mar 2011
Panda Home Page Feature Summary:
Shader Generation: Many advanced rendering techniques now fully automatic:




Special Maps: Normal Map, Gloss Map, Glow Map
HDR Rendering: Tone Mapping, Bloom Filter
Cel Shading: Threshold Lighting, Inking
More to come
Performance Monitoring: Powerful performance monitoring and optimization tools:






Identifies bottlenecks, both CPU and GPU
CPU time use decomposed into more than 250 categories
Counts meshes, polygons, textures, transforms, state changes, etc
Allows user-defined CPU-usage categories
Tools for batching and state-change minimization
Tools to merge textures and minimize texture switches
Full Python Integration: Automatically-generated wrappers expose full functionality of the engine.




Highly optimized: all core functionality in C++
Thoroughly-tested: two commercial MMOs in Python
Panda3D structures garbage collected when using Python
Manual and sample programs use Python
Just Works, Right out of the Box: No-hassle install:




Convenient installer packages for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux
Only one external dependency: working graphics driver
Sample programs run right out of Start Menu
No compilation step needed
Exposes Full Power of Graphics API: Modern OpenGL/DirectX features exposed directly to Panda3D user:




High-level shader language: Cg
Powerful interface between shaders and engine
Support for render-to-texture
Use of depth/shadow/stencil textures
Debugging Tools: Heavy emphasis on error tolerance and debuggable code:




Extreme resistance to crashing, even when errors are made
More than 5000 assertion-checks to catch errors early
Reference-counted data structures minimize memory leaks
Many tools to examine internal state (one shown here)
Mature, Complete System: Mature system used to deliver several commercial games.
Contains everything you need, not just the "sexy" stuff:





Converters for older file formats
Font file importers
Tool to package games into redistributables
Means to pack art assets into encrypted bundles
Lots of other boring but essential stuff
Crystal Space
Crystal Space is a free 6DOF portal based engine (based on the LGPL license).
Graphics API
OpenGL, Software
Operating Systems
Windows, Linux, MacOS
Programming Language
C/C++
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
Jorrit Tyberghein
General Features: Object-Oriented Design:
• True 6DOF engine with arbitrary sloped convex polygons.
• Optional MMX support for processors that support it
• make libraries of objects, textures and other game related stuff and put it all in a seperate ZIP file.
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body:
• Hierarchical bounding box collision detection system.
• Powerful physics library using ODE is included too. It is a dynamics modeling and simulation engine.
Lighting: Per-vertex, Lightmapping:
• Static colored lights with real shadows. Lighting and shadows are precalculated before the world is displayed (unless
stencil based lighting is used)
Shadows: Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
• Stencil based realtime shadows on OpenGL hardware
Texturing: Basic, Multi-texturing, Mipmapping:
• Supports GIF, TGA, PNG, BMP, JPG, and others.
• Perspective correct texture mapping with interpolation every 16 pixels (for software renderer).
• Transparent and semi-transparent textures
Shaders: Vertex, Pixel:
• Supports both CG and ARB shaders
Scene Management: General, Portals, Occlusion Culling:
• Visibility system based on a combination of portals, kd-tree, and coverage buffer.
• Powerful XML world file format allowing you to easily redefine the world
• Levels can be stored in standard compressed ZIP archives so that you can easily make a bundle of one level.
• A convertor to convert MAP files (from Quake/HalfLife) to CS is also included. Also, Blender scripts (Python) are
included to export models and levels from within Blender.
• Sequence manager with triggers allowing the definition of object interactions from within the level itself.
Animation: Keyframe Animation, Skeletal Animation:
• 3D animated skeletal meshes using Cal3D animation
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Progressive:
• 3D triangle mesh sprites with frame animation. Convertors for Milkshape, Maya, Cal3d, 3DS, 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.
• Supports 3dsMax and Blender with exporter plugins
Surfaces & Curves:
Splines, Patches:
Special Effects: Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Mirror:
• Dynamic gouraud shaded sky dome (half-sphere) for a very realistic and nice looking sky
• Support for multi-layered and animated skyboxes and skydomes
• Optional halo's around lights for nice atmospheric effects. Also support for lens-flares.
Terrain: Rendering, CLOD:
• Landscape engine. The new experimental renderer contains a landscape engine that supports scattering, lod, etc.
• 2D sprites and a particle system
Sound & Video: 2D Sound, 3D Sound:
• Support for DS3D, EAX, A3D, etc.
• Support for various sound formats: WAV, Ogg/Vorbis, AU, AIFF, IFF, and MOD (using MikMod).
Rendering: Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:
• Font system plugin to support other font types. Currently CS fonts and truetype fonts are supported.
• GUI system
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Thu, 8 Jul 2004
Last Updated: Sat, 8 Oct 2005
Stability:
Support:
Torque Game Engine
The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is a fully featured AAA game engine with award winning multi-player network code,
seamless indoor/outdoor rendering engines, state of the art skeletal animation, drag and drop GUI creation, a built in
world editor, and a C-like scripting language. Unlike most commercial game engines, as part of the low cost license,
you receive all C++ source code to the engine, so you can make any additions you need for your game.
Graphics API
OpenGL, DirectX
Operating Systems
Windows, Linux, MacOS
Programming Language
C/C++
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
GarageGames
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Save/Load System, Other:
•
Multi-Platform and a journaling and Integrated hierarchical profiler
•
Efficient memory manager with extensive debugging features; Resource Manager and a File/Stream IO
•
Unicode international strings support
Scripting:
•
C++ like syntax
•
Local and Remote Debugging
•
Bytecode-compiled
Built-in Editors:
•
World Editor allows you to manage terrain generation and object placement as well as Construct, place, size, scale
and rotate objects visually
•
Terrain Editor, Terrain Generator, and GUI Editor.
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:
•
Built-in physics engine
Lighting: Per-vertex, Lightmapping:
•
Animated lightmaps
•
Control lighting via World Editor
•
Vertex and multi-pass lighting
Shadows: Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
•
Projected object shadows (clipped against the environment)
Texturing: Basic, Multi-texturing, Mipmapping:
•
Multi-pass texturing with detail and decal support
Scene Management: Portals, Occlusion Culling, LOD:
•
Portal based interiors with seamless integration with the terrain engine. Buildings can be instanced, placed,
manipulated and scaled with the world editor
•
Spatial Database
•
Quark and WorldCraft converter and lighting
•
Support for Cartography Shop and almost all .map-compatible brush editors
Animation: Inverse Kinematics, Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:
• Supports, bone, mesh, texture bitmap, texture coor. and visibilty animation
•
Mesh vertex deformation and multi-bone mesh skeletal animation
•
Simple interface to multi-sequence animation manager
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive, Tessellation:
•
Continuous level of detail based on a progressive mesh algorithm
•
Damage and collision detail level
•
Supports Milkshape, 3DStudio Max, and Blender plug-ins, including an exporter and helper objects
Special Effects: Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Water, Decals, Fog:
•
Integrated particle system with scripting engine.
•
Supports texture and scale animation as well as particle generators which can emit multiple particle types at once
•
Layered volumetric fog
•
A water engine that supports dynamic waves and multi-pass wave crest and shoreline textures
Terrain: Rendering, CLOD:
•
Continuous, seemless, LOD mesh generation and Aggregated tile mip-mapping
•
Dynamically generated blend tiles and Altitude based fog banks
•
Seamless integration with the interior engine
Networking System: Client-Server:
•
Award winning client/server architecture, which uses UDP and TCP
•
Bit level stream, message, and string packing
•
Uses the optimal Notified Delivery Protocol
•
Packet stream and Object ghost manager with partial object updates
Sound & Video: 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
•
SFX/Music driver using OpenAL
•
3D sound support; panning, volume, doppler, cones
•
Multi-channel prioritized SFX manager
•
Built-in Theora video codec playback
Artificial Intelligence: Finite State Machines, Scripted:
•
Highly customizable through TorqueScript
Rendering: Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:
•
True spherical distance fogging (for terrain, buildings)
•
Spherical distance clipping (for terrain, buildings)
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Thu, 24 Jun 2004
Last Updated: Mon, 18 Jun 2007
Stability:
Support:
3D Game Studio
Game Studio is a fast and easy authoring system for interactive 2D and 3D applications - especially video games,
multimedia tools, or simulations. It offers three levels of access: click-together, scripting, and C++, C#, or Delphi
APIs.
Graphics API
DirectX
Operating Systems
Windows
Programming Language
C/C++, Delphi
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
Conitec Datasystems
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:
•
Automatic selection of own or hardware based T&L for maximum performance on old and new 3D hardware
•
DLL plugin interface
•
Arbitrary axis rotations for space and flight simulators
•
Path tracking for camera, actors or vehicles
Scripting:
•
Starting users can use the large library of pre-made scripts. Can create an entire game without writing any code!
•
More advanced users can use the built in script language to have full control over the everything in the game.
•
Expert users can interface to the engine using C/C++ or Delphi.
Built-in Editors:
Level, Model, and Script editors included.
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:
•
Polygon level collision detection for terrain and 3D objects
•
nVidia(R) PhysX subsystem with hardware acceleration
•
Hinge, ball, wheel, slider, and 6D joints
•
User-customizable raycast vehicle simulation
•
Physics engine supports gravity, mass, damping, elasticity, friction, and hinge, ball, wheel, and slider joints
Lighting: Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping:
•
Static and dynamic point, spot, and directional light sources
•
Light Manager for an unlimited number of dynamic light sources
Shadows: Shadow Mapping, Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
•
Stencil shadows and 24-bit level surfaces
•
Static and dynamic shadow mapping
•
Decal, Stencil, and PSSM shadows
Texturing: Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping:
•
Trilinear mip mapping
•
Multitexturing (up to 8 textures), light maps, detail textures
•
Material properties for static and dynamic objects
Shaders: Vertex, Pixel:
•
Object and postprocessing shaders
•
Shader viewer and editor
•
40 shader templates
Scene Management: General, BSP, PVS, LOD:
•
Seamless indoor and outdoor support
•
BSP Tree for indoor, Adaptive Binary Tree for outdoor levels
Animation:
Meshes:
Keyframe Animation, Skeletal Animation, Morphing, Animation Blending:
Mesh Loading, Skinning, Deformation:
Special Effects: Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Water, Fog, Mirror:
•
Programmable particle and beam generators
•
Sky system with animated layers and backdrop bitmaps
•
3D views and movies can be rendered to curved surfaces, for distortion or fisheye effects
•
Colored fog areas
•
Programmable 2D and 3D effects like lens flares, bullet holes, cartoon rendering etc
•
Slow motion / quick motion effect
•
Dynamic decal system for bullet holes, foot prints, tire marks etc.
Terrain: Rendering:
•
Deformable heightmap terrain
•
•Continuous LOD mesh generation and mip-mapping
•
Multiple tiled textures and shadow mapping
•
Seamless integration with the indoor engine
Networking System: Client-Server, Master Server:
•
Multizone/multiserver support for massive online multiplayer games
Sound & Video: 3D Sound:
•
Supports wav,mid,ogg,CD, mp3,avi, and mpg
•
3D sound sources with Doppler effect
Artificial Intelligence: Pathfinding, Decision Making, Finite State Machines, Scripted:
•
Full scripting language and DLL interface plus a large library of pre-built AI.
Rendering: Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture:
•
3D views and movies can be rendered to curved surfaces
•
Six degrees of freedom, multiple cameras and render views
•
Material properties for static and dynamic objects
•
Animated 3D sprites and decals
•
2D renderer for still images, 2D sprites, panels, buttons, sliders, overlays, Truetype and bitmap fonts, screenshots
and movies
•
Mouse picking and manipulating of 3D objects
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Fri, 6 Aug 2004
Last Updated: Sun, 13 Mar 2011
Stability:
Support:
Unity
Unity is a multiplatform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation.
Graphics API
OpenGL, DirectX
Operating Systems
Windows, MacOS, Xbox360, PS3, Nintendo Wii,
iPhone, Browser-based, Google Android
Programming Language
C#, Javascript
Status
Productive/Stable
Documentation
Yes
Author
Unity Technologies ApS
General Features: Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:
•
Professional FPS controller ready to drop in (and tune)
•
Streamed loading for the Unity Web Player
•
Unity asset server / asset source code version control
•
Cross-platform web player content, the Unity Web Player is available for both Mac OS X and Windows users and
works with all browsers
•
Standalone executables for both Mac OS X and Windows
•
Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets
•
iPhone Publishing is available as add-on product
•
Streaming Asset Bundles: the ability to stream in any asset (terrain, mesh, etc) into the game.
•
Asset Processing Pipeline: in larger projects, customizing the art pipeline to avoid repetitive steps becomes
crucial. You can now complement Unity's famous asset importing pipeline with any additions you need to make it
truly flow.
Scripting:
•
Uses the Mono and supports JavaScript, C# and Boo, interoperable (to a certain extent) and JIT'ted to native code
•
Complete scripting documentation
•
Source-level debugging
Built-in Editors:
•
Editor provides zero-cost asset pipeline: save a file and it updates automatically
•
Editor Extensibility: Create completely custom editor windows, and entirely new tools and workflows.
•
Asset Server that provides version control capabilities for Unity projects
•
Optimized for use with large projects New Server view integrated into the Unity user interface
•
Updates, commits, and graphical version comparisons are all performed inside the Unity editor. Open Source
Asset Server
•
The enterprise-level database PostgreSQL powers the Unity Asset Server Asset Server offers multi-platform
support
•
Install the server on either Mac OS X or Linux
•
Procedural tree creator
•
Beast Lightmapping
Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:
•
Powered by the PhysX Engine, which also supports particle physics
•
Cloth simulation
Lighting: Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping:
•
Beast-Lightmapping
Shadows: rojected planar:
•
Blob shadows
•
Realtime Dynamic Soft Shadows
•
Shadows are dynamic, optimized, and allow self-shadowing (only available in Unity Pro)
Texturing:
Basic, Bumpmapping, Procedural:
Shaders: Vertex, Pixel, High Level:
•
Unity comes with an extensive library of 40 shaders including Vertex Lit, Diffuse, Glossy, Bumped, Bumped
Specular, Reflective, Self-illuminating, a Toon (Cell) shader, and 9 different particle shaders.
•
Everything falls back gracefully on low-end GFX cards.
•
Parallax shaders
•
GLSL support (in addition to Cg)
Scene Management: Occlusion Culling:
•
Umbra occlusion culling
Animation: Keyframe Animation:
•
Skinned character animation
•
Procedural Characters and Animation: the ability to stitch multiple body parts into one character, and reassign
bones to different characters. The entire skinned animation system is now scriptable.
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Skinning:
•
Native importing from Cinema 4D, Maya, Cheetah3D, Blender. Also support for Collada, FBX, 3DS, OBJ formats
Special Effects: Lens Flares, Particle System, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Mirror:
•
Color correcting filter, grayscale, sepia, and twirl
•
Skinnable in-game GUIs
Terrain: Rendering:
•
Terrain engine with full editor tools, dense foliage, lightmapping and more
Networking System: Client-Server:
•
Build on Raknet
•
Supports .NET library and asynchronous WWW API
•
Multiplayer Networking (advanced NAT punch-through, delta compression, easy to set up)
Sound & Video: 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
•
Streaming video and audio Based on FMOD, includes sound effects (Reverb Zones, Various Filters: Low Pass
Filter, High Pass Filter, Echo Filter, Distortion Filter, Reverb Filter, Chorus)
Artificial Intelligence:
Scripted:
Rendering: Deferred Shading, Render-to-Texture, Fonts:
•
Extensible full-screen graphics effects (blur, motion blur, sepia, grayscale, more...)
•
TrueType typography
•
DirectX 9 and OpenGL rendering support
•
Rendering with Shader Replacement: render the scene, replacing shaders of all objects. This makes it simple to
make incredible eye-candy like depth-of-field, soft particles, thermal goggles, and more.
•
Immediate Mode Rendering: a single function call can render any mesh anywhere, with full per-pixel lighting and
custom shader support.
Features:
Ease of Use:
Date Added:
Mon, 18 Jul 2005
Last Updated: Fri, 11 Mar 2011
Stability:
Support: