Cafu Engine

3D Rendering and Material System Features

• New Cafu Material System that handles all rendering.
• The main MatSys components are Renderers, Materials, and Shaders.
• All material surface properties can be controlled by the mapper or texture artist via easy to understand material scripts.
  That is, even after a map or model is finished, the composition, translucency, filtering, modulation, blending, reflectiveness and all other properties of any material can be modified.
  This even works while the engine is running!
• Designed to be implemented on virtually anything:
  • Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, MacOS, Pocket PC, Palm, DOS, ...
  • APIs: OpenGL 1.2 to 2.0, DirectX 7 to 9, Cg, GLSL, Mesa, software renderers, ...
  • Hardware: NVidia, ATI, 3Dlabs, consoles, ...
• Cafu demo packages currently come with complete sets of renderers for Windows and Linux, each containing variants for:
  • OpenGL 1.2 (mostly used as fall-back renderer for the Cafu demo),
  • Cg with fp20/vp20 profile (for NV2X and higher GPUs),
  • Cg with arbvp1/arbfp1 profile (for NV3X and higher GPUs),
  • OpenGL 1.4+ extended with ARB vertex/fragment program (all modern GPUs from ATI, NVidia and others), and
  • a "Null" renderer that is useful e.g. for performance profiling or dedicated Cafu servers.

Cross-Platform and Cross-Compiler Portability

Windows

32-bit 64-bit

Linux / Unix

32-bit 64-bit

• Use the same source code on Windows, Linux, and (soon!) Mac OS X.
• Full support for native 32- and 64-bit code on all platforms.
• Supports the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005, 2008 and 2010 compilers on Windows, and the GCC 3.x and 4.x on Linux and Unix.

State-of-the-Art Lighting Technology

• First engine ever to combine light-maps with dynamic lighting effects!
• Radiosity-based, physically correct lighting.
• Dynamic, shader-driven, per-pixel lighting for both worlds and models.
• Stencil buffer shadow volumes (everything casts shadows on everything!).
• Support for diffuse-, normal-, bump-, specular-, and luminance-maps.
• Support for ATI and NVidia programmable GPUs and shaders.
• Smooth-Group support even for world brushes, easily controlled in the map editor!
• Shader-driven, multi-textured or 2-pass LightMap rendering.
• All this is implemented in the Cafu Material System.

Graphical User Interface System

• A powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) System (or short: GuiSys) is integrated with the engine.
• GUIs can be 2D (regular GUIs for game menus etc.) as well as 3D for world (entity) GUIs. This provides a maximum of flexibility in functionality and design for all in-game interactive elements like for example call-lift buttons, doors with access control, computer displays of all kinds, etc.
• GUIs can fully be scripted by the Lua-based Scripting system!
• The GuiSys C++ interfaces can also be accessed from the game code directly, e.g. in order to implement all kinds of HUDs (Head-Up Displays) for the player.
• An easy-to-use tool for creating own fonts for use with the Gui System is included with the SDK.
• As examples, the current SDK implements the in-game console, the chat input, the "Really Quit?" dialog, the HUD and a world (entity) GUI all with the GuiSys.

Model Editor

• Use the graphical Model Editor to import many model file formats.
• A complete toolbox for inspecting, transforming and texturing your models.
• Adjust and tweak any Cafu-specific model feature to prepare your models for use in the Cafu Engine.
• Attach graphical, interactive GUIs to any model.

Very Large Terrains

• Implements the excellent SOAR algorithm by Peter Lindstrom and Valerio Pascucci.
• Provides continuous-level-of-detail, permitting very large out-door scenes.
• Employs geo-morphing for perfectly smooth transitions between levels of detail.
• View-frustrum culling yields an optimal terrain approximation.
• Can directly load terrains from Terragen (ter) and portable graymap (pgm) files in full 16 bit precision or from any bmp, tga, png or jpeg image file in 8 BPP precision.
• Integrates fully into the rest of Cafu (i.e. terrains are in the PVS, use optimized code for collision detection and physics, etc.).
• Even all compile tools are aware of terrains, and act accordingly.
• There are no restrictions in combining terrains with other elements of Cafu worlds.
• Full integration with the new Cafu Material System - you can apply arbitrary materials to terrains (e.g. with detail-maps and so on).
• Direct terrain support and terrain preview in the Cafu world editor CaWE.
• A terrain (pre-)viewer is included with the SDK.

Easy Extensibility and Great Flexibility

• Supports Scripting based on the Lua programming language!
• Several forms of scripting are supported by the Cafu engine (e.g. cmat material definition files), the most important of which are GUI scripting and entity (map) scripting. For example, a lift that stops at several floors with each floor having a call button can completely be implemented by GUI and map scripts.
• Many relevant interfaces are available to (have bindings to) both the C++ game code as well as the Lua scripts.
• Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) control the engine.
• Simple to use C++ code interfaces make it easy to create entirely new games or applications (MODs) with Cafu.
• Also the Material System can easily be augmented with new effects, or ported to new platforms via clean and well-documented C++ interfaces.
• An example: the United States Air Force, Research Labs for Human Effectiveness employ the Cafu engine in warfighter simulation experiments to study the visuo-spatial working memory of their pilots.