C4 Engine Features

Full-scene dynamic lighting and shadows

  • Support for five different fundamental light source types. More
  • All lights and shadows rendered in real time at global scale.
  • Spot and cube light texture projections.
  • Precomputed ambient light volumes.
  • Three fully orthogonal shadow rendering techniques.
  • Shadow volume clipping and scissor optimizations.

Advanced per-pixel shading capabilities

  • Comprehensive bump mapping support.
  • Enhanced parallax mapping.
  • Horizon mapping.
  • Ambient lighting volumes.
  • Gloss-mapped specular reflections.
  • Cube environment mapping.
  • Cook-Torrance microfacet surface reflection.
  • Bumpy reflection and refraction.
  • Realistic water shading.

Scene graph

  • 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.

State-of-the-art portal system

  • Efficient large-scale visibility determination.
  • Advanced interzone lighting analysis performed in real time.
  • Special support for mirrors and remote portals.

High-level controller system

  • Powerful hierarchical animation blending system.
  • Handles state messaging in a multiplayer environment.
  • Powerful scripting system that can be extended with custom actions.
  • Cleanly extensible design and integration with the tools.

Special effects

  • Full-scene cinematic motion blur. More
  • Volumetric fog with multiple density functions. More
  • Interactive in-game interface panels. More
  • High-quality procedural fire effects.
  • Fully extensible particle systems.
  • Real-time fluid surface simulation.
  • Real-time cloth simulation.
  • Surface markings on arbitrary geometry.
  • Emission glow and specular bloom effects.

Sound manager

  • Fully spatialized 3D sound effects.
  • 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.
  • Unlimited streaming music channels with seamless looping and concatenation.

Networking / Multiplayer

  • 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.
  • Cross-platform internet voice chat. new

Core system

  • Resource management with support for pack files and caching.
  • Mathematics and geometry library.
  • Extensible system commands and variables.
  • Tool module plug-in architecture.
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Full-featured integrated world editor

  • World editor is part of the engine itself and runs within the engine's own windowing system. More
  • Powerful and intuitive interface design that allows fast level creation.
  • Zero build time, so results are immediately visible while editing a level.
  • Palettes for geometries, lights, sound sources, zones, portals, markers, and special effects.
  • Support for multiple undo.

Graphical script editor

  • Scripts are edited graphically for easy artist/designer access. More
  • 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. new

Interface panel editor

  • Fully interactive in-game interface panels can be created graphically. More
  • Custom scripts can be attached to panel items for limitless interactivity.
  • Panels have an extensible animation system with many built-in techniques.

Model, animation, and texture import tools

  • Support for the Collada scene format, enabling models to be imported from 3D Studio MAX, Maya, XSI, Blender, and other content creation packages.
  • Full skeletal hierarchy support for skinned meshes.
  • Bump map, parallax map, horizon map, and ambient occlusion channel calculations.
  • Texture compression and automatic mipmap generation.
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