ANN: New Ca3D-Engine demo and development kit released

[Carsten Fuchs <CarstenFuchs@...>]

Dear list,

this is a one-time announcement: We post it here because we're proud
on the Lua integration with our Ca3DE GUI System, and grateful to the
Lua developers and community for their outstanding work.


========================================================================
Ca3D-Engine: New release available!            http://www.Ca3D-Engine.de
August 2008                                     CarstenFuchs@T-Online.de
========================================================================

  Dear Sirs,

  a new version of the Ca3D-Engine has just been released at the project
  website at http://www.Ca3D-Engine.de. The Ca3D-Engine is a modern game
  engine and game development kit with 3D real-time graphics and multi-
  player network support for Windows and Linux.

  The latest enhancements are very interesting for both users and game
  developers, as they include many new features in the World Editor, a
  new Sound System (including OpenAL and FMOD implementations), many
  improvements to the GUI System, an entirely new Main Menu GUI, and
  many other enhancements.

  Full details about the new release are available at
  http://www.ca3d-engine.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=495


  Contents of this letter:

  1. What is the Ca3D-Engine?  (A brief introduction.)
  2. New features in this release
  3. Further information and contact



========================================================================
1. What is the Ca3D-Engine?
========================================================================

  Ca3DE is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine and game
  development kit.

  It can be used to create a variety of 3D applications, including
  games, simulations, and training and architectural software. The
  development kit is freely available, and the DeathMatch MOD code is
  open-source.

  Its main features include

    + high-quality, real-time 3D graphics,
    + included Ca3DE world editor "CaWE",
    + a very powerful and flexible material system,
    + cross-platform and cross-compiler portability,
    + multi-player network support,
    + physically correct lighting (radiosity based),
    + dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadows,
    + 3D sound effects, skeleton based model rendering,
    + very large terrain rendering,
    + scripting language support,
    + freely available developer kit and MOD source code,
    + and easy extensibility by code and scripts.

  For a more detailed feature list please refer to
  http://www.ca3d-engine.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=45&Itemid=55



========================================================================
2. New features in this release
========================================================================

  New features and tools for the Ca3DE World Editor "CaWE": The new
  "Entity Inspector" is a comfortable and powerful scene-graph view of a
  map that allows users to browse and edit the properties of entities
  (one or multiple at a time) easily. The new Terrain Editing tool
  allows mappers to edit the shape of terrains directly in CaWE. The
  terrains can be shaped by an array of powerful subtools with real-time
  preview in the 2D and 3D views.

  The Ca3DE Sound System has been rewritten from scratch. Like the
  graphics system, it is now highly portable and can auto-detect and
  choose among several implementations. This guarantees that at runtime,
  the best available audio implementation (based on OpenAL or FMOD) is
  employed for the current platform and system. Supported file formats
  include MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Wave and raw audio. The properties of sounds
  can be specified via Sound Shader scripts, and there are new Speaker
  Entities for spatial sound sources in maps, with Doppler effect and
  cone-shaped sound volumes.

  The Ca3DE GUI System has much been enhanced to support native Lua
  scripts for GUI definitions, including collaborative multi-threading.
  Game developers can easily extend the C++ class hierarchy and use the
  new classes in GUI scripts. Based on these improvements, an entirely
  new Main Menu GUI has been written that replaced the Options dialog
  from prior release and much enhances the user experience.

  Other improvements include better Radiosity lighting, improvements to
  the Type System for scripting, less memory consumption, more stable
  networking code, and many other enhancements.

  Full details about the new release (including screen-shots) are
  available at http://www.ca3d-engine.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=495



========================================================================
3. Further information and contact
========================================================================

  For further and more detailed information about the Ca3D-Engine,
  please visit the official website at

    http://www.ca3d-engine.de

  The website has a detailed feature list, many high-res screen-shots
  and of course a download page where the latest demo and game
  development kit are available.

  If you have questions, problems or comments, you're heartily invited
  to join the Ca3DE discussion forums or the IRC channel, see
  http://www.ca3d-engine.de/forum/ for the details.

  You can also contact the author of Ca3DE directly by sending email to
  Carsten Fuchs at

  CarstenFuchs@T-Online.de