dawntec 3D Engine

Feature list and technical details
 

What's this

An interactive 3D real-time engine that reads any kind of 2D or 3D information and allows to explore the world by means of helicopter, car, human, virtual camera. The 3D world is shown immediately and needs no preprocessing.

Generals

  • Written in C++, uses DirectX.
  • Modular dll concept.
  • Initially auto adjusts optimal settings incl. language, editable in on-screen menu.
  • Makes use of modern graphics hardware features; scales to run on all systems, even those without hardware support.
  • Mature stuff - the engine is integrated into professional applications since over 10 years.

Data input

  • Provides an abstract interface for retrieving geometric data. Implementations for 3D Studio .3ds files and .X files are derived; other formats, incl. generics, are easily added.
  • Each surface (of both static geometry and models) can be assigned a Material that defines its appearance (translucency, specular lighting, texture shift effects etc). Materials are simply assigned by names. These names, textures, and colors are taken from the model.
    Materials range from simple texturing to complex image based lighting.
  • Joystick/Gamepad support

Renderer

  • Ingenious "Cell and Portal"-based PVS algorithm that comes with neglectible CPU consumption and handles visibility, frustum culling and occlusion culling for static geometry by memory friendly precomputation. No restrictions for artists on geometry.
  • Highly optimized state-minimized rendering with adjustable sorting order.
  • Dynamic shadowing with time impact < 2%
  • A zoomable, position- and orientation-following map is self generated and displayed.
  • 2D text+image rendering interface to support menus and consoles.
  • Interactive on-screen mouse menu for fast input without changing hand to keyboard.
  • Flexible Particle Engine with various physical control parameters and customizable defaults.
  • Flexible sky/background graphics.
  • Sun glare effect with delay and sun occlusion test.
  • Provides external 3D overview of complete map with "dive in" on mouse click

Physics

  • Collision detection database - a compressed balanced AABB tree - consumes just 8 bytes for each primitive by directly referencing geometry data. The collision result comprises the primitives and a reference to their surface information (material etc).
  • The collision system interacts closely with the rendering system, hence retrieving close starting points for low-depth iterating O(log n) searches.
  • Terrain following for vehicles is primitive-exact, considers chassis movements of acceleration, impact and steering forces, emulates wheel spring dynamics and allows for realistic off-road "jumps".
  • Object picking and selection for interactive editing.

Output

  • Screenshots automatically set visibility to 100% for shooting *big* worlds
  • Videos with adjustable size can be recorded, stored on disk and played with any .avi capable player
  • Flight path can be recorded and played with very minimal data consumption and interactive steering
  • Objects in the 3D world can be marked and exported (e.g. for further editing)
  • Detailed trace logs and support tool (e.g. for forcing software rendering only)

Sound

  • Supports both 2D (control pan, volume, frequency manually) and 3D Sounds (based on position, orientation, speed, physical attributes).
  • Sound module uses DirectX capabilities, hence supporting all kinds of hardware incl. surround systems etc.

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