Features

Rendering

• Unified per-pixel lighting system with dynamic soft shadows; Every object casts and receives shadows
• Point, spot, and directional lights
• Masked shadows for tree and plant effects
• Specular reflection and normal mapping
• Parallax mapping
• Fast instanced mesh rendering
• Dynamic visibility determination, requiring no pre-placed portals or compiling
• Hardware skinning for fast animation
• Bloom, depth-of-field, motion blur, and other post-processing effects
• Fast hardware particle effects
• Seamless transitions between indoor and outdoor areas
• Adjustable rendering viewports
• Support for ambient occlusion maps
• Render to any graphics context to create Windowed applications and tools
• Render to texture
• Lens flare effects
• Dynamic shader management chooses from thousands of variations and compiles requested shaders on-the-fly
• Open-ended materials and shader system
• Use existing shaders or add your own
• Optimized rendering pathways for Shader Model 4.0, with render fallbacks for older hardware
• Features can be scaled to accommodate older hardware
• Load textures from .dds, .png, .tga, .bmp, and .jpg files

Meshes

• Load .obj, .md3, and .gmf meshes, or create meshes from scratch
• Support for animated meshes with fast hardware skinning
• Create box, cylinder, sphere, cone, and plane primitives
• Support for arbitrary number of LOD versions
• Fast mesh rendering using GPU instancing, if available

Terrain

• Huge landscapes with up to 33 million triangles
• Simulate areas up to 650 square miles
• Dynamic lighting and self-shadowing terrain allow day/night cycles and weather effects
• Modify terrain in real time
• Vegetation layers can simulate millions of plants
• Alpha-blended tiling terrain

Animation

• Hardware skinning for fast animation
• Blend animations, or mix hard-coded actions or physics with animation
• Attach weapons or items to animated limbs
• Attach physics bodies to limbs for animated collision and locational damage

Physics

• Support for multi-core CPU acceleration
• Simulate thousands of rigid bodies
• Create complex machines with ball, hinge, corkscrew, slider, universal, and fixed joints
• Extremely fast solver, with far greater stability than any other physics engine on the market
• Collisions with polygon meshes, convex hulls, boxes, cylinders, cones, spheres, chamfer cylinders, and capsules, or compound collisions made up of any combination thereof
• Player controller simulates player movement while participating in complex physics interactions
• Customizable collision system with support for any number and scheme of collision types and interactions
• Powered by Newton ArchimedesÆ

Audio

• 3D sound positioning, spatialization, and attenuation
• Load .wav and .ogg audio files
• EAX audio effects like reverb simulate different acoustic environments
• Seamless sound looping

Programming

• DLL version can be used with virtually any programming language
• Programmable in BlitzMax with a BMX module
• Procedural interface allows full access to all features while maintaining a simple and straightforward API
• Headers available for C++, C#, VB, and other languages
• Abstract file system with no pre-defined folder structure
• Load files from .zip packages directly into memory
• Automatic caching and instancing of media files