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Gamestudio/A7
SPECIFICATIONS 1 2 3 |
The A7 Engine - Version 7.07
The engine is the core of the development system - it generates the 3D image and controls the behavior of the virtual world. Gamestudio's A7 virtual reality engine was developed in 2007. Its new Adaptive Binary Tree scene manager switches seamlessly from indoor to outdoor sceneries. The brand new lighting engine overcomes the 8 lights limit of today's 3D hardware and supports an unlimited number of static and dynamic shadow-throwing light sources. Programmers can use plugins for adding new effects and features. The simple and straigthforward C-style DLL interface allows painless access to the engine from all programming languages.
The A7 engine is regularly updated in order to support the newest features of the newest 3D cards. Free A7 updates are released about every six weeks.
Rendering engine 
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Six degrees of freedom, multiple cameras and render views, multiple monitors |
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Supports DirectX 9, DirectPlay, DirectShow, DirectSound |
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Adaptive Binary Tree (ABT) scene manager |
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Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) / Potential Visibility Set (PVS) (Pro Edition) |
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Indoor and outdoor support, seamless LOD terrain system |
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Light manager supports an unlimited number of point and spot light sources |
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Static and dynamic shadows |
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Fog areas, Camera portals, reflections and mirrors |
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Geometric LOD, detail textures, texture compression |
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Softskin models with multiple shaders; bones, vertex, and morph animation |
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Animated sprites and decals |
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Material properties for static and dynamic objects |
PARTICLE & EFFECT Engine 
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Programmable particle generators for multiple particle types |
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Beam generators for laser beams and tracer paths |
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Pre- and postprocessing shaders, supporting shader models 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 |
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HLSL and asm shader languages, FX file import |
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Bump and environment mapping, light mapping, Multitexturing (up to 8 textures) |
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Layered sky system with sky cubes, sky domes, clouds and backdrop bitmaps |
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Weather generators for rain, snow and tornadoes |
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Programmable effects like lens flares, bullet holes, distortion, fisheye, etc. |
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Shader workshop and Shader viewer |
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More than 40 included shaders combining water, cartoon, environment, gooch, bump, lambert, blinn, phong, parallax, occlusion, blur, bloom, dilate, displacements, erode, bleach, sepia, emboss, posterize, lens, and many more effects |
Physics & Collision Engine 
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Polygon level collision detection |
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Physics objects with gravity, damping, elasticity, friction |
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Hinge, ball, wheel, and slider joints with motors |
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Water physics with dynamic wave generation (Pro Edition) |
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Arbitrary axis rotations for space and flight simulators |
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Bezier path tracking for camera, actors or vehicles |
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Mouse picking and manipulating of 3D objects |
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Slow motion / quick motion effect |
2D Engine 
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Multi-layer system |
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Animated 3D and 2D sprites |
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Movie player for fullscreen and sprite-projected movies |
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GUI panels with various button, slider, display and window types |
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Truetype and bitmap fonts |
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Screenshot generator |
Sound Engine 
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Static and dynamic 3D sound sources with Doppler effect |
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Multichannel streaming sound player |
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WAV, OGG, MID, MP3, WMA, CD support |
Network & Game Engine 
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Save / Load system for resuming games at arbitrary positions |
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Multi-player client/server mode for LAN and Internet (UDP) |
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Multizone/multiserver support for MMOG (Pro Edition) |
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Expandable through DLL plugins |
On our website you'll find tons of free plugins and extensions that were written by users and add new features to the engine, like Flash animation, database integration, or force feedback.
The lite-C Programming Language 
We can create a complete game by designing a level, placing items and monsters, attaching behaviors to them, and adding a game menu. So why do we need a programming language at all?
After having 'clicked together' your first games, you'll probably want to do something more ambitious - like realizing your own unique game ideas or special effects. Now it's time to learn programming! Gamestudio's lite-C language allows game programming from a beginner's to a professional level. Lite-C scripts can be attached to any object of the virtual world and react on events like being hit, touched with the mouse, coming close to something and so on.
Lite-C is a lightweight version of C/C++, the language used for commercial games programming. But unlike C++, it's extremely easy to learn and the best way to get introduced into 'real' programming. Anything that's scary to a beginner, like memory and pointer handling, is automatically managed in lite-C.
Still, lite-C is not a script language but a real programming language. It can access all functions from Windows libraries on your PC, including DirectX classes and OpenGL functions. You could write your own 3D engine in lite-C! Unlike many scripting languages like Basic, Python, LUA etc, lite-C is compiled - translated into optimized machine code. Thus a lite-C program runs up to twenty times faster than interpreted scripting languages. This is important as in an abitious game with several thousand actors, 10,000 program functions could run at the same time!

SED - lite-C script editor and debugger
If you prefer to program in 'real' C++, Delphi or other languages, you can implement Gamestudio's engine into your own programs using the engine SDK. You can even continue to use lite-C as a scripting language; lite-C functions and variables can be called from your program and vice versa.
lite-C FEATURES
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Direct access to the Windows API and DirectX classes and functions |
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Control of external devices through port I/O functions |
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Easy, transparent multitasking |
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Console mode for manipulating variables and objects at runtime |
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Syntax-highlighting editor, single-step debugger |
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Expandable through external DLL and COM libraries |
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