The A7 Engine - Version 7.80
The engine is the core of the development system - it determines the rendering of the 2- or 3-dimensional virtual world. Gamestudio's A7 engine is one of the fastest and most reliable engines available today. Its new Adaptive Binary Tree scene manager switches seamlessly from indoor to outdoor sceneries and renders up to 100,000 objects per scene. The new light manager 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 add new engine function with the included Source Development Kit. The simple and straigthforward API allows painless access to the engine from external development systems and languages auch as C++, C#, or Delphi.
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

	Adaptive Binary Tree (ABT) scene manager, up to 100,000 entities per scene
	Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) / Potential Visibility Set (PVS) (Pro Edition)
	Indoor and outdoor support, seamless LOD terrain renderer
	Light manager for unlimited point and spot light sources
	Static and dynamic shadows
	Fog areas, Camera portals, reflections and mirrors
	Geometric LOD, detail textures, texture compression
	Softskin models with multiple shaders; bones, vertex, and morph animation
	Animated sprites and decals
	Material properties for static and dynamic objects
	Multiple cameras and render views, multiple monitors, widescreen support

PARTICLE & EFFECT Engine

	Programmable particle generators for multiple particle types
	Beam generators for laser beams and tracer paths
	Pre- and postprocessing shaders, supporting shader models 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
	HLSL shader language, FX file support
	Per pixel lighting, bump and environment mapping, multitexturing
	Layered sky system with sky cubes, sky domes, clouds and backdrop bitmaps
	Dynamic decal system for bullet holes, foot prints, tire marks etc.
	Programmable effects like lens flares, distortion, fisheye, etc.
	Shader workshop and Shader viewer
	More than 40 included shaders: cartoon, environment, gooch, bump, lambert, blinn, phong, parallax, occlusion, wind animation, mirror, water, blur, bloom, dilate, displacements, erode, bleach, sepia, emboss, posterize, lens, and many more effects

Physics & Collision Engine

	Polygon level collision detection
	Physics objects with gravity, damping, elasticity, friction
	Hinge, ball, wheel, and slider joints with motors
	Water physics with dynamic wave generation (Pro Edition)
	Arbitrary axis rotations for space and flight simulators
	Bezier path tracking for camera, actors or vehicles
	Mouse picking and manipulating of 3D objects
	Slow motion / quick motion effect

2D Engine

	Multi-layer system
	Animated 3D and 2D sprites
	Movie player for rendering videos fullscreen and on textures
	GUI panels with various button, slider, display and window types
	Truetype and bitmap fonts
	Screenshot generator

Sound Engine

	Static and dynamic 3D sound sources with Doppler effect
	Multichannel streaming sound player
	WAV, OGG, MID, MP3, WMA, CD support

Network & Game Engine

	Save / Load system for resuming games at arbitrary positions
	Easy, tranparent client/server mode for LAN and Internet (UDP)
	Multizone/multiserver support, MMOG capable (Pro Edition)
	Expandable through DLL plugins
	Input devices: Mouse, Keyboard, Joystick / Racewheel, SpaceNavigator®, WiiMote®

On our website you'll find free plugins and extensions that were written by users and add new features to the engine, like Flash animation, database integration, force feedback, or further input devices.

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

	On-the-fly compiler
	Direct access to the Windows API, DirectX 9 and OpenGL functions
	Remote control of arbitrary Windows applications
	Control of external devices through port I/O functions
	Easy, transparent multitasking
	Console mode for manipulating variables and objects at runtime
	Syntax-highlighting editor, single-step debugger
	Expandable through external DLL and COM libraries

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