This page provides answers to the most frequently asked questions related to licensing the Ca3D-Engine.

For FAQs about other aspects of the Ca3D-Engine, please refer to the main Support menu above.

Yes, there are several previews and samples available so that you can evaluate the Ca3D-Engine thoroughly and get an impression of what coding with the Ca3D-Engine is like:

• The Ca3DE live demos for Windows and Linux include the Ca3D-Engine itself, the Ca3DE World Editor “CaWE”, and all tools to make new worlds, as well as the source code of the DeathMatch sample game and all scripts.
• We've prepared a C++ sample source code page that shows you real source code examples from the Ca3D-Engine core code.
• The Ca3DE Libraries documentation (API) is available online,
• Compiling the full Ca3D-Engine source code is documented publicly in the documentation Wiki at chapter “At the Core: The C++ Source Code”.

Compiling all Ca3D-Engine source code is very simple and kept identical on all supported platforms. Here is an overview:

• On Windows, you need Microsoft Visual C++ 8 (2005) or 9 (2008). Good news is that the Ca3D-Engine source code has been kept so clean and portable that the freely available Express Editions can be used.
• On Linux, you need g++ 4.2 or newer.
• On all systems, you also need scons, which automatically handles the whole build process in a single simple command-line call: scons -Q

For more details on building Ca3DE, please see chapter “At the Core: The C++ Source Code” in the documentation.

No, the Ca3D-Engine source code is only available under license, and all licensees are required to keep the source code confidential. You may modify the source code for use in your own products as much as you want, but you may not redistribute your modifications to anyone who is not a licensee.

Yes, fast and well-designed networking code is built into the Ca3D-Engine.

Yes, Ca3DE works on all i686-based (desktop) Linux systems that come with libc6. In other words, Ca3DE works on all contemporary Linux distributions like Debian, ubuntu, kubuntu, (open)SuSE, Red Hat, Gentoo, Fedora etc. as smooth as under Windows.

Due to the flexible and modular architecture of the Ca3DE rendering system, the Ca3D-Engine runs on a much wider range of graphics hardware than most other engines: Older systems that only support OpenGL 1.2 are supported as well as the latest hardware with programmable pixel-shaders and dynamic lighting effects.

Thanks to the Ca3D-Engine material system, this flexibility is transparent to the users: You define a material once, and it works on every available hardware, with automatic reduction of features when the hardware does not support them.

The secret behind the graphical power of the Ca3D-Engine is that it is able to combine Radiosity lighting techniques with dynamic per-pixel lighting - a unique feature that allows Ca3DE to work on the broadest range of hardware and still provide exceptionally fast and realistically looking results.

There are no inherent limits build into the Ca3D-Engine. It's framerate and performance mostly depends on the graphics hardware, and is in turn generally dependent on graphics processors fill rate on most modern architectures.

Ca3DE employs precomputation of potentially visible objects and level-of-detail techniques in order to automatically reduce the number of relevant polygons as much as possible per frame, but the framerate also depends on level design, number of types of light sources and shadows, the materials employed, etc.

We're happy to review your levels and give you performance and tuning tips.

Yes, students can purchase a Ca3D-Engine Standard License at up to 50% discount. Moreover, licenses are available for universities and institutions that wish to use the Ca3D-Engine as a teaching tool. Please refer to the Licensing Overview for more details.

For all license types, the licensing fee includes unlimited access to the latest Ca3D-Engine source code downloads. That means that without any additional cost, your download account never expires – it remains valid even after the completion of your title(s).

You need a Professional License rather than a Standard license if one or both of these conditions are met:

• You have a publisher and the publisher is or has ever been a member of the “Entertainment Software Association” (ESA) or the “Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association” (ELSPA). The current member list of the ESA is available here, and the current member list of the ELSPA is available here.
• You are developing for a game console such as PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or Wii.

The Professional License is different from the Standard License in these regards:

• Wish the Professional License, you can publish your title with one of the major publishers (members of the ESA or ELSPA as described above). With the Standard License, you can still publish via a publisher that is not such a member.
• The Professional License is for a single title only, whereas with the Standard License, there is no limit in the number of titles that you can produce.
• The Professional License is valid for an entire development team. The Standard License is for one person only, you need a separate license for each programmer.
• The Professional License includes additional support: On our forums, a separate forum is established for the private access of your team only, and your requests have higher priority.
• The Professional License reverts to the Standard License after your title ships. That means that you have still have unlimited access to the latest source code version, but have to renew your license for the next title that is published with a major publisher.

Note that you can start with a Standard License for each of your programmers and later upgrade to a Professional License for the difference in cost.

You need an Applications License rather than a Standard license if one or both of these conditions are met:

• You are developing a product that is sold for $80 (USD) or more.
• You are developing a product for company-internal use that is made available to at least 50 people.

Note that you can start with a Standard License for each of your programmers and later upgrade to an Applications License for the difference in cost.

The Ca3D-Engine and its tools employ several external libraries. In order to keep licensing considerations regarding these libraries simple, we use only external libraries whose licenses allow free commercial use, or come with restrictions that are all easy to meet (e.g. mention the library in the programs “About” box), or are under the LGPL.

Libraries that are under the LGPL can well be combined with commercial programs even if they are linked statically to the application and the application source code is not to be provided: A library author analyzed this very well at http://teem.sourceforge.net/lgpl.html

Here is a complete list of external libraries used in Ca3DE:

Libraries that are markes as optional can easily (i.e. with no or little effort) be omitted when building and using the Ca3D-Engine. The same is generally also possible for the other libraries, but either comes with more effort involved or with greater discomfort or feature loss.