The Ca3D-Engine has been designed to run on a very broad range of hardware. Therefore, meeting or failing a certain set of minimum system requirements is not necessarily a question of getting all-or-nothing. Instead, the details of a systems hardware usually just scale the performance and/or the quality that the Ca3D-Engine can achieve on that particular system – it even has automatic fall-back capabilities built-in in order to handle old and very old hardware well.

Your computer system should meet the following minimum requirements for Ca3DE to run (failing these requirements probably means that Ca3DE does not run at all):

• Intel i386 compatible CPU with 500 MHz
• 256 MB RAM
• 3D graphics board with OpenGL support
• Windows (9x, ME, 2000, or XP) or Linux operating system
• TCP/IP (network drivers)
• On Windows: DirectX 7.0 or higher

However, on such systems, both the main processor and/or the graphics processor RAM may easily be exceeded by loading larger maps with many textures, resulting in very bad performance. You can use the Ca3DE Options dialog then to reduce the texture quality and/or load smaller maps.

In addition to the above, here is a list of recommended system features that allow Ca3DE to run reasonably well (in all cases, more is better):

• Intel i386 compatible CPU with 2.6 GHz
• 1 GB CPU RAM
• 3D graphics board with OpenGL support and programmable GPU (like NVidia GeForce3, ATI Radeon 8500, …) and 256 MB graphics (GPU) RAM

In order to use the advanced networking features of Ca3DE, the network environment of your system must be appropriately configured.

In other words, if some of the modern commercial 3D computer games run on your system, then this is a good indication that the Ca3D-Engine will work, too.

I am developing Ca3DE in the Windows 2000 and Debian Linux environment, and I test it on as many platforms as I can get access to. I have only very little experience with other varieties of Linux, but have received only positive reports up to now, regarding compatibility with all supported operating systems.

In order to install the engine, simply unzip the packed file that you downloaded from the website. Please make sure that the directory structure is preserved. This is the common extraction process for nearly all contemporary decompression software. However, for some older programs you need to explicitly specify a command line option or check a checkbox. A new directory Ca3D-Engine will be created and all files will be extracted into this directory.

In order to upgrade the engine from an older, existing installation, please delete all the old files and directories and then re-install the new version as stated above. I am sorry for any inconvenience caused by this, but this is the best way to avoid many possible upgrade and version conflict problems.

Because the installation makes no changes to your system, it is sufficient to just delete the Ca3D-Engine folder for a completely clean de-installation.