Crystal Space is a free software development kit (SDK) that can provide professional looking real time 3D graphics. The software is cross platform and it can be used for virtual reality, games and many others. This is a full featured set with modularity, rendering, shaders, lighting, meshes, scene management and more.
As a rendering engine, Crystal Space is very advanced and can be extended with full support for OpenGL. In addition the engine supports features needed for modern game development like physical peripherals, a virtual file system, terrain, foliage and animation blending. Crystal Space also allows a programmer to incorporate 3D sounds, physics and complex lighting systems.
The fact that the software is platform independent makes it highly portable. Besides offering support for Linux, Mac and Windows, the software supports a variety of processor architectures including SPARC, ARM and PowerPC among others. In addition to this, developers can use a wide array of IDE and compilers such as Code::Blocks, MinGW/MSYS, Visual C++ and others.
Crystal Space was written entirely in C++ and besides using standard extensions it doesn’t require an external dependency. Among the most striking feature sets here is the engine which is based on OpenGL which provides support for hardware accelerated rendering.
There are a lot more features on Crystal Space, but it’s worth mentioning that there’s support for rendering loops if you need custom object rendering, and it also has lighting render managers, shadow maps, per vertex lighting and texture rendering. Other features provided by Crystal Space are HDR rendering, eye adaptation and tone mapping.
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