It's small, but you might still want to check it out 'cause...
C4 is commercial, however it's pricing is very affordable. It's license model is targeted at independent developers and small teams, which, i bet, are found amongst linux users.
I've been using the C4 engine for a while. And i'm not a developer team nor did i make games that have been put on the market - for me, it's just hobby coding. I've in fact read the news here and, after reading this thread, made a forum account here, for i do think that some programmers, no matter if professionals or hobbyists, who frequent these forums might want to give the C4 engine a second look.
Even though C4 is targeted at independent developers and small studios, it's used by some professional groups because it does have a few extreme advantages :
1. - you can completely program in C++, no need to learn some weird scripting languague and you can code every aspect of your game's behaviour
2. - the engine's scripting languague, if you want to use it, is graphical, every artist can use it
3. - the engine can do everything from graphics to shaders to sound to physics and it's native GUI is extremely flexible (but you can still use own implementations)
4. - no royalties !!! no per-title-payments !!! perpetual per-seat-license !!! fair price !!!
5. - from the standard edition on, which comes at a lousy cost of only 250 lice-infested scalawag bucks per developer seat, you get the whole source code for the engine. It builds out-of-the-box.
and 6. - said source code is written extremely clear, stable, reliable and well-commented. Want to look something up, just check the headers (or the API documentation). And just working with C4 did teach me some really good tricks about object oriented multi-threaded programming.
EDIT: and 7. - C4 suports voxel terrain natively, with an automated LOD. Even streaming terrain for huge worlds is on the closer roadmap, which means it might take a few months until it's in.
The engine is constantly being developed, lots of features are added on a two-month-ish major update base, and since my little server code runs on a Ubuntu machine (which also runs the database), i'm quite happy that it can run on Linux natively, that might make stuff easier.
Of course C4 is no market giant, and it's main users are smaller companies and developer teams. That also means that development on C4-driven applications does not have as many graphic artists as huge commercial companies can afford. That means the Demo's made with C4 are not as shiny as they "could" be because the models used are not too complex. But except for HDR support, which is a feature that C4 will support in the future, you'll find out that C4's graphical abilities can very well cope with actual market standards.
If interested, you might want to check some youtube vids, just search for :
"C4 Engine Dungeon Level"
"C4 Engine Physics Test Tour"
To see a few not so outdated youtube examples of what the C4 engine is capable of.
However, Terathon is actually making a little game called "The 31st", which might become a better demonstration.
And you can always download the C4 engine demo and play it's game levels, that's always fun too, that is if you don't have a too lousy graphics adapter and if you're not too fixed on the big market masters.
Saying that, i still got killed kinda early in the cemetery level. Bloody bats.
C4 is commercial, however it's pricing is very affordable. It's license model is targeted at independent developers and small teams, which, i bet, are found amongst linux users.
I've been using the C4 engine for a while. And i'm not a developer team nor did i make games that have been put on the market - for me, it's just hobby coding. I've in fact read the news here and, after reading this thread, made a forum account here, for i do think that some programmers, no matter if professionals or hobbyists, who frequent these forums might want to give the C4 engine a second look.
Even though C4 is targeted at independent developers and small studios, it's used by some professional groups because it does have a few extreme advantages :
1. - you can completely program in C++, no need to learn some weird scripting languague and you can code every aspect of your game's behaviour
2. - the engine's scripting languague, if you want to use it, is graphical, every artist can use it
3. - the engine can do everything from graphics to shaders to sound to physics and it's native GUI is extremely flexible (but you can still use own implementations)
4. - no royalties !!! no per-title-payments !!! perpetual per-seat-license !!! fair price !!!
5. - from the standard edition on, which comes at a lousy cost of only 250 lice-infested scalawag bucks per developer seat, you get the whole source code for the engine. It builds out-of-the-box.
and 6. - said source code is written extremely clear, stable, reliable and well-commented. Want to look something up, just check the headers (or the API documentation). And just working with C4 did teach me some really good tricks about object oriented multi-threaded programming.
EDIT: and 7. - C4 suports voxel terrain natively, with an automated LOD. Even streaming terrain for huge worlds is on the closer roadmap, which means it might take a few months until it's in.
The engine is constantly being developed, lots of features are added on a two-month-ish major update base, and since my little server code runs on a Ubuntu machine (which also runs the database), i'm quite happy that it can run on Linux natively, that might make stuff easier.
Of course C4 is no market giant, and it's main users are smaller companies and developer teams. That also means that development on C4-driven applications does not have as many graphic artists as huge commercial companies can afford. That means the Demo's made with C4 are not as shiny as they "could" be because the models used are not too complex. But except for HDR support, which is a feature that C4 will support in the future, you'll find out that C4's graphical abilities can very well cope with actual market standards.
If interested, you might want to check some youtube vids, just search for :
"C4 Engine Dungeon Level"
"C4 Engine Physics Test Tour"
To see a few not so outdated youtube examples of what the C4 engine is capable of.
However, Terathon is actually making a little game called "The 31st", which might become a better demonstration.
And you can always download the C4 engine demo and play it's game levels, that's always fun too, that is if you don't have a too lousy graphics adapter and if you're not too fixed on the big market masters.
Saying that, i still got killed kinda early in the cemetery level. Bloody bats.
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