C4 Engine

This video shows the velocity buffer used to render motion blur during post-processing in the C4 Engine. The screen-space velocity accounts for the motion of the camera, objects, and even vertices for cloth and skinned meshes. This technique is described in FGED2, Section 10.7.

Here's a short video showing atmospheric shadowing in the C4 Engine. It marches along rays and samples the cascaded shadow map to determine how much light is inscattered toward the camera. The results are combined with the scene in post. See FGED2, Section 10.6 for details.

Here are 200 zombies in the C4 Engine. Each zombie model has 56 bones and a skinned mesh with 3051 vertices. Skinning calculations happen every frame on the CPU through the multithreaded job manager. (Be warned that the audio gets kind of loud.)

Here's a quick video showing a few distortion effects in the C4 Engine. The window in the upper-left shows the distortion buffer, an off-screen render target containing per-pixel (x,y) offsets that get applied during postprocessing.

Here's some video of the SSAO buffer as I run around in the C4 Engine. The details about this particular flavor of ambient occlusion are discussed in FGED2, Section 10.5. amazon.com/dp/0985811757/?ta…

Doing some actual graphics development! Just finished a filmic tone mapping upgrade in the @C4Engine with histogram analysis and adaptive exposure.

Anyone remember DevMaster.net? It was *the* place to go for discussion about game engines and reliable independent reviews. It's too bad they're not around any more, but the C4 Engine reviews can still be found with the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20130117…

The C4 Engine costs $100 per person, and that gets you in for life. There are no fees beyond that, and there can't ever be. Unlike everyone else's, our license doesn't have a clause that allows us to change terms unilaterally at any time for any reason. c4engine.com

If you're going to be at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles next week, please stop by the Terathon booth (#831) to check out the latest Slug Library, to see how the C4 Engine is coming along, to take a sneak peek at my upcoming book, or to just say hello!

(Top) A typical computer keyboard rendered inside a 3D environment. This is from a PC game released about two years ago. (Bottom) A keyboard rendered in the C4 Engine using the Slug Library to draw the text on all the keys.

The @C4Engine has used similar techniques to send reliable packets over UDP for more than two decades. But it also lets games send unreliable data that does not need to be acknowledged or received in the order sent. 1/4

The @C4Engine currently uses OpenGL 4.5 on desktop, but I need to move to either Vulkan or D3D12. Now that I have some decent experience with both APIs, I think @VulkanAPI is the better choice. 1/4

I have received *many* inquiries about the C4 Engine over the past few months. There are a couple of things that still need to be updated, and then version 7.0 will be released. 1/2 c4engine.com

The C4 Engine contains all of Slug.

Something tells me this would be a really good time to bring back the C4 Engine. (It's almost ready.)

For over 20 years, the C4 Engine has done virtually all of its shading calculations in tangent space. Many years ago, I concluded that it would be better to do them in world space for various reasons. This week, I was finally able to make the change, and it's working nicely.

I've been working on improved impostors in C4, and I'm pretty happy with the results. It has taken about two weeks, though, and my brain is so used to looking at them that it expects to see transitions in the trees that go by while I'm driving. #C4Engine

Now that Slug 6.0 is out, the C4 Engine has moved to the front burner, and the flame is turned up to maximum. c4engine.com #C4Engine

Eating my own dog food, I've upgraded the shader and script editors in the C4 Engine to use Slug's new vector graphics capabilities. Those are some smooooth Bézier curves. #SlugLibrary #C4Engine sluglibrary.com c4engine.com