Engine Details
C4 Engine  |
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 (123 votes) |
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| It's a multi-platform operating system for games. It includes a comprehensive suite of game technologies including 3D sound and music, network communications, input devices, memory and resource management, and a lot more. |
| Author |
Terathon Software (Eric Lengyel) |
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| Graphics API |
OpenGL |
Operating Systems |
Windows, MacOS, Xbox360, PS3 |
| Programming Language |
C/C++ |
Status |
Productive/Stable |
| Documentation |
Yes |
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| Features |
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General Features |
Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:
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Extremely clean class hierarchy for scene graph nodes, including geometries, cameras, lights, sounds, zones, portals, triggers, markers, and special effects |
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General state serialization support for saving worlds |
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Quick save and quick load capabilities |
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Separation between per-instance and shared data |
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External scene graph referencing from within another scene graph |
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Support for pack files and a virtual directory hierarchy |
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Skinable GUI's |
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Scripting |
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Graphical script editor |
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Scripts are edited graphically for easy artist/designer access |
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Games can easily define custom script components, and these automatically appear in the editor |
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Controllers can advertise custom function calls that can be accessed from scripts |
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Scripts support variables, looping, and conditional execution, all shown in a concise graphical manner |
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Built-in Editors |
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Full-featured integrated cross-platform world editor |
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Interface panel editor |
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Advanced surface attribute manipulation and material management |
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Complete built-in windowing system |
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Powerful and intuitive interface design |
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Physics |
Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body:
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Built-in character controller. |
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Built-in projectile controller. |
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Real-time fluid surface simulation. |
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Real-time cloth simulation. |
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Lighting |
Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping, Radiosity, Gloss maps, Anisotropic:
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Support for fully dynamic infinite, point, and spot lights |
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Gloss-mapped specular reflections |
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Ambient radiosity |
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Projected cube and spot textures |
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Cook-Torrance microfacet shading |
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Shadows |
Shadow Mapping, Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
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All shadows are rendered in real time at global scale |
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Three types of shadows are seamlessly combined in one world |
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True penumbral soft shadows for area light sources |
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Texturing |
Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Projected:
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Comprehensive bump mapping capabilities |
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Enhanced parallax mapping |
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Ambient occlusion channels |
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Emission/glow maps |
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Horizon mapping |
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Realistic water shading |
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Shaders |
Vertex, Pixel, High Level:
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Extensive support for vertex programs and pixel shaders |
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Scene Management |
General, Portals, Occlusion Culling, LOD:
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Efficient large-scale visibility determination |
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Advanced inter-zone lighting analysis at runtime |
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Special support for mirrors and remote portals |
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Object instancing and external scene referencing |
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Scene data can be imported from Collada format |
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Animation |
Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:
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Full skeletal hierarchy support for deformable meshes |
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Powerful hierarchical animation blending system |
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Meshes |
Mesh Loading, Progressive:
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Support for the Collada scene format, enabling models to be imported from 3D Studio MAX, Maya, XSI, Blender, and other content creation packages |
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Special Effects |
Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Fire, Decals, Fog, Mirror:
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Cube environment mapping |
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Environment-mapped bump mapping |
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Fully extensible particle systems |
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Surface markings on arbitrary geometry |
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Bump-mapped (fully lit) surface markings |
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Real-time fire and electrical effects |
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Transparent warping effects (heat haze, etc.) |
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Bumpy reflection and refraction |
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Postprocessed glow |
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Fog volumes |
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Full-scene cinematic motion blur |
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Interactive in-game interface panels |
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Terrain |
Rendering:
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Networking System |
Client-Server:
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Fast, reliable network implementation using UDP/IP |
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Solid fault tolerance and hacker resistance |
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Advanced security measures, including packet encryption |
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Automatic message distribution to entity controllers |
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Cross-platform internet voice chat |
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Sound & Video |
2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
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Fully spatialized 3D sound effects |
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Unlimited streaming music channels with seamless looping and concatenation |
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Doppler shift and other frequency effects |
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High-precision sound travel delay |
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Atmospheric absorption effects |
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Reverberation with multiple simultaneous environments |
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Directional sounds with cone attenuation |
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Obstruction attenuation applied to direct and reflected paths |
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Frequency-dependent volume settings for all effects |
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Permeation system determines how far sounds travel through interiors |
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Apple's QuickTime technology can be used to play movies or soundtracks from numerous formats |
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Rendering |
Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture:
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Antialiasing (up to 8x) |
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Bilinear and trilinear filtration |
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Anisotropic filtration (up to 16x) |
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Vertical Sync control |
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| Features: |
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Ease of Use: |
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| Stability: |
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Support: |
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| Date Added |
Mon, 19 Jul 2004 |
Last Updated |
Wed, 1 Sep 2010 |
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There are currently 122 reviews for this engine
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| License Name |
Price |
Source Code |
Comments |
| Other/Custom |
$350.00 |
Yes |
All future updates available at no additional cost. |
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Screenshots:
Member Reviews |
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NOTE: The ratings and reviews below reflect the opinions of their respective authors and as such, do not reflect the opinions of DevMaster.net or its staff.
The reviews are not moderated and some are completely inaccurate. Therefore, most reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. If you find any inaccurate or inappropriate reviews, let us know by stating in detail why you think the review should be removed and any links/documents that support your contention.
| One of the 3 best engines here! |
Features:
- superb rendering features
- MacOS support!!!
- Good performance!
- Easy to use with the world editor and the visual script editor
- you can't get better support!
We now have decided to go with C4, it was very close (Sylphis3D) but C4 made it. Top notch! |
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| good deal |
| c4 is a very nice engine for a very nice price! for ease of use i only gave 3 stars because it's an engine which has to be used with c++ (you don't have to be a c++ master though to use it). i will change features to 5 stars once some of the upcoming features like the vegetation system, better terrain and physics are released. :) |
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| An engine well-suited for programmers |
I am the creator of the C4 Engine and the person primarily responsible for its continuing development and support. You may know me as the author of Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics and The OpenGL Extensions Guide, but the project that I have spent most of my time working on is the C4 Engine.
The C4 Engine has been in development since 1999, and we have maintained a strict adherence to high standards of robustness, stability, and clean code. The engine's carefully designed architecture has provided a strong foundation upon which a powerful and flexible set of features has been built over the years.
To make a game with C4 does require some knowledge of C++ and 3D mathematics. Those who are comfortable with these subjects will find a refreshingly elegant interface to a complete set of game programming tools.
When evaluating engines, most people concentrate on graphics, but it's important to look at a lot of other things like audio, networking, physics, multi-core support, input devices, GUI tools, scripting, and the import pipeline that you will need to make a complete game. C4 has all of these, and they're all as rock-solid as the graphics system.
There are over 1500 pages of API documentation, an extensive wiki maintained by both the engine's creators and the community, and an 800-page book to help you get started with C4. Additionally, all licensees have direct access to the engine's creators on the support forms where they can get quick and detailed answers to their questions.
The C4 Engine continues to evolve, and new features are being added all the time. Licensees get free code updates forever! A demo can be downloaded on the C4 Engine website (http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/). |
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| Superb! |
Finally, an engine which caters to the professional developer with a more than reasonable price tag.
The structure of the source code is the best I've ever seen. Clean, well presented and clearly very well thought out.
This engine is a pure pleasure to use. Stable, feature packed with excellent support from the author.
Do yourself a favour and give this engine a serious look, it deserves your consideration. You will not be disappointed I assure you.
- Dave |
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| Simply Beautiful |
| This is the greatest engine I've ever had the pleasure of owning. If you are serious about game development and require a top notch product that just works, this is the engine for you. This engine delivers, has more features than advertised and will reward you for your efforts. I can't say enough kind words about the C4 Engine, a remarkable product. |
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| Nice |
This is an excellent package, especially when considering the stellar cost/value ratio.
The engine is very carefully designed, and it's very evident. The source is quite easy for a coder to grasp, even by a programmer picking it up for the first time. One result of this is that customizing the package is much easier than most other engines (i.e., adding Novodex support, or scripting, etc).
The engine graphics quality is quite nice - don't let the demo fool you: it's all Programmer Art! But even with the "PA" there should be enough cues to the watchful eye indicating that the engine is a capable one.
Support is beyond excellent. The author is very accessable and interested in the future of the engine. Issues are typically tackled ASAP and suggestions are always welcomed.
Highly recommended to all. |
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A Feature-Rich Engine That Just Keeps Getting BetterPosted by:
a2k
at Mar 1, 2008 |
The C4 Engine is a cleanly constructed, feature-rich game engine offered at an extremely affordable price. I have been using C4 for over a year now and am quite pleased with the engine, its development, and its community. The wonderful thing about this engine is that software development in C4 does not have to be done completely in C++. The projects programmer(s) can construct several functional components called Controllers, Properties, and Scripts that allow game designers and artists to easily drag, drop, and modify behaviors of the game Entities.
The engine consists of an executable that runs several dynamically linked libraries for the main application and the various plugin tools. This engine is not for novice C++ programmers. It is a good API to learn programming in C++, but the underlying architecture can occasionally be daunting to understand because the engine makes use of advanced programming concepts. It helps that the engine itself uses core software engineering concepts, excellent C++ programming practices and design patterns, and fortunately, the C4 community is more than helpful with providing solutions, alternatives, suggestions, and positive feedback.
The asset pipeline leaves a little to be desired, but is still functional enough to produce results with a reasonable workflow. The newly-revamped virtual file system introduces greater freedom in file organization and allows for packing on a per-project basis. Support for the COLLADA 3D format lends to the flexibility of using the asset creation package of choice. Importing is a little bit of a hassle in that there are multiple steps to get assets into the engine, including manually having to refresh the textures after importing the geometry, which is currently being addressed. However, importing geometry and animation is straightforward, logical, and supports LODs that can be dynamically viewed in the Model Viewer. The World Editor has a perspective camera that can have lighting turned on to see how the world looks in-game, as well as a quick Save and Play feature. C4 Engine has no ability to create low-level custom shader scripts, but a Shader Editor is planned for a future release.
As a licensee with full source code, a C4 application developer can create custom middle-ware and modifications to the functionality and usability of the various integrated tools that come with C4. There have been plenty of home-brewed solutions in the C4 community that allow increased productivity, such as an extensive Material Library, additional right-click context menus, dual-column panel layout, camera speed adjustment, a particle system generator plugin, third-party physics integrations, third-party scripting language integrations such as with lua, Python, and some GUI SDKs, and some of these solutions either eventually get officially absorbed into the engine, or promote feedback to the C4 author for alternative solutions.
C4 is an excellent engine for the modern game developer. The core framework exemplifies coherent software design structure that serves as a stable foundation for any real-time interactive application. Although the engine has several unfinished features, C4 is continually and actively being improved, and it is an all-in-one solution that's difficult to find in today's market of game engines.
[To give some credibility to my review, I'll summarize that I am a computer engineering graduate, and have been programming for about 7-8 years, modding for even since before then, currently working in the game industry as a software engineer, and also have used 3ds max for a few years and am currently a Maya user for 4 years running.] |
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One very good engine!Posted by:
Jarrod
at May 30, 2007 |
Updated Review- Updated on 5-30-07 to reflect users increased experience and updated features-
Review from a graphic artist's standpoint.
Features-
-Mapping types-C4 supports parallax, normal, gloss, emission, and cube mapping, there may be some i am forgetting, but only because c4 supports so many! The implementation of these mapping types are also very well done, the engine even includes a tool to generate a normal or parallax map from a gray-scale map when importing it.
-shaders- C4 supports various shaders from reflection to refraction and ones from the above mentioned mapping types. Most importantly, they run fast!
-Terrain- Terrain in C4 is fairly lacking, i hate to say it, however future plans are to redo the terrain system and even add in a foilage system similar to those used by packages like speed tree (billboading lod vegetation...etc). Because this feature is being worked on now i will not let it affect my rating but i do feel it should be mentioned for those wanting to buy the engine before that particular update.
-Misc Features- C4 supports many types of misc things such as fluid and cloth sim, and very good geometry occluding. C4 uses a zone (portal) rendering system that will not only cull back faced tris but will also allow the engine to seperate your game levels into chunks and therefore allow you to more optimally use the max tri count your target hardware can support for each given area. This feature not only removes whole sections for rendering that are out of sight but it goes down to the individual object level.
Ease of Use-The engine is very very easy to use, especially as an artist.
-Editor-The engine has a built in editor that now allows full lighting and shaders to be seen within the perspective viewport. This is an excellent way to more precisely fine tune the lightign and shaders without havign to go back and forth between gameplay and the editor, along with this it gives a fairly similar fps rating to what you will experience ingame when previewing the full lighting, so its great to test performance while in the editor too!
In the material editor you can very easily put together soem very realistic materials, just throw in your textures into the appropriate slots, adjust specular/microfacet shading (if being used) and there you go! The material manager allows lots of things to be tweaked for each given material too, including color for many of the effects for either fine tuning them or adding some effect.
Then you also have the node options menu, to change a lot of the settings for each object in your world, simply click on it and go to the top menu into node options. Here you can tell objects to use certain shaders, allow or not allow certain shadows, apply scripts (there is also a visual scripting system built into the editor), and many many other things.
Stability and Performance- The engine's performance is rock solid for the features it supports. One thing some still don't understand is that C4 is purely a shader engine, or as some would say "next-gen" (current-gen). So please don't expect the engien to run on a low-end card all that well. Think to yourself, "would i be able to run Doom3 at full graphics with my card...?" if the answer is no then please don't expect the same from C4, that would not be logical. Pick the engine that is suitable for your needs. However if you need a kickass graphical engine for a great price C4 is here. To go a bit further into performance it is worth a bit of a mention that a lot of optimization techiques to speedup rendering have been implemented into C4. Namely a lot of optimizations with the lightign and shadowing have been done, although it is up the the user to activate these options intelligently, when used right it can help improve overal fps (though appropriate level design for such an engien is the best place to start for performance improvements).
I am giving C4 a 4/5 in this category only because i have experience a few crashes when trying to get some work done late at night. However these are rarely encountered and when they are it is a result of a bug, which is reported and fixed by eric asap.
Support- Hands down C4 has the best support i have ever seen for any engine. The owner himself, Eric, usually gives support directly through the forums. He does this so much it has even led me to develop some conspiracy theories on this subject on just how does eric does it ;-)
Curve-You also have to give the engine a rating curve because of its price. For $200 you get all of the above and the source code, what more could a person wish for?!
Basically i am trying to say, if C4 fits your needs, buy it!
Jarrod M. Christman
Old Review-
so far my experiences with this engine are purely on the graphic artist side and i only have one thing to say.... wow! this engien for its price offers lighting as good as doom 3, nice mapping techniques like parallax, gloss (controled specular), emission maps...etc. it supports about any kind of shadow you could possibly want with very little performance hit from using them! on top of that it support seamless indoor/outdoor tranisitons, is very good with handling rendering, has built-in editor and so much more!
and you can get it all for $100! very good price i must say. atm since the engine isn't finished (needs better terrain and more editor features) it doesn't have everything but its all being added at a very fast pace and the developers of the engine seem to be very dedicated. no use in waiting to buy, i would recommend this engine. even though this engine has features that are lacking or not there at all i'm giving it a 5 on features because it does have a lot fo features that you will not find on any other engine on this site for the price of a $100.
Jarrod M. Christman |
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| at last, I wrote the review :)) |
I'm using this engine since it was available for licensing. In that days I switched from Cipher Engine which remains abandoned by its author, except this I had very good times with Cipher.
So, I was in hope that the same good times comes with C4 license, because C4 in these times looks more like we wanted to do with Cipher here.
Let's start with features:
Supported features is the reason why I choose this engine (I planned also switch to better HW that days :)), but I'm using this engine on its lower edge of features what is my ATi9700 capable. I like realtime lighting system adn related FX like bumps and parallax maps. I never had a problems with performance like some people has, performace is still in boundaries of ATi9700 capabilities and depends on scene complexity and amount of eyecandies used in actual rendered view. But I can live with it. Some visual effects can't be rendered on this kind of graphic hardware I have.
Another not really in good shape feature is collision detection and some physics library. Collisions and physics are in stage to be fixed and finished. Exact schedule for milestones are available on C4's wiki pages. Check them out.
Another feature which I'm not really missing these times is Terrain support. Right now, I don't care if this will be done soon or not. But I can imagine good tool support for this. For now there is very cripple tool to add some terrain, but is good only for some kind of demonstrations. But same good (or better work for terrain) can be done (model and texture) in DCC and exported into C4.
Interesting features for me is cloth simulation, from the designer's point of view it is good addition to static level designs.
Stability:
I never had a stability issues.
Using:
I'm not a programmer, I'm game designer and artist. As an artist I can make small tweaks in the engine easily and compile it without problems. If something wrong I can ask (the internet, books, or support from forum).
As an artist or game designer I was nice surprised by an editor implemented into engine as a plugin module + there you can plug some more tools also into game or into editor as well. Can't wait for new updates :).
Way how is the game scripting done is a bit out of my style. Misses some access for "not that good" programmers - like LUA level, or some other scripting system which can be implemented into gameplay settings and then exposed into editor - this field needs a lot more work. Good way how to script gameplay has Reality Engine (acquired by Epic), also I like way of scripting used in Beyond Virtaal engine. If I could be good C++ programmer, scripting gameplay wouldn't be that issue for me. :)
The design of an engine is really good, but going much to details is not that easy for me.
Support:
Support from author is something I never seen before - SUPERB, mostly because when I was using Cipher engine - its author meanwhile abandoned his project.
Forum for users is something I can call also SUPERB, there you can find few really professioanal people who can provide good advice or criticisim, also with some additional support for expanding C4's capabilities.
Conclusion:
Heading of C4 engine towards future is good and I hope I can find a lot of resources enough to make good game with small team of professionals, and also I hope C4 engine will be the only engine we will use then. |
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An amazing deal for indies, and overall simply a great enginePosted by:
bryced
at Feb 28, 2008 |
Though the demo code shows an FPS, I've had no trouble at all making a an overhead freeform camera or 2D GUI components which behave exactly as I want them to.
The rendering is superb and the engine is chock full of high performance, high-powered graphics capabilities. The tools and art pipeline are good.
Code interface is through C++ using very well designed, easy to use interfaces. You will have to be a programmer or have a programmer to make things work but if you have any coding experience this method works out much better in the long run than using script based engines works out - it's also possible to add in a scripting system for certain tasks on your own, as well, like some members have chosen to do, but I have found it very easy to just use C++ in spite of the fact that previous to the last six months I had not used it at all since the 90s.
Support and documentation is beyond what I would expect from any game engine's indy license. Too many communities for game engines are just not as helpful as they could be for one reason or another, but the community for C4 is large enough that help is never more than a step away and at the same time not so large that the signal to noise ratio makes it difficult to cut through the cruft.
I have evaluated every engine out there that's remotely in the price range of an indy developer, and C4 outstrips them all pretty handily. Everyone's needs are different and some might want an authoring tool instead of an engine, but if you have a coder on your team at all and can't afford to pay 20-100k just for an engine then I believe this is probably the right choice for you.
High powered graphics, excellent support (the creator answers any questions amazingly promptly, if the rest of the community does not get to them before he has the chance), as yet rock solid stability (and bug fixes are often applied within hours of being reported). It's also future-proof, as the indy license gives free updates for life. Even if you decide on another route, picking up a license at 200 dollars just in case is a steal as it's bound to go up in cost.
That's originally how I purchased my license in fact - I bought C4 and Torque but after struggling with the annoyances and lack of documentation for Torque for a few months and not getting anywhere I decided to delve into C4 more thoroughly and am glad I did - I have no doubt that not only will I be able to get better graphical quality than I'd ever hoped for, but that this engine is likely saving me a solid year of work or more over trying to use the other solutions out there that I've delved into.
Oh, and there are not many negative reviews for C4 but a few of them really lambast it. I'd suggest taking them with a grain of salt, though. One is from the one person banned from the forums to date who had a bone to pick because his pet feature requests were not addressed in favor of other features the author deemed more important (which have now long sicne been addressed), and another from someone who tried the engine for one day and then started a forum flame war and decided to take it out on the engine's rating. |
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| The good and the bad |
features:
- fantastic rendering features
- very clean C++ Code
- easy to use with the tools (world editor, material editor, texture importer, mesh importer)
- good support
- very nice price
- the documentation is growing
- active forums
The bad:
You and your customer need a highend graphic card. Intel graphic cards will not supported. That decimate the possible market, today. |
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| Exceptional Engine - Superior Value |
Hi,
I purchased a license to the C4 engine in March of 2006.
Compiling the engine is quick & easy. The engine compiles without warning or error. The project setup is clean and organized and the code base is meticulously arranged and well thought out. The engine runs on Windows, Mac and PS3 (a separate license is required for the PS3) and some members of the community have a server based version running on Linux.
The C4 Engine is being used by many universities, institutions and companies around the world (University of Kempten, McMaster University, Georgia Tech and Lockheed Martin to name a few) in conjunction with Eric Lengyels (lead programmer of the C4 Engine) book Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics.
At the time of writing this review the independent license will cost you $350 US. This includes the entire source code to the engine, tools and sample modules, updates are free for life. New builds of the engine are typically released monthly and detailed release notes are published for each build. The community has a direct influence over the direction the engine takes.
Aside from being a complete game authoring package the C4 Engine features one of the best rendering engines available. Fully dynamic lights and shadows, extensive material settings and effects and a powerful zoning/portal system. In addition to this a comprehensive sound manager is included (featuring Doppler shift, sound travel delay, atmospheric absorption and reverb to name a few things) as well as a network manager, input manager and everything else that one might need. The engine also features many built in tools such as a full featured world editor, model viewer, texture, sound and movie previewing tools, a comprehensive material manager, an editor for constructing in-game interface panels and an exciting visual scripting system.
The Collada format is used to bring external geometries into the engine. This allows a significantly large range of digital content creation tools to be used in conjunction with C4. Full skeletal hierarchy support for skinned meshes and advanced animation blending is supported as well LOD, bump maps, parallax maps, horizon maps, specular maps, ambient occlusion and texture compression.
I encourage you to visit the C4 engine website, try the demo (don't be shallow, look past the programmer art) and visit the forum and Wiki pages. I highly recommend this engine. |
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| Excellent Value for the Indie game developer |
C4 is still in development, but its moving along quite nicely.
It has some of the graphical features of higher priced engines, like dynamic stencil shadows, dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion, dynamic soft-shadows, parallax (offset mapping/vitual displacement mapping) mapping, glow, normal bump mapping, and even cinematic motion blur!
The engine's support is second to none, if you find a bug, post it in the bug report forum, and Eric (the maintainer of the engine) is sure to respond. Questions about a certain piece of code in the engine? Ask and Eric will respond quickly.
The community is quickly growing, and is slowly becoming a nice little community for the engine, and is always growing!
The planned features is whats going to make this engine worth while.
With physics coming this summer, and many terrain enhancements, theres no reason to complain about X feature missing, you're covered! Just see for you self whats planned: http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51
Overall, get this engine, and you'll be happy, your artists will be happy thanks to a nice artistic pipeline, and your coders will be happy thanks to nice clean and well organized source code. |
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| Pure |
I've just manipulate this engine for a few hours, and the word clean and simple come in my mind.
The engine design is very good.
The performance is great.
In the new demo, you can fire light ball, who bounce everywhere, and light bumpmaped wall with a nice effect.
You can see that the author is a master in shadowing technique.
The world editor is already functional to make a game.
It need some feature to manipulate viewport easier, but I'm sur that the new version will enchanced that part.
The material editor is great too.
The only cons is that there isn't enough comment in the source code, and the workflow for importing graphical material isn't the best you can find.
But Eric Lengyel listen to the community, and improvements are coming fast. |
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| When finished, it will be the answer to indie game dev |
Day 1 downloaded the demo.
Day 2 I bought a license.
It was as simple as that!
The engine isnt yet finished but if it is a reflection of the finished product it is money well spent, and from $100 US he is practically giving it away the engine price has increased to $350 which is still very affordable to an indie.
The engine designer is well qualified and will almost surely answer any questions you have. One thing that I do like is that he will fix bugs in the engine before implementing anything new.
The level editor is easy to use with many features and growing. The new terrain is a nice new addition.
Things I like about the engine:
Support from Eric and other users when needed
Very easy to import geometry.
Clean source code.
Stable engine.
Shadows, shaders are second to none.
Regular updates/fixes |
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| Eric |
C4 is definitely becoming one of the best engines out there and it's still one of the cheapest by far. I think the main thing people are so impressed with is the developers knowledge and how he stays active on the forums providing the highest quality of support possible.
Not only is the developer constantly adding in new features, but the community is one of the most helpful I've ever seen. |
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| Very good |
The engine is great with alot of great features and alot more coming. It's relatively easy to use if you know C++ and both the skeleton project and the sample game code included are clean and easily understood.
The performance of the engine is great but you're going to need a higher-end computer.
The support is very good, the author of the engine will actually help you fix problems you're having and will go out of his way to help you.
Major updates usually come out with something brand new and awesome, such as a new fire effect and the coming customizable water, which looks great. The author really puts alot of effort into updates.
This engine is great which will only get better. |
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| Looks good, but... |
..you would need to be good at C++ (and not C), plus use a fair bit of templates, function overloading etc etc.
Graphics look very good, but has limited support for loading 3D objects. The in-built world editor is rather sluggish and can be a pain to use - its not always intuitive.
Help is certainly pretty good from the forums.
Unfortunately the documentation isn't so good - there is limited detail on the functions, so you either have to ask on the forums or try and wade through the code looking for what you hope will do what you want. An example of this is the ImageElement class - it tells you how to load an image, but doesn't tell you how to position it... Nor does it tell you where to look to find out how to position it...
In the Intel Mac version (V132), there is rather a problematic bug, where you have to open the CLI (and then close it again), before you can detect keypresses. In addition, the cursor up key is treated differently from all other keys...
The demo program is rather painful to view too because either the graphics are too sharp or the FOV is too narrow.
It seems to be overly complicated, which is a pity. |
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| Can't wait to see more |
| I looked at C4 after trying 4 other engines and theres really no comparison. While the code for the other engines was a giant mess, the code in C4 is beautifully clean and logically structured. Its obvious that a lot of care went into it. The engine is still in a developmental stage, but everything thats done is done extremly well. Updates come often and bug fixes are always addressed really fast. Theres already a huge amount of features in the engine , but when all the announced future features are done this engine is really going to be a major force. You can't go wrong for the price and the support on the forums is unbelievable. |
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| Fast, stable, small learning curve, and very well laid-out code |
After reviewing over a dozen sub-$1K game engines, I chose the C4 Engine and have been very pleased. The code's extremely well laid-out and easy to read, making it very easy to insert my code modules. Documentation isn't overly vebose and has just the right amount of detail. The couple times I've emailed questions, they were answered w/in hours, including my licensing which supposedly was going to take over a day. Demo performance and stability were better than expected, even after upgrading it with a lot of my code. I haven't tested the networking components, yet, however.
The best 3 points that I can't stress enough are:
1. The code is VERY easy to work with; it's organized very well and has well-placed optimizations. I was able to read it like a book and start inserting code in key locations immediately.
2. There are many modern eye-candy graphics features, maybe not everything, but certainly more than enough to add a high level of realism to my MMORPG.
3. The included tools (e.g. world editor) are very intuitive and are a great help for a noob content creator like myself. (I'm 90% coder, 10% artist.)
The only negative aspect of this engine is that it's not supported on Linux or other 'nix platforms. However, given Eric's reputation, it wouldn't surprise me to see him add it in the future. The lack of 'nix support is the only reason I rated the Features as 4- instead of 5-star.
PS The render-to-texture feature is wonderful, allowing you to have visually animated objects within the game world: computer screens, TVs, reactive keypads, animated dials on doors (e.g. a safe), realtime mugshots on character screens, etc. Lots of things you can do with this simple feature. |
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| For $200 it's a bargain |
Ok, so it's pitched at the next gen of graphics cards - this is mentioned on the site (just so you know which cards are supported). Also, the engine is not yet complete and is still in Beta.
The Engine and Source Code
Very well designed and coded, the C++ is very easy to pick up and run with. Two game framework demos are included, each compiled as a dll, Game and Skeleton - these are both using the C4 engine. Game is an FPS framework with a few worlds to load up and look around, the main being Demo. The skeleton framework is a cut down version of game, but heavily commented with a single world to load. Look through the source and you get a pretty good idea of how the engine is designed, couple together the high-level design docs it is very straight forward to understand.
The Editor
The editor is about to receive a much needed overhaul, the features of which are detailed on the C4 Engine wiki, I'll update my review when these are complete.
Graphics
Load up the demo and have a look around, forget the developer art, look at the lighting, think about what can be achieved in your game. The engine supports Collada 1.4 and it works surprisingly well, especially as Collada is receiving more and more support from the big modelling apps. The art pipeline is well on the way to working tremendously well - with the new editor tools, future changes to the Terrain and Foliage, this should be something special.
Physics
This is still open to discussion, will there be a custom developed physics solution or will there be support built in for one or many third party solutions, or both ? Start your lobbying.
A number of members of the community have already integrated a number of physics engines into C4, namely PhysX, TrueAxis, Bullet and Newton. The engine is so well constructed that the integration is straight forward. The source for a lot of these integrations is also available.
AI
Nothing implemented yet.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer has recently had a complete overhaul, which works well over the LAN and over the Internet. A multiplayer map is now included with the release, running from the Game implementation. Two future updates include a dedicated server mode and file transfer.
Scripting
I initially thought it would be a bit of a pain not having a scripting language, so having to compile every time just to check changes. I was wrong, the C++ is particularly easy to follow, but if you need to integrate a scripting language it is apparently straight forward with one or two forum members already having done so. An elementary graphical scripting system is in place, that is going to built upon in future releases.
Community and Support
An interesting community; ranging from complete newbies to the very experienced. But ask a question and 99 times out of a hundred it is answered straight away, if this doesn't happen, Eric will always supply an answer. The community is passionate about the engine and games and it is well worth just reading through the posts to understand the direction that C4 is travelling.
Value for money
The whole point is that for $200 you get a very well designed engine, well written and supported. It can be extended as the code and design is very easy to understand.
The engine is constantly evolving, Eric is very open to suggestions, and it can be fun just watching everyone lobbying for their requested features and priorities. This just demonstrates that Eric is open minded when it comes to new potential features, weighing their usefulness against cost (in time and money) to develop. The point is, he always listens.
Look beyond the developer art in the demos and spend a bit a of time understanding what is available here and then realise that for $200 it's a bargain.
Eric must be applauded for his hard work and effort. |
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| Unmatched |
One of the best engines I have worked with.
Highlights:
-Windows & MacOS support
-Programed in C++
-GREAT forum support
-Easy to use world editor
-Easy to follow tutorials
-Only $200 but hold it own against engines costing 10x the price. |
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| Superb engine for the price tag |
C4 is the most well laid out engine I have ever used. All of the features work seamlessly together. The Engine is still in a development stage and large features still have yet to be implemented but by the quality of the already installed features, I know the finished prodect is going to be nothing short of Phenomenal.
The graphics are astounding for a engine that can be purchased for $100. The lighting, shadows and texture effects such as normal mapping and reflections are all top notch.
I highly recommend C4 for anyone looking for an engine on a low budget but is looking to make a game that looks like it was made on a big budget.
The level editor included with the engine is very easy to use, for someone like me that is used to using the UnrealEd and MaxEd, I find C4's map editor to be extemely easy and quick.
Soon to be implemented are the terrain, foliage, physics and many more lighting and effects that will only make this engine that much better. |
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| Excellent engine! |
Features: Top notch, features you know from commercial features like soft shadows, realtime rendered portals, parallax mapping and the lot. There are also a lot of tools build into the engine like world editor, visual script editor etc. MacOS Support is another feature that is important to mention! 5 Stars
Ease of use: Really, the only thing that COULD be a little difficult is the C++ useage IF you don't know C++. But the sourcecode is well documented and tue to the compiled binaries you don't need to look at the sourcecode if you don't want to. There are good tutorials, the API is well documented and the wiki will help you a lot. 4 Stars for the inexperienced programmer but actually 5 stars if you know C++
Stability: There are a few bugs but since Terathon has a good bug tracking system and the engine runs pretty stable this is a 5! 5 Stars
Performance: Depending on the features you use, the performance is always very good. Can you expect to have all the eye candy with a FX5200? Of course not! But with all on the max. and a resolution at 1280x800 it runs pretty good at my laptop (1.8 GHz Core Duo, 1 GB RAM and a Radeon X1600). Not perfect but acceptable (with max. features!!!!). 5 Stars
Support: Eric is always there, he is a fast responding, high intelligent programmer. Does he get any sleep at all? I don't know. All I know is that I'm receiving the best support I've ever got. I came across many languages and engines (Blitz3D - support bad, PureBasic - support good, Dark Basic - bad, Beyond Virtual - ok, Torque Game Builder - ok, 3D Game Stuido - bad) but C4 beats them all.
One note: I got this engine for $100 (old price) but even at $200 with yearly upgrade fee of $75 this engine underpriced! Featurewise it's playing in the same league as the "big boys" and there will even be a PS3 port! Go get this engine, will you! |
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| Good for $100, Great for $200 |
I got c4 right before the end of $100 and it was the best investment I could ever make. Even at it's new price of $200 it is the best engine, for coders and non-coders. Why is it $200? Because of it's new found popularity and features, that make selling it for $100 "giving it away". But even with $200 (witch is more like a donation) it will be sure not to stay their. With collida import and unreal type rendering, it is the best engine around if you are willing to wait and or impliment some of the features yourself.A would editor make-over will be done in the next build. The more features the higher the price.
It has a very very clean higharchy for C++ coding, nothing like the "porque engine". Fetures are not broken.
Anyway you get direct support from the guy who made the engine. And don't worry about lightmaps, shadowmaps and bsp build-times. Cause you can instintly play your game :). |
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| Quite overestimated |
If you want a engine that is good on 3D on NVidia card, then C4 is for you, BUT:
- C4 has many bugs on ATi cards
- 3D sound is not right there yet
- only Collada support yet, not everyone has a high priced modelling package or wants to use Blender!
- no physics
- no terrain support
And most importantly: no scripting! I can live without scripting if I'm able to use C# or VB.Net or Java. But if I'm forced to use C++ then godbye! I'm a quite experienced C++ coder but why would I want to code my game as a DLL in C++ when there are other engines I can use with a more easy to use language like C#/VB.Net or can be scripted with languages like Lua?
Plus: price increase AND yearly update fee. If you don't pay the update fee then you'll have to get a new C4 license the next time you want to update. So you pay 200 dollar plus yearly update fee and you're not even allowed to sell your games through a retail publisher? That's not Indie...
If you can live with those flaws, then C4 might be the right choice. If not: go for TV3D, Torque Shader Engine, Luxinia (very good engine that is scripted through Lua) or wait for the .Net version of the Dark Game Development Kit. |
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| C4 - |
The good
1. Rendering engine
C4 sports what is simply the best rendering engine available in the indie market. A clean, well thought interface, which is built around latest advances in per-pixel lighting techniques? It is without doubt one of the finest points of the C4 engine and the strong point of its author, Mr. Eric Lengyel.
Lighting models:
unified lighting model with support for many basic light source types
unified *hard* shadowing (no soft shadow support as at the time of November 06 2006)
per pixel phong
cook Torrance
advanced normal mapping techniques (including parallax mapping and horizon mapping)
gfx:
fog , seamlessly integrated with the shader engine
advanced particle engine including polyboards, riboon & trails
decals
beams
video on textures
advanced flame effect
2. Advanced shader builder engine , which run-times creates shader by assembling fragments. Artists do not need to worry about lighting interaction, is all take care through a nice material editor
3. Advanced graphical shader editor, which allow construction of many different types of shader and implicitly, effects.
4. Advanced portal engine, which features mirrors and remote portals. Space warps are possible. The portal engine, in addition to being a powerful culling tool, is a powerful GFX tool. Effects like the ones seen in Prey game are easily possible in C4. in addition to normal portals, C4 features for advanced culling anti-portals, or occlusion portals to further optimize visibility. Also, fog efficiently culls portals which are completely fogged.
4. Orthogonal features
While it might not seem very important for many ppl, it is certainly a very big plus to have an orthogonal feature set.
5. Powerful controller system
6. Includes a basic scripting system
C4 features a pretty powerful visual scripting system , where you can build functionality from building blocks. THe system is complete , include access to variables and conditional support. While different of Unreal's Karma, it is very powerful.
7. Game State serialization is included and functional. It is supported for scripts also.
8. World manager supports instancing.
9. A powerful and clean API. Maybe the best in an indie engine. (but unnecessary complex in some places)
10. Sample source code (and almost complete multilayer game comes with the engine) to get you booted.
11. Complete GUI system. The system allow in-game interactive GUI elements which can be mapped to level geometry.
12. A easy to use effect system which allows creation of custom effects with ease.
13. The engine API is powerful and complete, meaning that is trivial to integrate any 3rd party middleware with it.
14. A complete 3D sound solution , space aware and effects such as echo, Doppler, atmospheric absorption
15. A very nice terrain system, which allow for rendering of pretty large terrains. The terrain system features unique features, from which the most appealing for me is the ability to have overhangs. It also comes with a fully functional editor for the terrains.
16. The engine contains all the tools / API necessary to create a wide variety of game objects. When combined with the graphical scripting interface, there aint much you cant create with it. Certainly, you can replicate the game objects set of any FPS title you can imagine.
The C4 engine is slowly reaching maturity. Version 2.0 which will be released in a short time will contain a fully featured physics engine , and a powerful LOD system for the terrain systems.
For anyone who is acustomed to code in C++ there are hardly better options than C4 engine in the price range where the engine sells. |
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| C4: The only engine I have purchased after 2 years of searching |
Hello all, I have searched for 2 years to find the right 3D game engine. Although there are some areas that C4 has yet touched, as a license holder I feel the engine has more potential than all others which I have looked at. Additionally, C4 has an indy price you absolutely can not go wrong with. The professional license is well worth it for a company to invest in. The engine's programmer has a vast knowledge of 3D programming and the platforms the engine runs on. One of the most attractive things to me about the engine is that the author responds directly to questions and comments (and in a timely manor).
I give C4 my highest review of all the engines I have looked at.
Thank you,
Billy Rose |
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| Quiet Achiever |
This is an outstanding engine. Well written, a programmers delight, impressive feature set and an encouraging list of planned future features. Jump on the forums and you will discover an intelligent community who seem quite intent on helping each other out, without any of the nonsense found in other game development communities. To summarize, the $200 I spent on licensing this engine was money very well spent. No regrets whatsoever, I encourage other serious game developers to do the same.
Sebastian. |
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| Solid Engine with bright future! |
I just recently licensed this engine and can't say that I am not happy with my decision. C4 has been a breath of fresh air, even in the little time I've been able to experiment with it, due to time constraints.
I've looked at most open source engines and also own a license to TGE/TGEA, as well as the now "defunct" Reality Engine, but C4 has always interested me.
Eric has been great about helping people figure out issues and even keeps the users up to date on when new things were going to be in builds. I can't say the same for too many other companies or individuals who license their engines.
I can't wait to get more time to really try to make this engine shine!
Ratings:
4 for features, as there are some things that are in progress like Terrain rework and Foliage system. As well as changes to make Glow work like it should and other things here and there
5 for Ease of Use: It compiles almost out of the box, as long as you grab the DirectX sdk and maybe some oddities, but its all properly explained on the Wiki
4 for Stability & Performance: I haven't completely been convinced on the performance, but feel the stability is there. Time will tell!
5 for Support: No contest, that Eric is offering better/more support so far than I've gotten from other Engines I own |
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| Only pleasant surprises. |
My second engine. Leary from the experience of the first, I actually tried the demos and asked questions.
Very helpful and tolerant community. Everything worked as advertised. My assets all worked with some tweaking. COLLADA rocks ... no dts hoop-jumping. I bought the engine. I recompiled the engine no problems a couple hours later and got right to work. The code is so neat and well organized ... my god ... I hate to mess it up. |
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C4 Engine made our game possiblePosted by:
Mojave
at Mar 5, 2008 |
To introduce myself, I have been developing a game with C4 Engine for almost two years, starting with code from a 2D casino game I developed about seven years ago. Once I had a new foundation of code developed with C4 Engine to build upon, I started recruiting additional members for our team in the last couple of months, to help out with level design, character animation, and music and sound effects. I have also licensed a number of professionally created animated character models and other models for our game environment. So, I can share some experience using C4 Engine to develop a game with a small team.
C4 Engine has been a true joy to use. With full source code, the engine, world editor, and model viewer tools have been easy to customize for our team's needs, and the engine itself has a well-balanced design that isn't over-engineered for its size.
The support for custom controllers (code that controls the behavior of objects in the game, such as characters and interactive panels) has dramatically improved in the last couple of releases, to the point where we now have a powerful, custom set of controllers built just for our game, that can be viewed and configured in the world editor without changing any source code. The latest version of C4 Engine has a plug-in mechanism that allows controllers to be dropped in as DLLs and loaded at run-time.
Eric Lengyel has been diligent about stability issues - he sometimes has a fix the same day. And although he hasn't endorsed every feature request, especially for features that are too specific to a particular game, he has often suggested how we could go about adding a custom feature on our own.
One of the artists on our team has had great fun creating demo levels using a combination of C4 Engine World Editor and Collada to bring in artwork from 3ds Max and other tools, and with the recent engine improvements, he is starting to make some nice progress on building custom levels for our game. We have also recently started importing animated characters, one that is scratch built, and others from a number of third-party vendors, via Collada, which is exciting given that the standard soldier character that ships with C4 Engine was getting kind of old :)
Music and sound effects have been easy to add to our game as well, with both streaming and one-shot playback options available.
For new licensees, I highly recommend checking out the C4 Engine Wiki:
http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
A number of C4 Engine licensees enjoy adding to the wiki to help out both beginners and intermediate developers. There are a number of licensees who share bits and pieces of code for custom features, and a few others who have even shared how to integrate third-party physics engines. Overall, there is a very strong community spirit to help out fellow licensees.
Eric Lengyel regularly adds new material to the "official" documentation as well, which is available in a handy archive that can be downloaded for offline reading. Eric is patient to make sure that everyone understands the reasoning behind his design decisions and how the engine works from the API level. (Although he has a few secrets that he keeps to himself. :)
Once you license the engine, you'll be given access to additional sections of the forum in which detailed discussions of the engine internals and other issues can be conducted. C4 Engine is not open source, but we still manage to share a lot of info with each other.
The one feature that isn't in yet, that we need for our game to ship, is large-scale terrain. (The lack of this feature is the reason I'm not awarding five stars for features.) I tried to make some large terrains with simple meshes built from height maps, but it used too much memory and the frame rate slowed down below acceptable levels, so C4 Engine really needs to dynamically support terrain detail in some manner. Luckily, the next major release of C4 Engine, code-named "Fireball" is slated to add a terrain and foliage system that will finally add the missing piece we need to ship our first title.
Bottom line - I've tried a few other engines, but made little progress. C4 Engine has finally made it possible for us to succeed at building our game as we envisioned it, which I believe is the real test of the worth of a game engine. |
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| This is the one you've been looking for! |
If you're looking for a robust, well architected, future-safe, feature-rich, well supported, well documented 3d game engine, look no further, this is it - C4!
It's hard to fault this engine. I've tried many of the others, but this is the best I've come acorss and I'm sticking with it. You get a world editor, the complete source code, well commented examples, excellent support on the forums - both from other experience users as well as from the chief architect himself. There is a clear plan for integrating new features into upcoming releases and C4 delivers on it's committments to the it's user base.
While you need C++ to understand and modify the engine, I started out with almost zero C++ and have managed quite well. I've even quickly found myself in a position to add to the tutorial base by adding to the wiki. In fact I'd say that C4 provides the best way to learn C++ while having fun making games at the same time.
Look no further, with C4, you've found it! |
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| Insane Engine |
This 3D engine is totally insane (I have bought 4 other 3D engines too, which I thought were the best at that time), it has the best looking graphics I've ever seen in any computer game, and runs on totally obsolete hardware without any lag (even on ATI MX300, I couldn't believe it).
I've held myself back from C/C++ coding because it was always a bit time-consuming and difficult to do things in C/C++ which I could do faster in BASIC variant languages too. But the clear structure of the source code of this engine makes actually C++ coding easier than BASIC coding.
Today I added a few lines to the source code, to have full Newton Physics functionality (it will be built-in in the coming release, also PhysX, it's a general plugin), and I felt that there's nothing this engine would not have to make any kind of game in a RAD ridiculously short time while providing a graphics technology and quality which not even million dollar engines can provide today (CryENGINE2, Unreal3 Engine, etc...).
The engine has even a superior 3D world and model and script, etc.., editor (all in one) built-in (it's ridiculously easy to use, you don't even need to read manuals!), which you can give to any of your team members for free, only the source code must stay at the one who bought it, but it's totally possible to write whole games without even touching the source code.
Well, maybe you think I'm just enthusiastic about it (yes I am!), but if you want some serious stuff to back it up: Lockheed Martin bought the engine Company-Wide! (and it's not the only company who bought it). |
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Excellent engine for ProgrammerPosted by:
at Feb 28, 2010 |
Under the hood:
I havent done that much with C4 but Im really impress what comes with it. The code is clean, though I havent performed a performance test to its best. If you are C++ programmer you will bea easily impressed by how they manage thing under the hood.
Ease of use:
In programmer point of view, its pretty easy to understand what happened. Everything is managed OOP-ly and the programming paradigm is persistent throughout the whole code. there might be bugs here and there but most times it will be handled through updates. However, I do have a trouble with the GUI. The engine come up with its own windowing system, rendered with OpenGL instead of using OS Native Windowing. You'll miss a few things like non resizable window/panel, etc2. But once you get used to it, its quite easy to handle by using shortcuts. Though I must warn the learning curve is steep, especially if youre not a programmer or GUI sensitive person.
Support:
The forum is very responsive, Eric(the creator) himself involved answering, and there are terathon employees too helping him, though sometimes the answer is not what you wish for.
Conclusion:
Its the best price value engine out there. it might not be for artist but good enough for indie game developer or hobbyist. It might be good for professional game too but I did not have an experience on that so no comment yet. |
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| Crytek beware! |
Updated Review : 30 Nov 09:
This engine is just awesome, and in the 18 months I have owned it has grown and flourished as I predicted it would. This is one of the best investments I've made.
I genuinely have not one negative comment or complaint re C4. The community and support is just brilliant and positive too.
As most readers will be prospective game engine purchasers, the following : In general there are 2 types of game engine purchasers ... those easily bullshitted with marketing hype (good artwork), and those with the IQ to see the real gems. In reality, the majority of licensees of Indie/Hobby game developers never do much with their purchase but mess about (kick tyres) - these are typically those caught by marketing nonsense as they lack the knowledge to know any better. Others have a lot of fun making small projects - which is great as they get their value (if its cheap enough), and a few go on to develop something really good (which 99% dream of).
All the time I see comments about buyers put off C4 because of its un-artistic demo or lack of flashy screen-shots, etc. These buyers fall in that first category. To be frank, the makers are not putting all their time into creating flashy marketing pages ... they are putting it into building this engine - and it shows! ie. They are not chasing sales, they are focussed on building the perfect engine. Some other engines even use 3rd party features in their marketing! Just check the update history on C4 and compare to other engines! C4 accelerates with features faster than any other engine. They've got it right ... let the engine code do the talking. And this is the best written and cleanest code you've seen - and of course you get source - don't invest in an engine without source!
C4 version 2.0 is about to launch ... as of writing this its going to Alpha release. This is a massive release, with tons of new features, including native cross-platform physics and advanced terrain, and introduces a world first in any game engine!!!
My message to you is this. Invest in this engine. As of writing its still available with lifetime free updates too! Which is just amazing value. So try get that!
_____________________________________
Original Review 20 May 2008:
While some engines are really good and have excellent potential of knocking on the top-end engines doors in the near-future, I see C4 getting there a lot faster, and I believe it is currently only a few releases away from shaking the 3D world. We saw this happen with Project Offset which grew from a garage-project to a monster (now owned by Intel and out of reach for all but a very select few), and C4 has all the indicators of becoming as powerful, so if you want to invest into something thats going to grow fast and big, this is it.
The features are excellent, the few that are lacking are on the road-plan, and within the next few releases this engine is going to be awesome, and a serious contender for challenging some big names.
If you're a big company and need to spend the dollars to form partnerships with big names, go buy the expensive licenses, but if you need to watch your budget, you really want to look at this. BTW: If you're a small company who sees the potential of being associated with a big name 3D engine in the future, you prob want this license too. As for private hobbyists, I'm not even clear why you are wondering.
When you want a good engine, you need to look under the hood. C4's code is excellent, support when needed is excellent, updates are frequent and solid, feature list grows almost every other month, and there's a great positive helpful community. |
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| C4 is tight! |
C4 is solid. It seldom crashes, and when it does, it's because you did something wrong. It uses old-school C++ class inheritance to implement a well-performing scene graph.
The tools that come with the engine work, and there's really nothing in there that would make you go "huh, that's bad..."
C4 doesn't (yet) have specific outdoors support, and it uses C++ for most kinds of logic you want to write. The script language (which is visual, drag-and-drop) is not something you'll use to build the entire game in. However, adding new script verbs or object properties, and exposing them to the artist in the editor, is easy, so any customization can be done in a modular fashion.
The forums are top notch, updates are regular (several times a year), and actual bugs you report actually get fixed quickly (often in the next release) with feedback from the developer. If there were 6 stars for support, C4 would get it. |
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| Excellent engine |
| The PS3, Windows and Mac game engine has incredible graphics, design and atmosphere! It is like you feelc in that engine with its high-quality that overruns(I think)the Unreal Engine 3.Marvellous, just marvellous! |
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Best Engine For Indie DevelopersPosted by:
igagen
at Feb 24, 2008 |
I've programmed for several different engines over the years (Quake3, Torque, TV3D), and evaluated many more (Ogre, Unigine, Unity, XNA, etc.) in search of a general purpose "next-gen" engine that would allow me to build the games I wanted to make. I've been using C4 for a little over a year now, and my team is currently using it to build a single player action RPG. Here's what makes C4 the best engine for Indie developer's in my view:
- Modern, well thought out design, makes the engine very ease to use, flexible and powerful.
- The engine code is very clean, modular and well written, making it easy to modify should you ever need to. As an example, one of the community members has added support for PhysX.
- Next-Gen graphics and design: shaders, per-pixel dynamic lighting, stencil shadows, zone/portal visibility system, etc.
- Customizable world editor. This is a very useful feature. C4 has built in support for customizing arbitrary game entities, so you don't have to create a custom editor to create your levels.
- Built in save/load support.
- General purpose design allows you to build the game you want, whether it's an FPS, RPG, RTS, or whatever.
- Consistent, frequent, quality releases adding meaningful new features. The engine is under very active development.
- Reported bugs are fixed promptly.
- Best support you can imagine from the engine's creator, Eric Lengyel. The C4 community as a whole is very good.
As an Indie developer, I have limited resources, and most importantly, limited time. The clean, well thought out design of C4, and amazing support from Eric and the C4 community in general, means that our team can focus our time on building our game. |
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| C4 is a Terrific Indie Solution |
| My team has been using C4 for a few months now after an abortive experience with Torque products. Our ability to implement features and build a quality game experience has been boosted tremendously by the C4 engine. In addition, the support offered on its forums is unparalelled. I would highly recommend this product to anyone looking to develop an indie game title. |
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| Ideal for C++ Developers |
After working with several other engines (like Torque and Power Render) C4 is probably one of the best thought out game engines an Indie C++ game developer could wish for.
The engine is already worth working with, but the developers continue to add to it on a regular basis (around 6 to 10 updates a year).
Once you get a license, you get all the source code for the engine, the tools, and the examples.
Even before you buy a license, you can down the engine and several examples to see some of the features the engine supports.
One of the best things about this engine is the support. Not only does the developer monitor and answer questions on the forums, but so does the community. There is no such thing as a bad question. The community is friendly and helpful, as is the developer. This is well worth the price of the licence compared to the other forums I have sought answers at.
The graphics engine already supports a lot of the features a modern game engine requires. But the next phase of features will help set the engine in a class to itself.
If you are a C++ developer looking for a game engine to use for your next graphics project, C4 is worth doing more research and taking it for a test run. |
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| C4 - the relentlessly evolving engine |
In terms of value for money, C4 almost makes you feel like a criminal every time you download the latest build.
It's not only the fact that new, high-quality features keep making their way into the core, but also that those features tend to be perfectly solid, sensible and ready to be put to productive use from the very first time they appear. No half-baked ad hoc stuff, in other words.
The rendering quality is nothing short of amazing. I'm not a huge fan of the term "next gen", but C4 certainly delivers the technology you need to let you slap that label on your product. Unfortunately, the demo levels that currently ship with the engine do not get anywhere near what C4 is actually capable of, but once you start throwing your own carefully crafted assets into the world editor, setting up your lights... you'll see what I mean.
Featurewise, the only major thing currently missing is a proper, generic physics implementation, but there is a fairly mature community-based PhysX integration available, and C4 itself will get a full physics system in the near future.
Once you start looking at the code, you'll be blown away by the rigorous attention to consistency, performance and quality. It's clean to the point of being mildly insane (in a good way!), and even though I'm mainly an artist and only a casual coder, this is actually one of the reasons I'm so happy about having made the choice to go for a C4 license. Countless other engines I've looked at have given me the impression of having rather fragmented and messy codebases, by comparison.
The only general drawback is that you (or a member of your team) do need to know your way around C++ in order to implement certain things specific to your game project. C4 is a game engine, and a fully featured one at that, but it's not a complete authoring system - and while the built-in nodebased scripting works really well within the scope it was designed for, it is quite limited compared to what you could do with, say, full Python support or something like that - so, at the end of the day, you do have to crawl in under the hood and start coding actual C++. And, because the engine code is designed around a very hardcore approach to strict OOP, using the most advanced features C++ has to offer, this isn't necessarily easy to handle if you've just recently managed to run your first 'Hello World'.
The support you get from Terathon is flawless, beyond superb, and the community is very friendly and helpful, so you rarely see a question/problem go unanswered/unsolved for very long.
In summary, if you're serious about getting your own game rolling, and you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty coding C++, then look no further - C4 is just the ticket. |
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Great enginePosted by:
Neonic
at Mar 28, 2008 |
I have been using this engine for the past, almost, two years now. It is very fun using it to develop. It has been a constant learning experience for me.
There are a few things to be said about this engine.
Features:
I put 4 because right now as the engine stands it is still not complete. It is lacking a few major features that make it less competitive against other engines in its price range. I will say however that the lack of these features is coming to an end. One of the greatest things about buying this engine is that you get free upgrades for life. Think about that. Every time this engine gets the newest and greatest features, you're not out any more money! The major features that are lacking are first on the to do list and I fully expect them to be completed within the next 4-6 months.
Ease of Use:
This engine can have a fairly steep learning curve for beginners. Both on the Programming side and on the art pipeline side. For the art pipeline, my team has had some trouble with before. After we became acclimated to the process though, everything works fine. As for the programming. The engine's API is Huge. It can be very hard for anyone to jump into a project like this and know which way is up. And to top that all off, there appears at first glance to be little documentation. If you stop and look around though you will see that there are plenty of sources for your information. There is first off a documentation page. This usually has some of the information that you are looking for, but many times there simply is not any additional documentation other than what is generated automatically. Included with the engine is the game called Mangler that is being developed by Terathon Software, LLC (the maker of the engine). This game has a lot of examples on how to implement the different aspects of the engine the right way. Whenever you can't find an example of how something works, check the Game project and see if it is implemented there. Then there is the Wiki. This has a good sized selection of tutorials from both Terathon itself and the community. You can learn a lot by reading some of the stuff on the wiki. Then, if all else fails, there are the support forums, which leads me to
Support:
The support for this engine is absolutely Phenomenal. If you have a problem that you can't figure out by checking the wiki, the game + engine source, or the documentation, then you can stop by the forums. There are a lot of people who are regulars there that help on ALL sorts of issues. There are usually people who respond to your questions within minutes of you posting it. Eric Lengyel (The Author of C4) himself reads and replies to the forums posts as well. That means that if you have a gripe about a feature, a suggestion to make the engine better, or a question that only he could know, then you have a direct line of communication with him. There have been numerous times when people have suggested features in the forums which Eric had squeezed into the next release. It is really helpful to know that the author of the engine is listening to your input in trying to make it a better product not just for him, but for you too.
Stability & Performance:
What can I say. I have never experienced a crash or strange behavior in the C4 engine (except when it was my code causing the problem.) The only exception to that was the switch to Vista which the drivers were causing trouble, but again, not the Engine's fault. The performance is really great. It runs decent on hardware down to like a Radeon 9300 and lower. That is just absurd. That is about 6 generations ago!
Overall, an absolute knockout engine with the power of a AAA engine at the cost of an Indie engine. You can't go wrong with this engine. |
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| It will explode soon |
Do not let the current demo fool you about the true capability of C4 engine. If you are currently in the decision making process of purchasing a game engine, do seriously consider C4. I made a mistake by purchasing another engine even when I have stumbled into C4 first.
I do not want you to make the same mistake !
The list here are the main reasons why I go for C4.
Support is beyond excellent !
Free updates for life and the updates is coming very fast !
Engine source code provided !
Well thought off framework design !
Evolving engine with defined roadmaps!
Built in In-Game GUI !
Built in World Editor !
Adopts mostly the recent graphics algorithm and specifications !
In short, C4 is an engine with the biggest potential .
Aptly named C4, it will explode soon and rocks the world ! |
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| C4Engine is great ! |
I have been using C4Engine since 2006.
Features:
Everything is there in stock version to make a game. There are some limitations for the terrain at this time but expect it to be fixed next month.
There are also some free user maintained plug-ins available, such as particle and effect editors and integrations with 3rd party physics libraries.
Ease of Use:
C4 has most of its functionality documented and really clean code which makes it easy to understand. Code of Demo Game and examples on Wiki are helpful too.
I give 1 star less for ease of because of 2 things:
1) As some reviewers have pointed out already there has to be at least 1 member in your team who is proficient with C++ to do complete game using this engine. (but it is possible to learn enough in 2 months if you are familiar with some other programming language beforehand);
2) documentation lags behind for some parts of the engine.
Support:
Support is great. Eric always tries his best at resolving various user problems. Also lots of existing Engine users are helpful too.
There is like 99.9% chance of getting helpful answer in 1 day, usually it is much sooner though.
Stability & Performance:
Performance is superb.
C4 Engine is stable as a rock. Rule is if there is a problem it is your code to blame or bad data.
Sure there are some bugs found and reported. Eric doesn't hesitate to fix them.
I never thought of switching to any rival. I have seen tons of improvements to this engine over these two years and more are soon to be released. |
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| Simply the best there is |
I have been using this engine for a couple years now, and I am continually impressed by it. Everything in the engine works right, works fast, and is designed well with the future in mind. New features are being added all the time, and they are very polished and powerful. The source code is amazingly clean.
But here's the really good thing...The support is just unheard-of great. You got a problem, you post on the forums, and you get an answer. Usually, you'll be pointed to some documentation that you didn't know about, or you'll get a source code snippet written for you to handle your problem. Just fantastic.
The only thing I wish I had in C4 was better physics built-in. What they have right now is pretty simple, but they are working on a new system that is supposed to be a complete physics solution. There is a free PhysX addon that you can get now though, so its really not a bad thing. |
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| A bang for the buck |
Features: 5
There may be engines out there with a bigger feature list but in the end I prefer quality over quantity.
C4's feature list is increasing but in a steady and controlled tempo. I also get the impression Eric doesn't like leaving something half done.
Ease of Use: 4
Might get a little "frightening" at first if you are new to c++ but once you get the hang of it you will realise how clean and well structured the engine code is.
Stability & Performance: 5
Not much to say here, rock solid stability and excellent performance.
Support: 5
The documentation can be a bit lacking sometimes but the community is extremly helpful and Eric is very active in the forums as well. |
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| The ONLY option for the Indie Dev |
C4 is a work of art. The code is clean and easy to understand (self-documenting code). The engine has obviously been well thought out in its core design.
The engine has many of the latest and greatest features (with more in the works). The development cycle is quite aggressive.
The art pipeline is very easy. It doesn't take a genius to get a model in the engine and to behave correctly.
What can I say about Eric (the C4 developer)? First off, he is VERY active in the forums. He is always answering questions personally and NOT in a condescending way that other engines do.
The ONLY option for the independent developer! |
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| C4 review |
code quality:
As you could see from a lot of reviews, the code quality is more than excellent. You need good C++ knowledge to understand it and to use it right but then you will see how well it is thought till to the tiniest detail.
support:
You will not find better support especially in the area of indie technology.
rendering:
The indoor scene management with zones and portals and lots of optimizations for shadows, lights and sounds is probably the best you will find ever. The outdoor scene management is in a heavy development currently and will probably be of best quality as well.
Shaders are generated automatically and they render fast and reliable even on different systems.
lights and shadows:
The lighting is very good. There are lots of lights, everything is dynamic and you can use different kind of shadows (cubemaps, projected, stencil, shadow maps, ambient occlusion). Some more optimizations (e.g. multi resolution shadow mapping for outdoors) are already announced.
terrain:
The current voxel terrain is an impressive technology. It allows caves, bridges, steep rocks and much more.
New features for LOD and streaming are currently in the making.
animation:
The skinning and animation process renders very fast via multi-threading. I saw a video with 100 smoothly animated characters.
team management:
If you are working in a team then C4 is a good choice, because you can organize the work fine. Programmers can expose so-called controllers to the editor. Artists/designers can use them to bring life into their worlds.
editors:
I can compare the editors best to Unreal3. I find them more easy, clean though they are very similar. The script editor is almost like the Unreal (Kismet) editor. The shader editor is also very similar (although not channel oriented). The additional material editor (creating shaders automatically) is even much more simple.
The world editor offers everything you need and delivers real-time feedback.
the down-side:
Currently it is hard to say anything bad about this technology. Actually I can only mention things that are missing but are already announced at the roadmap and are in the making (new shadow options, more and flexible post-processing, a better ambient occlusion solution).
And personally I would like to program it in a language without pointer- and memory trouble (C# as an example). But to be honest: Learning C++ takes just a few days when you already know any other object oriented language.
comparison to other engines:
As already mentioned you will not find better indoor scene management and no better code. The lighting is impressive and the editors are complete. The workflow for importing assets is not as fast as in Unity but faster than in Unreal3. |
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| The Next Big Thing |
| Cheap. Powerful. Next-gen. What's not to like? I've worked with plenty of other engines, but C4 takes the cake in terms of features for price. And it's only getting better - physics, the world's first geomip terrain system, and much more - are all on the engine's roadmap. Seriously, if you have $350, now's the time to pick this thing up. |
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| Terathon Software - C4 Engine review |
Hi there,
Last year (Summer 08) my indie team was looking for a game engine to bring our project from a bunch of ideas, to a work prototype and eventually a game.
Features :: In regards to C4's general design, the engine has every major 'feature' already implemented to complete (at least, among a full list of others) a FPS.
Networking support is continually improved (important for me).
Graphics capabilities is always being improved and expanded. The wild part about this isn't so much graphics feature A, B, or C, but rather, ABC all work together robustly. Nothing has been blindly implemented just for the sake of it (or if it has, it was removed -- but this hasn't happened as long as I have been in the community actively). The graphics that C4 produces is just as good as the artist that made it.
In one night of working with voxels, I produced this:
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/7332/c4post.jpg
http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/9056/c4post2.jpg
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/1863/c4post3.jpg
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/2774/c4post4.jpg
That's a grab straight from the editor. It looks wonderful!
Ease of Use :: I speak as a programmer and an artist. The programming interface is incredibly intuitive and straight forward. Learning a new API takes time, but with the examples provided in the game code, the wiki / official documentation, the C4 book, and Eric himself supporting the community through the forums, learning the proper way to code is Fast and FUN. Try to say and agree with ourselves when using some other engines out there. . .
From an artist's perspective, the world editor has been improved a lot as far as usability is concerned, even only in 1 year (Eric has even implemented an idea that *I* requested . . . talk about support!). Working within the editor is fun and importing assets is a breeze (so as long as you know some basic technicalities about your art). Improvements are always coming in this area.
Stability and Performance :: Never ONCE has C4 ever crashed for me because of bad engine code. It was always PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair), or a graphic's driver bug. Performance is rock-solid as long as you wisely develop your assets / programming, which is a must in any professional environment.
Support :: WOW. The community was one of the first reasons I chose to purchase the C4 engine. Look up my account (3shirtlessmen) and read my first few topic posts. Do you notice that the creator of the engine himself is answering my questions nearly every time in the SAME DAY as posted? Not only that, but the community itself is incredibly informative and supportive. If you ask a question, literally, within an hour you'll probably already have your question answered.
10/10 |
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| Excellent |
| This engine is simply superb. The code is well documented, extremely clean, easy to understand, and very very fast. It has some very advanced features only found in multi-million dollar game engines and some features that those multi-million have yet to do themselves! Having worked with many of those (Unreal, idTech, etc) personally, I would say this engine should have a much larger price tag for the quality and feature set you get. Definitely highly recommend. |
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| C4 Engine FTW |
| As a professional developer and Maya animator, C4 has everything I could want in a game development environment. Without a doubt, the value I received is unmatched by any competitor. The product is excellent, the support is excellent from both the developer and his community, and I would most definitely recommend C4 Engine to anyone with the skill to take advantage of it! |
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| Nothing like C4 |
Having used most of Garage Games engines previous to trying C4, I was amazed at the difference between the code quality. C4's codebase is unbelievably clean and well thought-out.
Eric Lengyel, the main programmer, is fantastic about supporting users on his forums. You will not be disappointed in C4. |
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| Programmer's Paradise |
The C4 Engine is one of the most logically constructed, easy to work with, yet sophisticated pieces of software I've ever seen. The code architecture is clear and well defined. The engine is not just great for programmers though. Here is a quick run down of the great points of this engine.
Pros:
Powerful forward rendering pipeline.
Lots of platforms supported out of the box.
Powerful world editor.
Extremely elegant visual scripting system.
Incredible support.
Voxel based terrain support.
Excellent shader creation and management.
Efficient scene graph, visibility determination, and portal system.
Full source code.
Asset packing and protection.
Support for Collada format.
Excellent performance on skinned meshes utilizing multi-core animation.
Performance and Stability is absolutely ROCK SOLID. C4 versions are tested thoroughly and rigorously.
Very good API documentation.
Absolutely top notch community of developers.
Very low price point with a package that is flexible and powerful at the same time.
A very competitive licensing agreement.
Upcoming 1.6 version physics looks to be very robust and accurate*
Cons:
Limited control of post processing effects.
The world editor is a work in progress(It is excellent but still needs a few things added, mostly related to usability.)
At the moment some GUI enhancements are needed. (They are planned in version 1.7)
Limited support for very large streaming worlds(At the moment)
Overall, I can't say enough about this engine. It is without a doubt the most excellent piece of software I've had the pleasure of working with. This engine will make you look great and like a professional. It lets you focus on building your game and not the engine. (Although you have full source code so you can if you want!) I will update this review as the engine grows but there is no better time then now to get a license of this engine. It will only get better! |
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| Over 1 Year Experience, Highly Recommended |
I've been a licensee of C4 for over a year now and it has been a pleasure to work with from the very beginning. I'm not a big fan of sharing unwarranted opinions which is why I've spent so long getting to know the engine before writing a review.
All I can say is that it is absolutely amazing! Don't get me wrong C4 may not be for everyone, but if you've had any prior experience with C++ or other game development experience then this definitely is the engine for you. The design of C4 is absolutely brilliant. Everything has been cleverly thought out from the beginning to be highly modular, logically structured and an absolute pleasure to work with.
The brilliance of C4 isn't particularly surprising given that C4 was written by Eric Lengyel an experienced expert in the fields of Game Development and Mathematics. Eric is the author of several books, papers and presentations including contributions to the notorious Game Programming Gems series and his very own Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics.
Documentation and Support:
C4 comes with plenty of documentation, a fully functional demo game, in code method and class documentation, online documentation (http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/doco/) and a wiki (http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) with tutorials on a wide variety of subjects written by both Eric and the C4 community.
However, by far the most useful resource you'll find is the C4 forums. Eric himself is highly active there and will usually respond to posts in a mater of hours (to be honest I don't know how he does it, I'm in a different time zone!). There's also plenty of regular users, including myself, that will be willing to lend you a hand.
Code:
Now you certainly aren't required to look over the engine internals, everything you need is heavily documented. Those of you who are interested will find that the engine code itself is incredibly organised and easy to follow, which is very unusual for any project of this magnitude.
As with all game engines there may be a time when you've noticed that the engine doesn't explicitly have support for something you want to do. In most cases trying to find out where you plug-in your code can be a complete nightmare, assuming you even have access to the source, with C4 you won't have this problem. For one, Eric's amazing foresight usually means you don't actually have to modify the engine but instead the design will allow you apply object oriented coding techniques to add custom functionality. However, if you really are set on modifying the engine yourself and you're sure that what you're doing can't be implemented in your own game, then you'll find that the engines modular design won't mean any hacks or crazy workarounds are required.
Another thing that users may like is the fact that the code just works. You open the project and it compiles, no errors, no warnings first shot nothing to worry about. Keep in mind you need the DirectX SDK on Windows in order to compile. C4 doesn't use DirectX for rendering but uses DirectInput for keyboard and gamepad support on Windows operating systems.
Graphics:
C4 in tremendously powerful in this regards. Those of you with out-dated graphics cards beware! C4 is a next-gen game engine and as such has all the typical next-gen features. Real-time shadows, dynamic lighting, post-processing effects (ie. Motion blur) all built in. At present post-processing effects are limited to those built into the engine although personally I haven't found this to be a problem.
The current demo (1.5.9) isn't really the best demonstration of C4's power. I still do recommend you download it and take a look. You'll see a couple of cool things but the level design itself is fairly basic, there's nothing overly breath-taking in terms of design. I'll admit this originally put me off the engine for a while but after investigating further you will realise that the thing that makes competitors demos look good isn't the graphical functionality but instead the artistic cohesion of the levels. Whilst that's nice to look at, it isn't going to help you when it comes to developing your own games. I'm hoping the 2.0 demo will remedy this somewhat.
Features:
C4 is packed with features, I won't go into too much detail as plenty of information is available but one of the huge casing points for C4 right now is the use of voxel terrain. Unlike traditional heightmap-based terrain this allows the creation of caves, tunnels and overhangs. C4 still supports heightmaps as a starting point but as with any next-gen outdoor game you really should be taking full advantage of voxel functionality.
The next major version as of the time of writing (2.0) is set to be without a doubt the biggest update C4 has ever had. It brings to the table the worlds first implementation of voxel geomip level of detail and support rigid body physics. The physics support is a custom implementation developed by Terathon that is implemented directly into the C4 to ensure the high level of quality that C4 users have come to expect.
One thing that is missing that you will probably find is available in competitors' products is a GUI Editor. This is on the roadmap for the 2.1 release.
Development Tools:
C4 comes with a comprehensive suite of development tools most of which are centred around the world editor. I'm a programmer so working with world editors and such generally isn't my forte but I've found the C4 editor surprisingly easy to navigate around.
The in-built material editor is very useful and allows you to create shaders two different ways. For those of you just interested in basic check boxes and drop-down list style options you'll find the material editor very easy to work with. However if you're looking for something a little more particular C4's Shader Editor allows you complete customisation in a graphical scripting-like environment, which brings me to the Graphical Scripting Tool.
The Graphics Scripting Tool is probably one of the most under-rated features of C4. The graphical scripting language is very different from most scripting languages you might be familiar with in that it has practically zero predefined API. It is up to your programmers to write and expose script methods to be utilised by level and game designers. You may see this or as a good or a bad thing, you certainly can't create a game using the provided scripting features alone. However it does mean you have full control over the functionality of what scripting can be performed and each script method has the speed benefits of native code. Surprisingly this can actually take some of the strain off the programmers. For example, I personally wrote a script to control complex animation states of our characters which meant that the level designers could drop the script in, change some parameters and have full control over the aesthetics of the scene.
Usability:
I really would like to make this clear so people don't get the wrong impression about what they can do with C4. C4 is a game engine, it has some amazing tools but it isn't a drag and drop game creator. If you don't have a reasonably experienced C++ programmer on your team you won't get very far. In saying this I'm still confident that C4 deserves 5 stars for usability because the engine internals are tremendously easy to work with. I don't really recommend C4 for those of you just learning to program for the first time. Certainly you can improve your skills a lot with C4 but don't expect to jump right in and have a game in a couple of months time.
I personally haven't read the Beginner's Guide to the C4 Engine as it didn't exist when I was learning to use C4. I still managed just fine which is once again a testament to C4's ease of use, design, documentation and online support. I've heard good things about the book and it's my understanding that a beginner/intermediate programmer who has a basic understanding of object oriented programmer should be able to pick-up this book and have no problems with C4.
Stability:
Very stable, the majority of crashes I've ever had are driver crashes which are caused by bad drivers and are no fault of the C4 Engine. I've ran C4 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, OS X Leopard and OS X Snow Leopard all without any problems.
Community:
This is another strong point for the C4 Engine. The attitude of 99% of the community is absolutely fantastic. The community has a lot of respect for Terathon and the C4 Engine. Because of this Terathon allows the community to play a reasonably large roll in the development of C4. There's a bug tracking and feature request system that all licensees are encouraged to use. Not only this, the community also has a large impact on the direction Terathon takes. For example (as of the time of writing) Terathon is currently running a competition allowing the community to submit and vote on what will soon become the new official C4 logo.
There are also a number of freely available plug-ins and tools available for licensees created by licensees. These include some nice effect editors, a Collada scene exporter and support for some third party physics libraries (PhysX and Bullet).
A Few Things to Consider:
* C4 isn't as new as it once was but it certainly is young compared to some of the competition. It has support for a lot of nifty features however you still might find the odd thing that hasn't been implemented just yet. For example, morph targets are not present in the current release. Morph targets are actually really simple to implement, I've done so myself.
* You WILL NEED a programmer on your team. Once again C4 is not a game creation suite, it is a game engine. You definitely need a relatively experienced programmer if you want to make a game.
* 2.0 is going to be a huge update for the C4 engine as it will come jam packed with new features. However, 2.0 will be introduced with a new licensing model that no longer has free updates for life. Terathon has a policy never to change the license of existing licensees so those who already have lifetime updates will continue to receive them. In my opinion the new licensing system is still by far better value for money than any of the competitors, but obviously you can't beat free updates for life. So if you can get in before 2.0 is released I strongly recommend you do so! |
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Simply the bestPosted by:
Seryu
at Sep 21, 2009 |
I have used this engine for a long time and I have only good words for C4.
Very clever design, good tools, good price, free updates, "state of the art" tech and a great community (forum, wiki, etc).
Of course it's not perfect, but until now, I can say without a doubt, that this engine is a very good choice.
If you are a programmer tired of poorly designed code, and you are able to see a good engine although the graphics of the demo, then C4 is for you.
My personal list of negative points:
Features:
Lack of HDR support (Will be in future updates).
Lack of GUI editor (There's a Panel editor for ingame interfaces, in future version it will be also the GUI editor).
QuickTime is not the best choice to support video playback (Maybe will change in future updates).
Ease of Use:
C++ knowledge needed (not exactly negative).
The high rate of updates makes the documentation sometimes be outdated but both the author and the community is constantly working on it.
You can always ask at the forums to know the current status of any area of the engine.
Stability & Performance:
Good but still needs more stability when importing collada models.
Support:
Nothing.
Possitive points:
Features:
Superb: There's no other game engine on the market at this price tag who offers the source code, a next-gen tech and free updates.
Ease of Use:
Good: Clean & documented code, wiki & forum support.
Stability & performance:
Good: memory leak detection, none of my prototypes crashed because of the engine during development or testing.
Support:
Strong point. C4 support is top noch for an indie engine. |
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| Great ! |
I recently bought C4 after reviewing several other engines. I also own Unity and the majority of the Torque range. I just want to say that it's been a great buy. Unlike other engines one can name, it doesn't flatter to deceive - yes, the demo textures aren't great, but that's where it stops - just add your own. The dynamic lighting is fantastic, the ability to get COLLADA models into C4 is very straight forward and to top this, it also runs on my 6800GT !! The downside is that you need a grasp of C++ to develop a game, but what engine doesn't require this. But the C++ is very easy to read and although there isn't a huge amount, the documentation is pretty good - I do own engines by GarageGames don't forget.
Oh yes, and best mention free updates for life, how is this not a bargain. |
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| Rock Solid |
i have been using C4 for about 3 years now, since i found it and insisted on using it as my engine for my final year in college. the key word for this engine is SOLID. every feature is well considered. no hack-jobs of integrating the latest fad features. if this engine does it, it does it well with consideration on how it affects the overall product.
rendering is beautiful and very efficient.
regards ease of use, this is a high-end engine aiming at people who know what they are doing, or who can at least learn to do things correctly. if you want an instant game maker, look elsewhere. the interfaces are a little quirky. not bad, just different to most other engines. but everything works, and works well once you figure it out.
support: the community around C4 is the most helpful and mature i have ever encountered. if you have a problem, there are a lot of experienced and helpful people, including Eric himself who you will find on the forums ready to provide considered advice. there is minimal fanboyism within the community also, which is a serious help. keeps the signal-to-noise ratio good.
if you are considering an engine, do your homework and ask questions. dont rely on stats. these are ALWAYS scued in someones favour, either through fanboyism or business interests. decide what suits your project and your abilities. whatever you choose, good luck and enjoy.
irishlostboy. |
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| Nice |
I've been using the C4 Engine for a while now and found it to be a rather decent engine. Coming out of a 2 year game design course I was able to pick up the work flow with no problem.
Though the engine has many nice features, it lacks its native physics system that was announced a while back. Until it is released I give features 4/5.
I was able to learn the work flow with close to no problem. It does require C++ knowledge to use, however with me that wasn't a problem. I give ease of use 4/5 because even though I didn't really have a problem learning it doesn't mean others will.
C4 works like a charm. I had no problems at all with it proformance and stability wise. The engine is very clean that even a beginner like myself was able to modify and add changes with no problems and for that I give it a 5/5.
Finally, the support is unbelievable! Half the reason I was able to learn C4 was through the support forums. The community is very patient and will always help. No question goes unanswered, and if it isn't the community giving the answers it's Eric himself. 5/5 for sure!
Though it might not be for everyone, it is worth the effort in researching and testing for yourself. |
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Fantastic engine for a good price!Posted by:
ethom
at Sep 30, 2009 |
Don't let the demo fool you, imo the levels provided serve as better examples of templates to help you wrap your brain around setting up your own games. Play them if you want, but make sure you import your own game assets and see how great they look. I think they may have been made by a programmer, throw in your own artistic touch before you judge too harshly =)
Waiting for 1.6 to be released to play with the new physics but what is currently available is more than enough to get started on a long term project and the features to be added in the future should ease the minds of any wondering about them not existing at the moment.
Eric patrols the forums regularly throughout the day and is often quite helpful, and the community is also there to potentially provide that instant gratification we know and love. The wiki has a lot of information, but that doesn't make it the most helpful. The available book on creating games with the C4 engine is worth purchasing, if nothing else it helps make the connections and set you on the path in the right direction. The way the game engine has changed has affected the book, and its annoying, but the new WIP book is set to contain information on currently unreleased features and is a free update to those who purchase the original anyway.
I'm currently working on solo projects and only deal with the aspects of the engine that I require, but will probably update my review after more experience in the engine and after much use of the 1.6 version when it is released. |
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Terrific Engine with Dedicated and Professional AuthorPosted by:
MCCC
at Nov 23, 2009 |
This is an engine that boasts a pretty comprehensive and cohesive feature set for the price. All of the features included are also fully integrated and work out of the box, there is nothing half-@$$ed here.
The forum support is terrific and the community is outstanding in helping grasp the nuances of this engine. The code is very well architected and clean, and it is simply fantastic having the source code at one's fingertips when debugging. It is highly extensible, and supports a very workable content pipeline.
It definitely presents a fairly steep initial learning curve for the newbie game technology tinkerer, but any serious developer can get their game mechanics off the ground fairly quickly with this engine.
The engine itself is feature rich across the board, with integrated networking support, an outstanding renderer, a rapid iteration toolset, collision and object enumeration systems, visual scripting, properties, solid sound and music services, many built in scene graph node types, etc.
I have been very pleased thus far in working with this engine for my current game project. The only glaring negative I could possibly mention is that its hardware requirements are not modest -- but that would be true for just about any major 3D engine listed here except for TGE and perhaps Unity. |
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| A Student's Perspective |
I'm currently a high school student. I started learning Java about a few months after getting a C4 license (I thought getting a license would get me obligated to learning). My learning pace right now is pretty slow, considering I'm still in AP Computer Science. I haven't made a huge game with C4 yet, but I'm confident that I will some day.
The price is great for anyone. Being able to learn with and becoming proficient with one engine (with a lifetime license) is perfect. I definitely know that I'm going to be working on C4 related projects even through college.
I have never used many of the features of C4, such as the shader editor and etc., but I am looking forward to seeing integrated physics in 2.0. That would make a lot of things very easy for a beginner like me.
A great feature of the engine isn't really a feature at all. The support that Terathon has is just unbelievable. Before purchasing a license, I sent an email regarding Vista support, and received an answer within an hour. These days, forum responses (for me) have taken a maximum of 10 minutes IIRC. The community is also very helpful. |
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| C4 Engine Review |
Hi there, I've been a user of C4 for a couple of years now, and I must say that it was a worthwhile purchase. I know that a lot of people criticize it for its demo, but something people don't seem to realize is that what they are seeing is known as 'art', and unfortunately, just because the author decides to put his time and effort into developong the engine itself instead of the art being shown, his wonderful product gets criticized for it. Almost everyone I know who has bought the engine will agree that with me that it is a great engine. Eric is a very talented person that has a lot of professional experience in game programming. He has written several well known books, has written algorithms used by other engines such as Ogre, does his own reasearch that has led to features such as voxel terrain and a world's first seamless voxel-based geomip terrain LOD algorithm in the engine, etc.
Probably the greatest thing about C4 is its very clean and efficient object oriented design. Some people complain about C4 requiring C++ as the only way to develop games, but that is a preference, and some people actually like it. It allows for efficient and portable code, and C4's api makes it all the easier.
The nice thing about C4 is that it just works. Its physics, terrain, sound, rendering, etc will all work identically on different platforms as long as they meet the hardware requirements. Thats why Eric has put alot of effort into each of those components. Other engines frequently integrate some 3rd party tools that may not be neccesarily cross-platform. In addition, C4 is extremely stable and has very few bugs, and those are typically resolved by the next release. Eric puts a lot of effort into making sure everything works as expected, and he also listens to us and what we want and frequently integrates features for us last minute, and they work.
The simple fact of the matter is that C4's rendering is top notch. I know the demo doesn't make that obvious, but if you look closely at it and give it a fair chance you'll realize that it has some very nice features. Parallax, normal, specular, and horizon mapping for textures. Some people complain about the way Eric has the shaders setup to use the shader editor and not shader languages like glsl or hlsl, but if you look at the C4 wiki Eric has an article explaining "Combinatorial Shader Explosion". Long story short, once a shader or material is constructed in C4, it will work on all platforms and with all light types (present and future). C4 also has dynamic lighting, and has had it since 2001, long before it was commonplace. Some people complain about the stencil shadows and some of their limitations, but Eric has begun the process of replacing them with dynamic shadow maps.
I bought C4 for a couple of very important reasons. First and foremost was Eric. When I was reading through the forums it became clear that he was dedicated to his customers. He cares about us and what we want. His professional history served to assure me that he is professional and will continue to support the engine and implement new features (voxel terrain being a recent example). He is very active and helpful on the forums. The other members of the community are very professional and helpful as well. We are open-minded about other engines and recognize that each serves it purpose.
Simply put, C4 has a lot of great assets: excellent support from its creator, an excellent community, great features and stability, and a clean code base.
If you really want to see what C4 is capable of then look at the showcase section of the C4 forums. There you can see lots of great projects by C4's users that have access to good art and use it show off C4's true potential. |
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| Top notch game engine for professional developers |
If you are a knowledgeable programmer with C++ experience the C4 engine's architecture is marvelous to work with. Not only does the engine run smooth as silk while supporting all the modern visual effects, a consistent high polish can be seen in each and every component where it is clear that deep thought was put into how each relate to each other. Masterful use of design flow patterns, OO concepts, and optimizations can be seen through the entire code base that you even get access to in order to make engine level modifications. While diving in at first can be a bit daunting there is excellent documentation, wikis, and demos to guide you along your development path.
The in-game tools such as the level editor, shader designer, and model importing function just as you would expect. While you won't be able to create high detailed models within the engine, importing assets from external 3D applications such as Blender is effortless.
On top of that, the author Eric Lengyel is one of the most hard working, attentive developers I've ever seen. He not only pumps out patch after patch with awesome new features he is manning the forums and answering questions from everyone from the beginners through the veterans. He even takes future feature requests into consideration!
If you are in the market for an a professional engine that is superbly crafted, gives full control, and has an excellent community look no further. |
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| C4 Engine (1.5.9) |
I am using the C4 Engine since 2006. This Engine is very well designed, elegant structured and the code is easy to read. Of course you have to have some knowledge of C++ and 3D mathematics as well.
Community (Support) is beyond excellent. No question goes unanswered. If you ask a question, you'll already have your question answered mostly in less then one hour.
C4 is powerful forward rendering engine. You don´t have to know about OpenGL or DirectX. C4 has its own cross-platform graphics API. There is no shader languages like glsl or hlsl, but powerful graphical shader editor instead.
C4 is excellent engine with lot of tools and has good documentation at all. |
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| Best Engine for Indie developher ! |
First,Before buying C4 license I've tried many free and commercial engines out there. I also worked on few projects using other game engines. About 2 years ago I've downloaded C4 demo and was impressed by feature set and World Editor capabilities.
I've showed it to few artist friends of mine and they were working in WE in 30 mins or so and were as much exited as me. Before buying I've asked few question on forums and (from my previous experiences) was hoping to get answers in couple of days, BUT I got all answers in 30 min !
I decided go and buy license (200$ when I bought it). Reading license term I was pleased VERY much about lifetime upgrades !
Another surprise waited me aftr downloading sources and opening project. Clear and self explained code. Many features were implemented the way I thought they should work.
Did I mentioned strong community and INSTANT support on forums ?
After getting access to C4 forum's licensed only sections I find many useful community made tools and addons (like Physx, bullet integration, Effects addon etc. )
All bug were address in rocket speed as well.
Year later after purchase I've got voxel terrain feature and more to come !
Very soon we'll got 2.0 release and tons of new features and integrated physics as well (one can continue using third party physics engines if preferred )
C4 is best investment I've made and new updates and exciting features remind this pretty often !
Still not exited ?
Simply take look at feature list that will 2.0 bring:
http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/notes2.php |
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Best Bang for the bucks!Posted by:
x0r
at Nov 29, 2009 |
| I was Torque Customer for 4 years,after they more into 'Professional' market,i look around for alternative engine,i have reviewing also Unity3d,once want to buy for professional,but because lack of new Engine runtime update(they use Mono 1.2.5 right now),the mono runtime already on 2.x,which offer more stability,command set.So i stumbled across C4 Engine which to be honest a very friendly community,smart,and the support(Eric) just excellent very technical know how about what he is writing on,even Eric himself working along with ATI dev to fix up some problem on ATI's driver,this is really shown up Eric's capabilities as good developer. The one i embrace on C4 is not just the community,but also the flexibility,you can pick between built-in(v2.0) physic engine,physic by nvidia,bullet,or any other physic engine that you want to integrated,not to mention the voxel terrain(2.0) :),and iam the one of lucky one who gets lifetimes update because i bought before v2.0,Macos Support,what could be more good than this? well maybe web based player :D,or opengl 3.2 upgrade and tessalation support? |
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| Amazing Engine. |
This engine has been incredible to work with so far.
Community for C4 is responsive, and helpful.
The internal structure of this engine is incredibly clean, and the learning curve overall is not a steep one.
Features are continually added on an already feature rich engine.
So far the engine has not crashed, and hasn't had any performance problems rendering on my Macbook.
Biggest Highlights in my opinion.
Runs on both Windows and Macintosh systems.
Voxel Terrain
World Editor
Script Editor
Shader Editor
I honestly wish I would have learned about this engine a year and a half ago and saved my self some time trying to deal with other solutions to indie game development. |
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| A terrific value for a 3D game engine with full source code included |
The graphical quality of games rendered with C4 is very high. The engine is really capable, the quality of your graphics in your game won't be limited by the engine, but the quality of material produced by your artists. (Which can use COLLADA to import into the engine). The world editor is very cool and integrated into the engine itself. So you could potentially let your users use this as a mod-tool for the games you make if you wish, or you can remove it. Your choice.
With C4 engine you will write your game in C/C++ which is a plus because it gives you total control, but it is more complex to learn. Of course since you get the full source code, you could write a mono/python/lua wrapper around the C/C++ API if you really wanted to. C4 does also have it's own proprietary "visual scripting" language which is pretty neat for designers, but you will have to dig into C/C++ to get the full power of the engine. You'll be thankful you took the time to learn later.
The new release coming out soon will have a full blown physics system built in, and there is already a community written plugin for using PhysX which has been out for quite some time.
I do wish it had a web player, but that's not on the roadmap for this engine currently to my knowledge. It focuses more on the higher quality desktop games instead of browser games. And if it had a real signed web player it probably wouldn't have source code included for security reasons. So I'll keep my source code and write my own web plugin if I have to :-)
For learning purposes, if you want to see how a 3D engine works, this is the best. The code is written out extremely cleanly, with great care and design. For students, even if you don't release a game with the engine , just being able to experiment with the code and being able to study it is worth the current price which is less than the cost of a single community college class. Excellent educational value for the money.
Support is awesome, and if you buy a license you get access to a special section of the forum. Forum members (including the creator of the engine) get back to you really quick, often the same day. Really nice community, and there are plenty of free resources available from the community too once you are a licensee.
The price is ridiculously good right now with only $350 including lifetime updates to the engine. Run, don't walk, right now and take advantage of this. Purchase a standard license. |
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| A fine example of how indie engines should be. |
EDIT: It seems something went wrong, my review is on the page twice but I can't edit or remove the other one.
In my opinion (as a learning programmer) C4 engine's best point is its readability.
Unlike torque, for example, the code is organized and structured (thanks to the node/controller based system).
Add to that really good support service (Your questions get answered really fast) and you get a great package to learn from.
Ofcourse its readabilty and great support are not the only things that are good about C4. It has all the graphical bells and whistles you'll ever want, voxel based terrain and a good editor to use it with.
The package does not have any "bad" points persé, it is however an engine for programmers and an understanding of C++ and your basic maths are required.
Also the engine has no advanced physics support at the moment but the next version will fix this (and bring with alot of other new features). |
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| Solid as a "Rock" |
While not a "professional" programmer by trade I was able to follow simple instructions and actually compile C4 without a single warning!
I am using C4 as time permits as a learning tool for C++ and am having a great time with clear visable results.
Erik has put a lot of thought and effort into this engine and I have the upmost respect for him (and high expectations for the upcomming release!)
Bottom line - I love the stability of the C4 engine and how well designed it is and hope you will too. |
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C4 ReviewPosted by:
niz
at Nov 30, 2009 |
It didn't take me very long to decide to get a licence for this engine, in fact right away. Having been a hobbyist game programmer for a number of years I have tried a few game engines. All have their own good and bad points, but I have stayed with the C4 game engine since 2007 for a very good reason.
What drew my attention to the engine in the first place was the world editor, it was nice sometimes to take a break from game coding and just sit there and build a world (a playable one at that).
I mostly learn from other people and the C4 community is an active and very helpful community. Also the time and effort that alot of the members put in is outstanding in helping the likes of myself who may only have a couple of hours a week to do anything but can make it constructive by finding answers to my questions in the forums.
As for the time and effort the creator of the engine (Eric Lengyel) puts in, suberb, thank you. He can be easily contacted and is ever present in the forums.
The code is nice and clean and quite easy to follow, although not easy at times but that is not a problem with the engine that is down to personal skillbase, and thats what we all like programming for, to learn, right?
I find the features of the engine remarkable, please download the demo and see it for yourself, better seen than explained (by me in anycase).
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| Affordable high end quality! |
I can't say much about how well structured and commented the code of C4 is.
I also can't say much about how easy it is to implement own features and plugins for C4.
I also can't say much about how good the learning curve for C4's coding structure is.
Because being not a programmer but an artist I can't say anything about these things.
But that's what my programmer and many other programmers say, who work with this engine.
What I can say is that I am very happy about how easy it is to get good looking and working results with this engine even without knowing anything about C++.
Texturing for this engine is a real pleasure because of the high quality maps produced by the generators working behind the texture importer. With C4 I am able to generate normalmaps, parallaxmaps, horizonmaps and even ambient-occlusion-maps from one single heightmap. Combined with the powerfull graphical shader editor users without any knowledge of writing shaders are able to produce materials and shaders that are easily able to hold a candle to the big engines out there.
That also applies to the graphical script editor which allows level designers and artists to create scripts in their world without learning a scripting language. A great assistance for people like me.
When I was searching for an engine that could fit my needs I was looking for something that could handle large terrains in a high quality. At the point I purchased C4 the engine couldn't handle the terrains I needed for my project. I talked to Eric, the programmer of the engine. He told me that he will implement those features. Because of the professionalism Eric, his engine and the community left to me I purchased a license and hoped that the upcomming terrain features will rock as the rest of the engine.
But the terrain features weren't as good as I expected them to be.
C4's terrain features are way better than what I expected and broadened my mind about creating terrains for Computer games. At last it is possible to create high end terrains with real overhangs, rocks, bridges, caves, cliffs and tunnels because of C4's voxel terrain. With the upcoming LOD system and background terrain loading features the level designer knows no bounds anymore in terrain creating.
Not a feature but also very important is the support. Eric is almost always at the forums and questions and problems with the engine get answered very quick and competent. I couldn't wish a better support.
If I would mention every feature I like on the C4-Engine the list would become very long.
So I only have to say that with every build of this Engine my enthusiasm for this engine and the joy working with it are growing even more.
Keep up the good work! |
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| Great Value |
(The engine is great, but this website/devmaster really needs some work! This is a copy of a post above that didn't work)
I have only been using C4 for around 8 months, testing concepts and seeing what is possible with the engine, however it is clear that C4 is a good engine with lots of potential.
Pros:
- Source Code is very well written
- Voxel Terrain is awesome
- Good quality rendering
- Physics seemed okay, but should be a lot better once the new version is out (which is soon).
- Bullet, PhysX ready to drop in thanks to community
- Great community
- Eric is very responsive to posts
- Graphical shader editor is very nice
Cons:
- The editor is okay, but doesn't feel very intuitive compared to other programs I have used. This doesn't bother me too much as you can get used to it, but things like not being able to bind keys and set everything up how you like are a real pain. This should improve with the next version or so as the editor is improved.
- Have had some issues with the dynamic lighting and importing models, but the lighting should be fixed in a future version, and the models is probably because they were quite complex. Unforuntalely there is no feedback from the interface when importing large models (like a loading bar), so it can be a little tedious in this regard.
I haven't played with multiplayer/networking so I won't comment on that yet. |
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| Nothing but great... |
Features: there are a lot of great tools and what not that come with the engine. They are not as nice as some others and but I believe this is being worked on and as long as they work that's what really counts.
Ease of Use: The code is extremely easy to follow if you have a programming background. Ive used many of the top 10 engines on devmaster and I would say this is the easiest one to use for serious development.
Stability: Eric does not release something that does not work. This is not an issue. I was shockingly surprised at how bug free, how stable, and how fast the engine runs. I have yet to run into programming short cuts that end up leading to bad spaghetti code.
Support: I have yet had a question go unanswered and most the time very quickly in the forums. Eric is always on there helping people. The people of the forums are also very active and don't mind helping everyone from the newly started developers to the seasoned individual.
I really do enjoy using this engine and really cannot wait until 2.0 comes out. The license cost of the engine is out of this world for the type of product you get. |
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| Review |
The C4 engine is a professional and fast game engine that offers features expected in engines many more times expensive. For the cost of the license it offers full source code for the engine and all tools as well as superb support from the author and community. Extending the engine is very easy and despite having the engine source code no modifications are necessary to get game specific functionality within the game world.
The art pipeline and approach to world editing, whilst nuanced, is very powerful and only requires a license purchase for developers that require the source code, making it attractive for small teams with limited resources to get started without requiring a large number of engine licenses.
The engine is implemented in C++ with a clean scenegraph architecture and whilst it requires developers to be competent in C++ to make the most of the engine, tutorials and assistance available through the community make it easy to get started developing with the engine. Performance is generally quite good on both supported operating systems but requires adequate hardware to run the supplied demo. |
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| C4 is a great C++ game engine providing all source code |
I've been using many game engines so far, and C4 is one of the best ones. Its implementation is clean, concise, powerful and a joy to work with.
My favorite features of the C4 engine:
+ Full source code access
+ Excellent support through the forums, directly from Eric
+ Great graphics rendering on both Mac OS and Windows
+ Nice world editor and importers
Most of the projects that come close in functionality are (partially) closed source or lack certain features. |
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One of the best indie engines availablePosted by:
Ludi
at Nov 29, 2009 |
Features 4/5
You get a lot for your money. It's not only the engine and it's source, you also get all the tools and their sources. E.g. the World Editor, or the Shader Editor, or the Visual Script Editor. So why only four stars? You can't write any post-processing effects on your own, which is a deep hit for a 3D engine in 2009.
Ease of Use 3/5
From the programmers point of view, you'll need a basic knowledge of C++. The source is nice structured and nice and clean written, but you'll still need some time to get into it. And as there are's no scripting language available (I don't count the Visual Scripting as I personally don't like it and it's limited, if you don't extend it to your needs), you'll spent a lot of time doing: stop the game, edit source, compile and run the game again. -1
While there are a lot of tools are available, you'll notice, that they feel clumsy. Importing a bunch of textures is a time-killing task, as you can only import one textures at the same time (There's a community provieded tool available, which helps in this case). Scaling, moving and rotating nodes in the World Editor, which is a common task, is just a nightmare, no uniform scale, the clickable area of the editor gizmos are so small, that you'll miss them a lot, if you don't put all your concentration into the click. And the shader managment isn't great, if you have a bigger project. There's no way to write, e.g. a common shader, e.g. a Weapon Shader, that can simply reuse and edit later, without touching every weapon again. You can export/import materials, but, it's clumsy and time consuming, as you have to open every weapon, change the shader and export it again. -1
Stability 5/5
The engine and the tools are really stable. And for the few times, that you might spot a bug or a crash in the engine or the tools, Eric fixes them within a short period of time.
Support 5/5
The support is great. Eric is really doing a great job and the community is nice and friendly too.
PS: Don't judge C4 only by the demo artwork. It's really crappy and always makes me wanna cry, if I have to take a look at it. C4 is much more powerful. |
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| Great engine. even easy for us artist types! |
I have been using the C4 Engine for about 2 years now. And I cant see any reason to switch to anything else.
Ease of Use:
It's extremely simple to get art assets into the engine for use. C4 uses imports tga files and collada model files. so, the art pipeline is pretty simple.
Stability and Performance:
I have never had an issue with the engine's stability. Every release is rock solid.
Support:
the engine developer makes himself accessible daily via the support forums. you never have to wait more than 8 hours for an answer. And if the developers dont get to your question in time. the forum community is the best. They are all willing to give a helping hand. |
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| Excellent product! |
Found no bugs so far, and the creator is always there to answer questions, i've received answer the same day by Eric to all my posts.
The source code is very clear to understand, so you don't need to be a C++ expert to change it.
I've been using the engine about 8 months now, and i am not disappointed in any way, it offers high quality tools to develop games. Graphics are top quality, also network support is very neat and solid. As for sound, we haven't used it, but features on page talks good, it should be as high quality as the rest of the tools.
You do need to know C++ to make a game with this engine, but it pays back with great performance. Also, you can provide components to your designers, so they can drag-n-drop to create new behavior on your levels.
You can also extend the editors adding new functionality easily... No need to touch the base code, just create a new plug-in for the engine.
This engine is worth every penny i've spend. |
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A great EnginePosted by:
Lunz88
at Nov 29, 2009 |
C4 is a really great product.
Having evaluated over a dozen Engines, C4 is the one I bought after giving its Demo Version a longer Try.
Pros:
- Support: The Level of Support you get from the Developer and the Community is outstanding. Never before i've received so much support and every Problem i had got resolved mostly within an hour.
- Toolset: The Editors of C4 allow a nice workflow which is in my Opinion very important because as an artist you don't want to spend days or weeks getting good Results. The Shader Editor is designed for easy use and despite its simple nature is extremely powerful. If a Shader Node is needed that is not implemented, it will often be implemented and ready to use in the next update. The World Editor is also easy to use, but it needs a few tweaks to become even better. The Script Editor allows a lot of Interactivity inside the Game World and is easy to use and powerful.
- Rendering: The Quality of the Visuals is outstanding. But as with most engines, this depends on what you are capable as an artist. I'm still a beginner considering what I can do as an artist, but the Result I got is really nice. Performance is also excellent, but for bigger Levels you should really optimise its layout and use the Engines Optimizations
- Sourcecode: You get full Access to the Engines Source Code, and being a Programmer myself, the Code is extremely clean and easy to understand. It is pure fun just to look at it.
- Stability: C4 is rock-stable. It only crashed once because a plugin didn't support the newest version of the Engine.
Cons:
- Portal System is powerful but difficult to use at the moment. However, it will be updated in a future update
- A built-in Particle Editor would be really cool. There is one from a User but i'm to stupid to include it inside the Engine
Also, the Price of C4 is really fair considering what you get from it. It is affordable for nearly everyone and delivers quality that is normally expected at higher Price Ranges.
The next few weeks will be really exciting, because C4 is getting a huge update which will bring tons of new features like a LOD-System for Voxel Terrain and a Physics Engine which allows more interactivity inside the Game Worlds. |
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| Awesome Engine |
C4 is a really good engine with excellent support 24/7 with the developer off the engine answering your questions. The engines graphics are constantly improving to keep up with the latest tech on the market and for a very low price you get a lot.
Overall the engine is really good with all main features covered such as physics, lighting, editors, support and even demo source-code. |
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| Pre-review (full review forth coming) |
C4 Engine Review (preview) -- Engine Author: Mr. Eric Lengyel., Terathon, LLC
You have already read about the pre-2.0 features, so I will hit on improvements...
1. Rendering engine -- excellent, very smooth.
Lighting: New 2.0 feature(s) "Landscape Light" an infinite light that provides large-scale multi-resolution shadow mapping capabilities, enabling shadow maps over areas of unlimited size.
Shaders: Custom Shaders thru game editor, millions of variations. Many shader processes available.
gfx: The fog, and smoke trails are excellent, the flame effects are excellent. Explosions effects are very very good.
2. AI pathing.
3. Advanced portal engine: allows Gfx to be efficient, by only allowing gfx card to process objects that are viewable. Does require portals to be placed efficiently by the game builder.
4. Particle Effect: wow... as I mentioned the particle effects are very good.
5. Controller system - a method to control object in game. (will discuss more in later review)
6. Basic scripting system -- DOES now have ability to terminate running scripts at demand.
Edit: Also conditional branching is in place.
7. Game State serialization: (will discuss more in later review)
8. World manager: your project is stored in wld files, and loaded into the editor. You can have multiple "worlds"
9. A powerful and clean API. (will discuss more in later review)
10. Source code: When you purchase a License: you get access to the source code... in case you need to customize the game engine.
(Not recommended tho for significant changes), instead see below (plugins)
11. C4 now allows the use "plugins" -- its much better to use plugins rather than customize the game engine thru source (where possible)... because plugins will work regardless of new engine builds... (we hope)!
12. Forum community and Developer support: When I read the reviews, 90+% touted excellent support. This is true, even for licensed users! (hehe yea, after you get your license, you STILL get responses from Eric! LOL.
13. LOD for models does exist.
14. VOXEL Terrain!!! yea, fully editable, voxel based terrain system means complex underground tunnels... with beautiful appearance.
15. scenegraph: now is more organized, also there is a scenegraph plugin for licenses users.
NEW:
PHYSICS! NOW IN THE GAME ENGINE for 2.0!!!!
wow. However, this is not released quite yet...
But seems it might release anytime in the next week or 2.
As soon as I can I will update this review to discuss the physics aspect.
The not so good:
1. Scripting: (EDIT: this has improved)
2. Does not appear to have a lot of data driven generators for creating content. -- ie almost everything must be hand placed. Vegetation system is lacking.
3. The game stores pretty much everything in "wld" files, but there does not seem to be any built in way to export the many custom pieces of information into a text based system such as XML or INI that can be used to rebuild the data. In other words, what goes in... well, no way to get it out.
4. Model importation pipeline -- over and over in the forums, the same problem is found with people having difficulties importing the "required" Collada format. Initially this was due to immature format. But, it seems not all exporters properly handle collada. I think it would be best for the engine to include some kind of tool that would check for Collada consistency... at least so people could understand what is wrong with their models.
There is a learning curve to "handling" the models so that the game engine will get the "proper format"... and this can be frustrating.
Other Information:
1. Feature requests -- Anyone can request features to be added. Over the years since 2006 many features have been added simply at the request of the users.
2. The forum community can be very helpful...
Overall:
1. Version 2.0 is about to be released -- it will include physics, improved voxel texturing, and many other tweaks.
It remains to be seen how physics works since this is the first release with physics.
Overall Grade:
Features: 4
Ease of Use: 4
Stability: 5
Support: 5
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| Overall a very powerful and professional engine |
Overall, C4 is a very powerful and professional engine, capable of producing top quality games. The code is very well organized and easy to understand - allowing a knowledgeable C++ programmer to get something up and running quickly. The engine also comes with a demo game with complete source code, which is incredibly valuable as a reference for how to perform specific tasks and use the engine as it was intended.
Pros:
Extremely fast and powerful
Very well designed code, easy to follow
Impeccable support from Eric (the creator) and the community
Source code of engine, tools and demo game
Very stable
Great rendering capabilities
License - no royalties, ever
Cons:
No way to create custom post-process shaders (without editing engine source)
No built in particle editor (although a member of the community built one) |
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| An Excellent Investment |
I own C4, and I consider it a great investment. At the time I purchased C4 (and at the moment I'm writing this review), the licensing terms are very good - source code is included, and there are no upgrade fees - licensees receive free upgrades for the foreseeable future.
This is a fantastic 'pro' for C4 - though the licensing terms will change very soon. (If you're already looking at C4, and you know C++, do not hesitate to buy it).
One aspect of C4 serves as both 'pro' and 'con'. Really, to use C4 effectively, you must know C++, or partner with someone who does. This keeps some young learners away, which helps create the high signal to noise ratio on the forums.
Here are my grades on the values DevMaster measures:
Features: 4
Ease of Use: 4
Stability: 5
Support: 5
Features: C4, like every other engine, does not have some features you may be looking for. It does however have _excellent_ design - and if you need to add features, you will find it relatively easy to do so.
Ease of Use: Kind of hard to put a number on something that can cover so many aspects of an engine. Code - extremely good. Tools - don't always work the way I thought they would - but you will learn how to get what you want.
Stability: Rock solid - never saw a problem. C4 works. Performance is also excellent.
Support: The only problem here is that DevMaster's ranking system only goes to 5 stars :). The C4 forums are seriously excellent, and if you have a problem, you can count on the helpful community. But the really cool thing is that Eric Lengyel, the author of C4 provides outstanding support through the forums as well. He's genuinely interested in his engine, and it shows.
Recently, several other engines have offered free licensing of one sort or another. Some of these are tempting, but my bottom line is that I want the source code. I'm not aware of any competition for C4 in this regard - for the quality of the code, the source license is a steal - especially under the current licensing terms.
C4 is a great as is, and continues to add impeccably designed features over time. I'm very happy with my purchase. |
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| extremely powerful *professional* grade engine not for the faint of heart |
My review of C4 is long overdue. This is based on 1.5.9, and 2.0 is coming out in a few weeks, and I'll update the review when it does.
*** Judging by the Cover ***
Ever heard the expression that you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover? Well, you shouldn't judge an engine by the quality of the art in it's demo.
C4 demo doesn't look as nice as Unity demo
C4 demo doesn't look as nice as Leadwerks demo
C4 demo doesn't look as nice as Torque3D demo
However...
C4 *blows* them all out of the water in terms of...well...everything else. Capabilities. Low Defects. Quality. Performance. Documentation. Extensibility. Support. The only area it falls significantly short is quality of art in the demo.
In all of the areas that matter for *making a game* and not *playing a demo*, then C4 wins hands down for any engine < $10k per developer seat.
The funny thing is the reason C4 has some amazing strengths in other areas, in particular Community and Support, is at least partly attributable to the lower quality of the demo's art assets. More on that later.
*** Engineering Quality ***
The powerhouse behind C4 is a *programmer*, and a damned good one. Not an artist. Not a marketer. All of this shines through, for both the good and the bad.
I've been coding in C for nearly 18 years now and C++ for many of those, and have probably conducted detailed reviews of 10+ million lines of C/C++ code, including many game engines. How does C4 stack up?The quality of C4's code is easily in the top three of all complex systems I've ever reviewed, and by far the most well rounded of all game engines I've seen, and this includes the source to two AAA engines costing orders of magnitude greater than C4. Yes, it's that good.
C4's feature list is solid, but not as extensive as some competitors. However, C4 still wins, because it's features *work*. The documentation is substantial and accurate. The performance ranges from above average to outstnading. The bugs are extremely few and far between. In short, you couldn't ask for more solid features: if a feature is released and advertised by Terathon, it works. It's that simple.
*** Community and Support ***
C4's community is literally second to none for at least the dozen or so game engine products I've used. The community is very mature and intelligent, with flame wars being few and far between. Many folks are eager to help, not just the author. Questions are more likely to be answered in minutes rather than days, with hours being the most common.
Even beyond the engine topics themselves, there are some very good discussions that can be found in the forums. I've participated in some very positive and fruitful discussions that you wouldn't typically associate with an independent game engines site. This is a testament to the maturity and intelligence of the average C4 developer.
The quality of the community is partially a happy accident. Frankly, the type of person who is most likely to walk away from C4 based on it's current demo before they truly evaluate the engine is the type of developer who will contribute the least to the community. The opposite is also true...those that can see past the demo and see the true Work Of Art that C4 as an engine is, are the ones who are smart, diligent and experienced enough to make positive contributions to the community.
Eric @ Terathon is extremely responsive to questions for a company that doesn't have paid support options for it's Standard Licensees. It's amazing how much time he puts into this and just how responsive he is. I'm not sure how sustainable this is, but at this point in time the support is still truly first class. You couldn't ask for better support, at any cost.
*** Not For The Meak ***
C4 is a professional grade engine. You will be coding in C++ when implementing a C4 game. You need not be a total guru, but you do need to know your way around the language well. If you fit more comfortably in derivation-based coding vs. component-based, you'll feel at home with C4.
Component-based api's are easier to understand for newbies, and are essential when you don't have the source, but neither is the case with C4. With C4 you'll have the source (at least with Standard and up...a new Basic edition is coming out that won't have source access), and it's not designed for neophytes.
With C4, 98 times out of 100 you'll be able to do what you want to do through derivations and plugins, and where you can't you have access to the source, and a support-staff that is more than willing in guiding you through the required modifications (if they are indeed required, almost all of the time they are not).
*** A Workflow That Works ***
Now that Unity Indie is free, and both Unity and C4 directly import Collada, a crazy-good approach to building a complex game is to prototype in Unity where you have access to incredible artist integration and fast-paced scripting with C#, but on the other hand can never seem to get the last 10% of the game to do exactly what you want due to the fact that you don't have engine source, and the engine simply isn't up to snuff performance wise.
This is where C4 shines, and why C4 is a perfect compliment to Unity. Prototype in Unity for free, and then implement in C4. The two are extremely complimentary because the strengths of Unity are the weak points in C4, and vice-versa. Where Unity falls short, you pick up the pieces with C4.
Therefore you figure out the majority of your overall design and gameplay issues and first few levels in a rapid fashion in Unity, and then when you find your development velocity in Unity is starting to suffer becuase it just can't do what you want it to do easily, that's when you migrate your project over to C4 and go after that last 10% that makes the difference between a good and a great game. If your game is simple and you don't need that last 10%, then finish it in Unity and save C4 for when the pro-grade tools and performance really are needed.
This may sound like redundant work that a small indie team can't afford, and it is if C4 is truly not needed (ie if Unity can hit the quality and performance you need for your title). But in cases where Unity can't do this (and this happens a lot), the entire team will get to get to the goal line much faster, and with a much better overall game becuase you used the appropriate tools for the appropriate kind of work, and therefore maximized productivity throughout construction.
If you instead tried to hammer the Unity round peg into the square hole, you'd spend all of your time hammering instead of finishing your game.
The converse is also true. If you are spending days upon days writing C++ code just to test out different gameplay elements, you are just wasting your time, unless you are in the top 1% or 2% of C++ coders in the world. It would be far more effective to use the high level tools provided in Unity to get an approximation of what your game is going to be whipped out in short order, and then go refine it in the C4 implementation once you've worked out the gameplay to your satisfaction.
*** Act Now Before It's Too Late ***
C4 is a really interesting product that is really going places in the near future. As I said, I'll update my review once the new 2.0 features are out.
C4 2.0 ships in the *very* near future, and when it does it will introduce yearly maintenance fees to keep your Standard License up to date. Prior to 2.0, a C4 Standard License comes with *lifetime* updates. That's right...never pay an upgrade fee for the future source. Anybody who doesn't jump on this soon misses out big time.
Even if you do not have immediate need for the engine, you would be crazy not to jump on this now if you have the funds. And even if you don't...find them! In 3-4 years who knows what a Standard License will cost...perhaps 2x to 3x the current cost...plus a yearly maintenance fee. But it today and get updates for free for life!
But you had better hurry...you only have a few short weeks! |
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| Rock solid triple "A" engine |
| In my opinion this is an excellent engine on a par with engines that license for hundreds of times what this one does. With parallax maps, normal maps, reflection/refraction, portals, dynamic lighting. You will be hard pressed to find a buzz word that is not supported, and supported well. There is a free downloadable demo that will let you try the editor and a demo game. When you get the license, source for the demo game comes with the engine source so you can be up and modding within hour's. Since you get source access, you are not limited in how you can extend the engine. But you will need to know C++ to get the full potential of this engine. That said the code is clean and well organized, the community is friendly, and many questions asked on the forums are answered within hours, many times by the engine's author. |
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| C4 Price to Quality Ratio Unmatched |
It's very inexpensive compared to all the other engines in its class and comes with the source code included.
Beginners will have very little trouble being introduced into the world of 3D development for games or applications.
The support is very knowledge and quick to respond to your questions. The community is always willing to help out in the message forums.
The C4 engine is very stable. I was very surprised how easy it was to work with and it has a book to help guide those new to the engine.
If you want near triple A quality for a reasonable price C4 is your choice. |
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-A customer satisfaction rating that is self evident.
-Utilizes modern gpu's in a very effective way. Not for low end geforce 6 generation.
-A high level shader editor built by someone who seems to understand parallel processing.
-It's a difficult learning curve for the beginner but the tools make up for that.
There is source. There is a thriving community.
My only newbe complaint would be that there are no real SDK docs and the book is out of date.
There are the forums, wikis, & sample code though. |
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| Powerful engine. Cumbersome editor. |
I've had a license for C4 for a while now, going back several versions. I've checked it out a few times and really love what the engine can do, how well it performs, its stability and its feature set.
The support is great as Eric himself will typically respond to questions or other posts himself. He's not condescending or aloof, but answers the questions very evenly.
My one big complaint, though, with C4 - and it's keeping me from really digging further into it - is its editor. It has good ideas - the ability to add or remove the particular tools you need (panels) is great, for example.
However, it's not intuitive from a designer's stand-point - at least not to me. As a designer, I won't be doing any programming, beyond maybe some elementary scripting.
My focus is on creating attractive and believable worlds with the toolset - which C4 is more than capable of creating.
In attempting to achieve that, I feel like I'm constantly having my attention drawn away from what I'm doing in order to "fight" with the interface.
In short, the editor is very much designed from a programmer's mindset; that is, what should be intuitive simple functions tend to involve several cumbersome steps.
For example.. setting up terrain textures. C4 uses a "terrain palette" as a way to set textures for each side of a voxel "brush". It allows you to craft your terrain with the proper texture being automatically applied. Pretty cool idea, to be sure.
However, the process - or pipeline - of getting those textures into the engine, into the terrain brush and then on to the terrain is far, *far* more cumbersome than it should be.
How, to me, it could work is:
1. I import a series of textures from an arbitrary location on my HD
2. Set the parameters for each texture via a contextual properties screen (specularity, alpha, blending, bump-map, etc.).
3. Save each as a 'material' to a stored library (basically what a terrain palette is)
4. Select the material to use for each side.
5. Sculpt/Paint away.
That would be straight-forward and very intuitive, at least to me.
Here's the way it works, as I've found:
1. Create a "strip" of textures, each of the same dimensions, to be used in a graphics program, like Photoshop. Save it as a TGA to a specific "import" folder, which is the only location C4 seems to recognize for finding assets.
2. Create a strip of normal maps to correspond to the textures set up in step 1. Save as a TGA to the same import folder.
3. Create a strip of specular maps, same as in steps 1-2.
4. Go into C4, open the editor, import the textures as a "terrain palette". Repeat for each individual TGA, setting the appropriate flags.
5. Let C4 do its conversion to create the texture palette.
6. Open up the material window, then activate the material node editor where you now have to set up and connect the textures to each other in order to use the bump and spec maps that you created in steps 1-3.
This last step, in itself, requires you to learn an entire area of the editor which could take time in itself. Frankly, you shouldn't have to learn how to use a node editor in order to import, configure and use a series of textures.
Again, an interface is supposed to empower the user. It should be "invisible" and make sense. It should work the way you expect it to, for the most part. I don't expect to have to open a node editor in order to *use* textures after all the previous steps I just went through just to get them into the engine in the first place. It's cumbersome.
Looking at other editors, like the one for NeoAxis... or Leadwerks.. Those are editors that are clearly created from a designer's point-of-view. They make sense. I was able to create an entire scene in both of those without having to look at a single piece of documentation. Only when I got to the more involved tasks did I have to look at a wiki, etc. In my opinion, that's how it should be. |
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| Support for this Engine is horrid... |
Good Game Engine, Source Code, Decent Features, and very cheap compared to other Engines in the same category.
Horrid support, and slow development! Just try to say anything negative about the engine and you'll be lynched. Instead of responding with a positive approach and listen on how to improve the Engine, they'll stand by what they know and won't give you an inch. They think they know what the costumer wants and they'll force that belief on you.
As for development, it is extremely slow. There hasn't been an update in almost a year, even though it's been promised many times.
If you're on schedule to develop games, look somewhere else. |
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| A gaming engine with a future. |
I purchased the C4 engine almost a year ago now and to date I still keep finding new features, ways to improve graphics and increase the performances.
It's just a wonderful program that is defiantly heading in the right direction. I was always worried that I wouldn't understand how to use it, however, after spending some time on the provided Wikki site I managed to get everything in order very quickly.
I am disappointed that version 2 isn't yet available and because of that we have had no choice but to delay our planned games. Needless to say however it's totally understandable and expected in this industry.
When version 2 is available and ready to use I believe it will add many more functions for it's users to explore, such as Ambient occlusions and physics. It will look great! |
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| A well rounded package |
One of the first game engines I have used on a large commercial project and I have found it to be a very stable, well documented and reliably supported engine.
The commercial project has involved implementing third party middleware with the Engine which has been done with relative ease.
It is well supported by its own creator as well as by other users of the Engine so there is no lacking in quality support should you run into a problem.
Updates do come fairly regularly and again, dependent on how you code your project in conjunction with the Engine, the updates should not cause any problems during implementation.
Documentation is being reviewed and updated on a regular basis as well. |
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| C4 Engine |
Features:
C4 is engine is a good engine from a programmers standpoint however is of little use to anyone but. The tools are archaic and clunky and creating content is virtually impossible to anyone other than professional computer programmers.
Graphics:
C4 engine supports a few lighting and texturing methods common in games of today but none of the ones you'd expect it to. Post-processing effects such as SSAO are impossible and modern screen effects are so weak even on maximum settings that the are essentially worthless. You can neither use nor create your own full-screen and/or post processing effects.
Visual Effects:
C4 has absolutely no effects system of any kind. If you'd like to add effects to your game of any type you must either create your own effects system from scratch or use a third-party plugin which are totally unsupported by Terathon.
Terrain:
Creating terrain in C4 is accomplished by making a "block" of terrain which cannot be linked or stitched to other terrains. To sculpt this terrain you are given three brushes: a sphere, a cylinder, and a cone which only allow for creating totally unrealistic terrain that resembles mountains of breasts created with an icecream scoop. In addition to this shortcoming you are only able to blend between two textures on any surface.
World Editor:
Doing anything in the world editor can feel even more frustrating then doing it in CAD. You are given the ability to create objects with simple shapes like a sphere or once again cone and the ability to create extrusions. However the extrusions routinely "break" creating horrible shadow artifacts and becoming useless.
Shadows:
Other than shadow-maps C4 only supports incredibly sharp and unrealistic stencil-shadows and requires that all 3D models in your game creating shadows be entirely encapsulated. If you're a 3D artist of 12 years experience this means tossing everything you've ever learned about the necessity of culling faces out the window because 95% of the models you may have created in your career are now worthless in C4. |
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| Worth every penny |
I have been using C4 for several years now, and I am continually impressed by the number of quality of the features it has. The engine isn't perfect and it's still in development, but so is every engine. The one thing to realize is that C4 isn't an engine for wannabes or posers. You do need to know what you're doing. You need to know C++, and you need to be competent with 3D maths.
The graphics features are very high quality. The engine supports detailed shadow maps over extremely large areas now using a new "landscape light". Stencil shadows are also available and both methods work perfectly together. The shading system is also very impressive. You edit shaders in a graphical interface with a huge set of "process" node types, and the engine creates all of the necessary shader code for all the different types of lights and fog environments, for all platforms. It just works everywhere.
There are a huge number of special effects available right out of the box like particle systems, fire, lightning, flares, and beams. And it's easy to make your own custom effects, if you know how to program.
The support that you get for a $350 license is insanely good. For the most part, the community is really helpful, and the engine creator himself is constantly available on the forums. I almost always get a response to a question within a few hours, and a lot of times within a few minutes. Problems are usually solved very easily, but sometimes there isn't a good solution to something I want to do. In these cases, though, a new feature is often implemented just to help my situation! I've seen this happen with less than a day turnaround. Amazing!
The only complaint I have is that the next version is taking a long time to finish. Before this, we've been used to getting updates every month or two, but that has changed now. There are really huge features in the next version like a new physics engine, so this delay is a little understandable, but I would still prefer more incremental updates. |
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| An engine for programmer |
Features:
I havent gone through the program but its pretty impressive. i like the idea you can build your own controller(feature) and put it on the editor.
Ease of use:
though it is a good engine, i must say that this is not a proper engine for an artist. but for programmer it is very good. its easy to understand the basic concept of the whole engine and the code structure is very neat. if you've gone through the tutorial you'll notice how easy it is.
Stability and performance:
I've seen the demo and its good how they put lots of enemy/object without any frame drop. I also notice its stable in a very large scene. however, i have a problem once in a scene with lots of material. i dont know if thats just me because i cant find someone with the same problem.
Support:
Ask nicely and you'll have your problem solved within hours :)
Overall:
its a very good engine, good for indie dev. worth price/performance, have a bright future. yes there is problem here and there but considering the active community, it has a very bright future. |
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| Mediocre rendering engine |
The documentation for this engine is terribly lacking IMO.
If you are not a hardcore programmer then forget about this engine. The tools are also very basic and rudimentary at best. Not worth the price IMO when you can get much more powerful rendering engines for free.
C4 engine is in reality nothing more than a mediocre rendering engine with a poor set of tools. |
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