Cipher Features

Cipher contains a broad range of features to help you in all areas of game development, from ultra fast rendering and immersive audio, to powerful artist tools. The following introduces just some of Cipher's capabilities.

Rendering

Cipher's uses one of the most advanced graphics engines around, with exceptional performance, incredible image quality and a range of features that will ensure your game stays ahead of the competition. By using a high level shader language to describe surfaces and materials, Cipher is able to create incredible visual effects with no custom programming, with all the effects created by artists using our range of visual tools, such as Shader Designer.

• High level shader driven graphics.
• Real time dynamic volume shadows.
• Static and dynamic lighting.
• Segment Renderer provides efficient geometry culling.
• Skeletal and Vertex based character animation.
• Models support multiple LODs.
• Fast particle systems, with interactive visual editor.
• Fully customisable lens flare and glare effects.
• Dynamic Scene Graph allows simple scene manipulation.
• Multiple viewports and cameras.
• Support for the latest effects, like reflection mapping and per pixel lighting effects (using dot3 bump mapping).
• Programmatic control over shader effects.
• Landscape rendering with support for large terrains, continuous level of detail, on-the-fly quality adjustments, multiple blended texture layers and detail maps

Animation

Cipher's Advanced Animation System offers powerful features and integration with Character Studio and Biped in 3ds max. The characters in your game can be animated with Cipher's sophisticated skeletal animation system, while simpler objects can take advantage of the flexibility of the vertex animation system.

• Arbitrary number of bones per character.
• Arbitrary bone influences per vertex.
• Deformable skins with multiple levels of details.
• Animate facial features and hair.
• Attach rigid models to individual bones.
• Full access to animating bone information (e.g. to place gun in characters hand).
• Vertex animation supports arbitrary deformation of models.
• Smooth blending between frames in both skeletal and vertex animations.
• Variable speed and reverse playback of animations.
• Efficient use of memory and extremely fast skinning.

Audio

Cipher's low level audio API gives programmers full control over audio, while a higher level, game-centric API makes it easy for game code to get effects and music in place quickly. Custom console commands let audio designers try out their effects and music in the game, and manage their audio budgets.

• Position sound effects in 3D and let Cipher track and update them.
• Streaming music playback (wav and Ogg Vorbis).
• Dynamic volume, frequency and Doppler effects supported.
• Native support for compressed audio files.
• Adjustable playback quality from CD quality down.
• Automatic tracking and management of audio samples and streams.
• Understands multiple speaker configurations, including Dolby Digital 5.1

Tools

One of Cipher's primary goals is to offer more power to artists and level designers. Cipher includes a range of visual tools that allow artists to interactively design the shader effects and particle systems used in the game via an easy to use interface. Additionally, its batch processing tools make light work of converting and building all your art assets on demand or as part of overnight daily builds.

• Visual tools for creating and editing shaders and particle systems.
• Model and Animation viewer.
• Model conversion tools to convert from 3ds max to Cipher model format.
• Support for Character Studio and Biped animations, rigid attachments and  multiple LODs.
• Powerful optimisation features mean more polygons in your models.
• BSP generation.
• Font tool to generate UNICODE compatible fonts.
• Numerous plug-ins for 3ds max to assist with level layouts, animation sequencing, texturing and animation event tracking.
• Custom version of lcc C compiler to generate byte code version of game code for execution of Cipher Virtual Machine.

Documentation

Cipher offers comprehensive documentation for both programmers and artists.

• Complete source code to Cipher and tools included.
• Comprehensive programmers manual that covers the APIs exposed by Cipher and detailed information about its internal workings for developers looking to extend Cipher.
• Artists manual covering tools, plug-ins, the art production line and getting the most from Cipher.
• Sample projects, including source code to the playable game Crazy Car Championship.
• Discuss developing games with a other developers and the people that develop Cipher

Collision and AI

Collision, multiplayer support and AI are areas that change significantly from one game to the next, so Cipher provides the fundamental building blocks required to deliver the solution you need.

• BSP Collision detection.
• Fast swept volume based collision, for testing moving objects against the environment.
• Efficient filtering of collision volumes based on user defined properties.
• Fast point testing and line of sight testing.
• Supports third party physics, such as Karma and Havok.
• Simple entity based framework for building AI and other behaviors.

Core Engine Features

At the core of Cipher is a set of features that provide teams with the head start they need to get to market sooner, increase productivity and decrease costs.

• International font rendering technology.
• Full adoption of Unicode to simplify localisation issues.
• Compressed file system support improves loading times by over 50%.
• TCP/IP based networking for LAN and Internet compatible play.
• Client / Server technology, optimised for 1-32 players.
• Support for dedicated game servers.
• Virtual machine allows same game code to securely run on multiple platforms.
• Logging and tracking of all inputs and time for simple debugging.
• Drop down console for debugging and customisation during development.
• Custom memory management.
• Command driven central core.
• Flexible input event binding allows arbitrary commands to be linked to events.
• Numerous debugging options and error reporting features to aid development.