Jet^3D Features

Jet3D is a 3D graphics/game engine built for high performance real-time rendering. Jet3D offers advanced lighting features, 3D modeling support, seamless soft-skin polyonal characters and many other features.

Jet3D is a product of the former Eclipse Entertainment, the makers of Genesis3D. Jet3D was developed in late 1998 and became available as open source in early 1999 after the breakup of Eclipse. Shortly thereafter, most of Jet3D technology was used by Wildtangent which adapted it to make WTStudio and the popular, if short-lived (for the indie community) WildTangent Game Driver.

Jet 3D continued to improve with the help of independent developers until the late 2000's. Despite its age, Jet3D presents a remarkable development environment for bsp-style realtime 3D action.

Environment

Exceptionally fast rendering Radiosity lighting Integrated rigid body physics simulation support for world objects Pre-computed lighting for animating light intensities and simulating caustics Environment uses BSP trees for fast visibility culling Dynamic RGB lights Dynamic shadows Dynamic fog Dynamic mirrors Dynamic water effects Dynamic texturing effects such as procedurals, animations, blending, and morphing Area portals allow selective rendering of world geometry Translucent world geometry for windows, or other effects Spherically mapped sky for seamless sky and horizon 3D sound positioning and attenuation User extendable special effects and particle systems Bitmap and Windows font support for labeling the screen, textures, or bitmaps

 

Editor

CSG editor builds geometry optimized for 3D environments Built in keyframe system to animate world geometry Multiple compilation options, including fast recompiles for changes to non-geometrical objects such as lights and entities Configurable entity definitions for sharing level data with applications Built in physics entity definitions for specifying interactions between physically controlled objects

 

Characters

Seamless soft-skin polygonal characters Automatic visibility culling for optimal performance Tools to support character and animation authoring for 3D Studio Max Smoothing group support for high quality shading No limit to the number of materials used to texture or color characters Materials can be animated using tinting, procedurals, animations, blending, and morphing

 

Character Animation

Animation based on either a hierarchical or a non-hierarchical bone system Arbitrarily spaced keyframes in time High quality interpolation between keys - second order continuity across orientation keys Sharing of animations across different characters Animations can be blended and mixed or partially applied Animations are optimized to take up minimal space Interpolation and blending subsystems can be used independently to animate other user objects

 

Driver Support

Glide (in its time...) D3D (full screen and in a window) Software driver for support on machines without hardware acceleration (full screen and in a window) (no longer...) Built in texture and lightmap caching Takes advantage of 3D hardware that supports multitexturing 2D bitmap overlays

 

Technical Details

Physics subsystem can be used to control world geometry, or independently to animate other user objects Virtual file system allows file IO access to collection files, memory files, dos file systems, and user extendable file systems transparently Math support for vectors, matrices, and quaternions Comprehensive support for texture and bitmap formats, mipmaps, and conversions Basic network transport support for multiplayer Fast collisions against the world geometry Volumetric queries to determine the type of volume(s) a box lies in Multiple worlds can be loaded and rapidly switched between Multiple renders from different cameras can be mixed in a single frame High level polygon API for adding persistent or temporary user drawn objects