Delta3d is an

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

. Delta3d is managed and supported by Caper Holdings LLC. Previously the Modeling, Virtual Environments, and Simulation (MOVES) Institute at the

Naval Postgraduate School The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is a public graduate school operated by the United States Navy and located in Monterey, California. It offers master’s and doctoral degrees in more than 70 fields of study to the U.S. Armed Forces, DOD ci ...

in Monterey, California managed and supported delta3d. Alion Science has also been a major contributor to enhancements and features. Delta3d is released under the GNU LGPL-2.1-or-later. The external

modules Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a sy ...

have their own licensing. Some modules, such as Qt, require the user to download and install separately for use with Delta3d. Delta3d is a widely used, community-supported, open-source game and simulation engine. delta3d is appropriate for a wide variety of uses including training, education, visualization, and entertainment. Delta3d is unique, because it offers features specifically suited to the Modeling, Simulation and DoD communities, such as the High Level Architecture (HLA), After Action Review (AAR), large scale terrain support, and SCORM Learning Management System (LMS) integration.

The delta3d Engine

Delta3d is an Open Source engine which can be used for games, simulations, or other graphical applications. Its modular design integrates other well-known

Open Source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

projects such as Open Scene Graph,

Open Dynamics Engine The Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) is a physics engine written in C/C++. Its two main components are a rigid body dynamics simulation engine and a collision detection engine. It is free software licensed both under the BSD license and the LGPL. O ...

, Character Animation Library (CAL3D), and

OpenAL OpenAL (Open Audio Library) is a cross-platform audio application programming interface (API). It is designed for efficient rendering of multichannel three-dimensional positional audio. Its API style and conventions deliberately resemble those ...

. Rather than bury the underlying modules, Delta3D integrates them together in an easy-to-use Application programming interface (

) -- always allowing access to the important underlying components. This provides a high-level API, while still allowing the end user the option of having low-level functionality. The Delta3D engine renders using the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) that imports a whole list of diverse

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

s (

.flt OpenFlight (or .flt) is a 3d geometry model file format originally developed by Software Systems Inc. for its MultiGen real-time 3d modeling package in 1988. Originally called Flight, the format was designed as a nonproprietary 3d model format for ...

.3ds 3DS is one of the file formats used by the Autodesk 3ds Max 3D modeling, animation and rendering software. It was the native file format of the old Autodesk 3D Studio DOS (releases 1 to 4), which was popular until its successor (3D Studio MAX ...

, .obj, even more so). For a full list of features, please see the Delta3d Feature List pag
here

Supported Platforms

Delta3d is developed and tested on

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

using

Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such a ...

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

using

Clang Clang is a compiler front end for the C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ programming languages, as well as the OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, and HIP frameworks. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), ...

, as well as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

using GCC. All the underlying dependencies are cross-platform as well, so just about any platform should be compatible with a few minor modifications to the source.

Delta3d-Extras

Delta3d-Extras is a project housed on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

which contains numerous projects related to the Delta3d Engine. Delta3d-Extras is not necessarily developed or maintained by the delta3d Development Team. However it is available for the community to share their delta3d-related projects with the world.

Simulation Core

Simulation Core, commonly referred to as SimCore, is a "collaborative" implementation of delta3d functionality — providing the "base" capabilities for an

MMORPG A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game. As in role-playing games (RPGs), the player assumes the role of a Player charac ...

application using delta3d. SimCore is developed primarily by Alion Science and Technology. The first version of SimCore was developed as part of the Deployable Virtual Training Environment (DVTE) project for USMC which started in 2006. Although Alion is still the primary developer of SimCore, it is now used by a number of other companies and organizations across the

Modeling A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

and Simulation (M&S) community. In order to build and "run" SimCore many additional libraries are required, including additions to the core Delta3d build. Physics — special effects and

particle system A particle system is a technique in game physics, motion graphics, and computer graphics that uses many minute sprites, 3D models, or other graphic objects to simulate certain kinds of "fuzzy" phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to repr ...

capabilities. A "Physics Abstraction Layer" (PAL), is used to provide a standard API to various physics libraries.

Libraries

Several open-source products are part of the Delta3d package. One can build them or use the provided binaries/libraries to build and run Delta3d based applications on one's own computer system. The current version of a product may not be compatible with delta3d. * Boost *

Bullet A bullet is a kinetic projectile, a component of firearm ammunition that is shot from a gun barrel. Bullets are made of a variety of materials, such as copper, lead, steel, polymer, rubber and even wax. Bullets are made in various shapes and co ...

* Cal3D *

CEGUI Crazy Eddie's GUI (CEGUI) is a graphical user interface (GUI) Library (computing), library for the programming language C++. It was designed for the needs of video games, but is usable for non-game tasks, such as applications and tools. It is des ...

* CppUnit *

expat An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person who resides outside their native country. In common usage, the term often refers to educated professionals, skilled workers, or artists taking positions outside their home country, either ...

(optional) * FreeType *Game Networking Engine (GNE) *

GDAL The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats (e.g. shapefile), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open ...

*HawkNL *

libpng libpng is the official Portable Network Graphics (PNG) reference library (originally called pnglib). It is a platform-independent library that contains C functions for handling PNG images. It supports almost all of PNG's features, is extensible ...

Utility Toolkit (ALUT) *Open

Distributed Interactive Simulation Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) is an IEEE standard for conducting real-time platform-level wargaming across multiple host computers and is used worldwide, especially by military organizations but also by other agencies such as those invol ...

(DIS) *

(ODE) *

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

OpenSceneGraph OpenSceneGraph is an open-source 3D graphics application programming interface (library or framework), used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, computer games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling. ...

(OSG) *Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) *PLIB *Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) * Xerces *

Zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also a ...

References

External links

* *
Archive of Official website

Archive of Caper Holdings LLC

MOVES institute

Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL)
{{DEFAULTSORT:delta3d Free game engines Game engines for Linux Python (programming language)-scriptable game engines