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1.4 Feature List

The first feature to mention is that Crystal Space is an open source project. It falls under the GNU copyleft license (LGPL). See section 1.12 GNU Library General Public License.

Crystal Space is divided into several libraries. The items in the feature list are sorted by the library they belong to. Note that this is not a description of how these libraries work together. Some libraries are not even mentioned here.

Currently Crystal Space has the following features:

System Driver
A system library that will perform system-dependent operations for your program. This way your program is easily portable to any supported system. It includes a good plug-in system that offers you an interface to dynamically loaded drivers (`.so' or `.dll'), like the 3D rasterizer. NOTE: This library as such will not be available in the 1.0 release, OS-specific functions will remain in this library however. The most important classes will be moving into the Tool and Utility libraries.
Geometry Library
A 3D math library, including 2D and 3D vectors, matrices and polygons. This library can be used without the rest of Crystal Space.

2D Canvas / 3D Renderer
These libraries allow you to draw directly on the screen, and to use hardware accelerated 3D drawing. They are independent from the engine and perform only basic operations. You can actually use them if you want to write your own engine. The libraries include:

3D Engine
The engine features the following:

Utility Library
Much of the utility functionality in this library can be used independently of Crystal Space. This library includes the following functionality:

VFS
Virtual file system. See section 7.2 Virtual File System (VFS).

Tool Library
Much of the utility functionality in this library can be used independently of Crystal Space. This library includes the following functionality:

Sound Driver / Sound Renderer
General sound system. Currently drivers exist for GNU/Linux, MacOS/9, and Windows.

Network Driver
General networking support. Currently supports socket-based networking via TCP/IP.

Scripting
Crystal Space supports scripting through the PYTHON plugin. This way a game using Crystal Space can call PYTHON methods and PYTHON scripts can call Crystal Space methods.

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