we last looked at the cs engine around a year ago. since this time there have been some very appealing developments, so much so we're looking into basing a couple of future projects in this engine. one thing that really held us back last time from moving over to cs was the lack of support for multiplayer, and now that it is in there [albeit purely socket based], along with support for OSX it is a much more appealing option. the cs devel and user base is very rigorous and is only becoming stronger as the project's breadth of application and platform widens. from our perspective crystal space is probably the most flexible open sourced engine available. it accepts a varierty of publishing outcomes, artist toolkits and rendering applications. here's some examples:

- Convertors for Milkshape, Maya, Cal3d, 3DS, Quake MDL and Quake II MD2 formats to Crystal Space are included.
- Importers for 3DS, MDL, MD2, OBJ, POV, and ASE.
- Textures of various formats including GIF, TGA, PNG, BMP, JPG.
- Landscape engine.
- Ports for Unix (X Windows, OpenGL), GNU/Linux (X Windows, SVGALIB, SDL, & OpenGL), Macintosh OS/X (also with OpenGL), Windows 32-bit (DirectDraw & OpenGL).
- Support for 3D sound (DS3D, EAX, A3D, ...)
- Support for various sound formats: WAV, Ogg/Vorbis, AU, AIFF, IFF, and MOD (using MikMod).
- LGPL - the limited GPL suggests that you *don't have to* release the source if you publish [sell] the project. though i'd say you or your publisher is a bit hung-up if you don't ;)

as yet i haven't seen any clear path to bringing other camera orientations to cs; it's largely built around the FPS. as with any engine without a dedicated editor, all the mesh work needs to be done in a third-party art package like 3DSMAX or MAYA, and then dynamic components need to be incorporated and manipulated in the scripting layer. luckily with cs this is a well tuned interface - cs-config is a highly configurable Master of Ceremonies with a clearly delineated Include tree [all the files that the script calls upon and runs - sound, light, communications and whatever else you want to put in there].

crystal space is ideal for both the modder moving into deeper development, the artist that doesn't want to compromise their toolkit when moving to another engine, and the experienced developer wanting a bleeding edge alternative to proprietory engines with a flexible license.
02/03