DSK engine

DSK is designed in a very modern way with clear goals. The three main goals of DSK are:

• Ease of use. You don't have to be a 3D programming expert to build 3D games!
• Full Control. You can achieve any effect you want very quickly and easily!
• Best Performance. To guarantee that no single operation is wasted on redundant calculations!

All these goals are of top and equal priority, and we believe that we have successfully achieved these goals thanks to the advanced design our engineers has been developing over the years.

Learning with DSK

It takes absolutely no-time to start using DSK and getting beautiful 3D results out of it!
DSK requires certain knowledge in 3D before you can use it. Do you know that 3D coordinates have three components (X, Y, and Z)? No? Well, now you do, and that is all the 3D knowledge you are required to have before you can start programming DSK! Really!
As you spend more time with DSK, you will automatically learn about all the more advanced capabilities and features offered to you across the various modules and facilities in DSK. It is that easy! Learning curves? We don't have any!

R&D with DSK

You want to develop some sort of a very special rendering effect? Or perhaps you want to prototype advanced real-time shaders? DSK offers you with full control and flexibility to express all of your ideas! No limitations! And it doesn't just stop there. By saying "full control" we do not mean dirty low-level access stuff. We mean a well-designed development layer that you will use to achieve your goals directly without having to care about any of the internal and boring mechanics of 3D development. Just plug in your ideas and see them in action!

Convenience with DSK

The time you invest by using DSK in your application is actually the time you will spend implementing your application's features! We do not impose any programmatic chores. Everything can be done automatically by default in a very convenient way.
Regarding performance, our philosophy is clear. Solid designs and simple interfaces map to high performance. We do not involve customers with the intricate details of optimization and that entire headache. DSK has been carefully instrumented and tuned for best speed performance in a wide variety of different scenes of usage. You do not have to care about all of that, it just works, and it works fast!

DSK FEATURES

Generic Features

• Multi-layered interface, where each layer is targeted towards people with a certain degree of knowledge.
• Memory management facilities and anti-memory fragmentation containers that offer fast algorithm implementations (e.g. sorting and binary searching...etc).
• A powerful set of debugging aids, including flexible and re-routable tracers, built-in performance profilers, and a big set of automatic 3D visual cues.
• High-accuracy timers designed for common tasks such as continuous event-firing tickers, single-shot timers, and time book-marking.
• Superior key-framed animation unit that can animate almost all data types (even pointers!) with many modes of playback and interpolation (e.g. cosine ease-in/ease-out, hermite, and cubic). Optimized specifically for handling long animations with thousands of keyframes!
• Flexible I/O unit to handle data from various sources (e.g. files, in-memory and Windows resources).
• Full documentation for each of the DSK modules, complete with reference, programming guides and samples.

Rendering Features

• Build applications targeted towards the widest range of graphics hardware, starting from the oldest non-TnL parts, and up to the newest advanced programmable hardware!
• No least-common-denominator policy! Make full use out of the user's hardware, and deliver scalable content with almost no additional line of code!
• A wide range of high-quality ready-to-use materials like Lambert and Phong.
• Write vertex shaders, pixel shaders, geometry shaders, and texture shaders! Our advanced shaders development environment will turn the job into real fun!
• Unique Render Manager that handles all internal scene organization and output.
• Re-routable rendering via a very elegant interface. Render on textures and use them again in your scene for great feedback effects!
• Render to as many windows as you want... all from your single application process.
• Fully-featured 2D blitter. Besides all the basic 2D rendering operations (e.g. alpha blending, rotation, zooming) it allows you to run pixel shaders on your sprites!
• Total control over material output quality, as well as level-of-detail (LOD) rendering for 3D geometry.
• A unified standard interface for feeding 3D geometry information across all materials. Makes implementing your own geometry-generation algorithms a nutshell.
• Super fast frame-hierarchy solver. Solves transformation hierarchies and the most complex character skeletons in constant time. It really never cares how branched are your scene hierarchies! Now supporting two different transformation solvers, the Classical solver and the Hierarchical Scaling (HS) solver.
• Easy camera setup, exposing all common camera controls (e.g. lens type, roll, FOV), with stock implementations for a scene navigation camera, as well as a first-person shooter camera.
• Unlimited number of lights per scene. Whether static or dynamic, use light groups to logically combine lights affecting a single environment.
• Supreme texture management and history tracking! Load textures of a very wide variety of formats (e.g. Softimage PIC, DXT compressed, HDR ...etc) and of different types (1D, 2D, 3D, and Cube). Apply a wide range of filters over your loaded textures prior to passing them to your materials, like color-correction, channel combining and level scaling.
• The simplest shader development interface to happen. Control your shaders' inputs with total ease and without sacrificing a single feature!
• High performance geometry enveloping (skinning) for handling animated characters with complex skeleton rigs. Unlimited number of bones with an unlimited number of influencers!
• Local geometry morphing between different key shapes. It can be applied in Additive mode for effects such as facial expressions, or in Absolute mode for generic geometry blending.
• Load your scenes from Softimage dotXSI files. DSK offers the best user-experience with its powerful dotXSI integration. This allows you to import all scene data into DSK from all major 3d packages (e.g. Softimage, 3dsMAX, and Maya). Read in everything, including lights, materials, cameras, skeletons, characters, and all custom data you export. All can be animated!
• A lot of other stuff to explore, including the polygon tesselator, fast floating-point math functions, as well as a multitude of helper macros that will turn work into total fun!