Technical Features of Spine

Spine is a framework for easily developing applications based on immersive digital environments.

Such an application must have control over a display medium, including graphics and sound aspects. It must manage user input in order to provide an interactive experience. It must also control networking, to allow products to incorporate multi-user access and distributed processing.

Current features :

Platform Core : Base system

High-speed, easy to use Client/Server architecture built on C socket connections.
Simply tick() the server or client (or both) to update the program state.
Event-handler system for major system events. These are handled by deriving application-specific server and client objects from Spine's Server and Client components.
Scriptable Console component that allows registering of user-defined classes and objects to react to scripts and user commands.
Utility components to handle basic mathematical functionality, text processing and cross-platform file-handling.

Renderer : Graphics sub-system

DirectX 9.0-based 32 bit Hardware Transform and Lighting graphics engine. This provides quality anti-aliasing, texture mapping support and fullscreen display capabilities.
Drawing of static meshes, using both hardware and dynamic software vertex buffers.
Blending/morphing of meshes for expressive elements.
Flexible particle system to allow effects such as rain and snow, sparks and smoke.
Quadtree-based, view-culling environment system incorporating a dynamic Level of Detail (LOD) terrain module.
Sprite drawing for rendering distant scene elements that do not require full detail.

Surround Sound : Audio sub-system

DirectX-based full surround sound mixer that works with headphones up to full surround speakers.
Blend multiple 3D-located sounds with music and ambient sound effects.
Play CD Audio.
Control the volume, pan and pitch of non-3D sounds.

User Input : User control sub-system

DirectX-based high-speed user input manager
Allow user input with Keyboards, Mice and Joysticks.
Works alongside Win32 user input message system.
Simple polling of an event queue for managing user events.

Networking : communications sub-system

Socket-based server/client networking system with simple message-passing and buffering mechanism. Includes broadcast on LAN for discovering hosts.
Implements an easy message passing system for applications to implement their functionality around.
Easily portable to other platforms.
Basic authentication and "message of the day" functionality.

Documentation : Learning and Reference Material

Spine is in the process of being thoroughly documented, from introductory material, to tutorials, to reference specifications, Spine is easy to learn and set up.
Documentation is always exanding. You can never look at things from too many perspectives.
I'll do my best to answer specific email queries to solve any major problems.

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