kjAPI Game Engine: An Overview
kjAPI is a next-gen game engine developed by Ksatria Gameworks, Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. Headed the game engine-ering are two french nationals, Frederic Duval(aka Kanda) and Cedric Caillaud (aka Jeckle).
As Ksatria's proprietary game engine, kjAPI is use to currently being developed "Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark", an adaptation of Joe Dever's well known game book series. (Mr. Dever, personally is also very much involved in the game development process). More features and tools are added in the engine as the development of the game progresses.
The kjAPI includes tools for the developers' pipeline, such as Planet(world editor), Pulsar(model tool), Comet(3DMax exporter) and Kaya(Maya exporter).
It has its own AI system that enables brain designing which is divided into Cell, Controller and Sensor capabilities. NPCs or AI driven entities are directly authored graphically in the Planet(editor). It has its own avoidance and path finding system that works with zone and way points.
For its physics engine layer, it supports Ageia PhysX(Novadex), Newton SDK and TrueAxis(currently, no longer supported in newer build).
It utilizes portal space design and zoning system for optimization and culling.
kjAPI design is a plug-in based system which is very similar to component-based system(Unreal 3 and Gamebryo). Game play modules are automatically detected upon running Planet. Because of its modularity design, game play features can be added/edited/removed on the fly in the editor. And even the game itself can be played, edited, tested and debugged in Planet without running the actual game executable.
In graphics, it works the same way. HLSL, CG and Assembly are seamlessly integrated and are automatically converted to a special binary to protect the shader codes. It supports DirectX and OpenGL. The engine has a design that enable users to special made shaders between ATI and Nvidia cards.
kjAPI integrated GameMonkey scripting but it is layered, if in case users prefer to integrate their own or other scripting languages.
Best of all, kjAPI is free to use for non-commercial.
For more details visit the following websites:
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