Engine Overview

MASI-CiX SE is a high level sprite based engine, written in C++ and designed to utilise modern graphics hardware through OpenGL. MASI includes an OpenAL-based sound system, as well as its own image and sound codecs. Input is handled with DirectInput (8), and it is currently a Windows-only engine.

Requirements (Development):

MASI is delivered to developers as a compiled C++ DLL, along with several header files. As MASI uses STL strings heavily for argument parsing, as well as decorated C++ names, it is locked into the original compiler. Acheron Design provides MASI DLLs for Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, as well as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, of which a free, compatible copy can be obtained through the yearlong Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition Promotion.

If you are using Visual C++ Express 2005, please ensure that you have downloaded the Platform SDK, and installed it as instructed.

Requirements (End-User):

The end user of a MASI-powered product must have the appropriate Visual Studio Runtime Library (the VC2005 beta 2 redistributable libraries are available for download here). In addition, they must have installed the OpenAL runtime libraries (provided with the MASI-SDK).

Finally, they must install an appropriate graphics card driver to enable complete OpenGL support. In older versions of Windows, OpenGL isn't supported unless a driver is downloaded from the graphics card vendor. In Windows XP, people often operate without OpenGL support, and upon running a MASI program, it will drop into software mode, and render at an apalling framerate. Please ensure that your users have up-to-date video card drivers.

Some versions of MASI will create an error if software mode is detected, and will not start at all.

Feature List:

Sprite Graphics

• Persistent Sprite Objects
• Requires only two lines of code to create a sprite
• Layer based drawing for complex scenes
• Full transparency / alpha support
• Multiplicative colour support
• Loads BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF textures as colour or alpha sources
• Hardware scaling and rotation

Text Graphics

• Text objects from Truetype and Opentype Fonts
• High quality texture fonts from bitmapped graphics
• Hardware scaling, blending and rotation of text

Sound System

• OpenAL-powered sound engine
• Decodes and plays WAV, ACM, OGG, as well as a multitude of tracker formats

Animations

• Inbuilt support for MASI's own 32/8-bit animation format
• Supports both lossless and lossy compression schemes
• Support for cell-based animation from multiframe textures
• Extensible animation system - define your own textures which are updated on demand

Particle Engine

• High performance spline-based particle engine
• Simple mathematically defined particle system for less complex effects
• Extensible classes, allowing you to define your own behaviours

Network Support

• Supports lobbyable networking via DirectPlay
• No knowledge of network voodoo is required

Input Control

• Mouse, keyboard and gamepad support built into MASI
• Interfaces are created and destroyed transparently and on demand

Simplicity

• Persistent primitives managed by MASI
• Objects can be referenced either by strings or pointers
• Automatic caching and garbage collection

Memory Management

• Ultra-high speed memory manager based on a regimented pool model
• Full memory leak detection
• Supports guard blocks to detect array overflows
• MASI container formats, designed and optimised for use in games

File Management

• MASI's own compressed resource file format
• Virtual filesystem built around MASI Packages
• Security and efficiency using the MPX format
• High performance filesystem, pooling file handles and caching reads/writes

Awesome

• MASI is constantly evolving
• Friendly development staff that are willing to help at all times
• Completely free for non-commercial use.