CEL

Introduction

CEL is used to create many of the game mechanics behind the Peragro engine (we were going to use) in UMMO.

CEL (or Crystal Entity Layer) is a set of plugins and applications built on top of the Crystal Space SDK. CEL provides a set of commonly used abstractions to specifically help with writing games. CEL introduces the notion of an ‘entity’ which can be any kind of (visual or non-visual) object in a game. CEL also comes with a lot of useful plugins for 3rd/first person camera handling, physics, movement system, quest system, and so on.

Written in C++, CEL can also be interacted with via Python or Xml. Using CELstart it is also not necessary to use C++. This means that since the base code is C++, CEL is fast while being extremely easy to use from within Python and/or Xml.

Documentation

The first place to start is the manual:

CEL user manual	view online	download
CEL public API reference	view online	download
Wiki documentation	CEL Wiki Documentation
CEL Design document	CEL Design

Also worth checking out (but getting a bit dated now) are the Planeshift summary and Once CEL tutorial.

Downloads

Latest Release (1.2 as of March 2009)

Go to the download section to download Crystal Space (required for CEL) and CEL.

Example Demos/Games

CEL comes prepackaged with a number of example applications which can be found under apps/ in the CEL package. You can also download the binary CELstart application and download several demos from here.