Hyperion is a free tool designed to help developers and artists quickly create and prototype realtime 3D solutions: demos, benchmarks,
little applications or games. Hyperion uses a mixture of XML, LUA scripting and GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) in order to describe static and dynamic parts of the 3D scene.


Most Importtant Features:

General features:

- scene description language based on XML syntax
- use of oZone3D realtime 3D rendering engine with OpenGL plugin

3D file format reading:

- *.3DS (3D Studio Binary Scene File)
- *.ASE (3D Studio ASCII Scene File)
- *.TXT (MilkShape3D ASCII Object File)
- *.O3MDL (oZone3D Binary Object File)
- *.OBJ (Alias |Wavefront ASCII Object File)
- *.XML: oZone3D Simple Object Desription Format (for developers)
- *.FBX (Alias Kaydara FBX interchange format)

2D file format reading:

- *.jpg
- *.tga
- *.bmp
- *.png
- *.psd
- *.gif

Scripting

- LUA Virtual Machine
- many functions allowing to extend and manage the demo dynamic and logical part

Camera

- several cameras per scenes
- several viewports
- EXAMINE, FLY, FIXED and DOOM_LIKE modes
- modification of field of view (FOV) and clipping planes
- pan (translation)

Dynamic lighting:

- control up to 8 dynamic lights of different type: point, directionnal or spot, including each of the light components ambient, diffuse, specular, position, angle and orientation

Meshes rendering:

- simple and multitexturing up to 4 layers
- shading mode: flat and gouraud through the fixed functions or any other mode through programmable shaders
- lighting
- back face culling
- solid or wireframe
- automatic texture loading
- vertex scaling
- high performance rendering using VBO
- normals flipping
- seam removing
- FSAA: full scene anti aliasing

Materials:

- ambient, diffuse, specular, opacity componant management
- possibility to attach directly textures to materials
- possibility to attach directly gpu-shaders to materials

Classic effects:

- stencil shadow volumes
- static and dynamic cube mapping
- DOT3 bump mapping using fixed functions
- alpha/opacity maps by injection into alpha channel
- procedural texture generation based on Perlin noise
- planar and non-planar reflections using reflection texture
- skyboxes
- terrain generation from heightmaps
- HUD (Head Up Display) support

Particle System:

- emitters: point, disc, sphere, line, mesh, matrix text
- obstacles: disc, sphere, plan, mesh
- controller/Actions: gravity, size, color, orbit point

Vertex and Pixel Shaders:

- GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) support
- source code can be stored in separate files or directly embeded in XML code
- parameters modification/update through LUA

Sound-system:

- *.wav
- *.mp3
- *.xm
- *.s3m
- *.it
- *.mod

Animation:

- time in LUA or GLSL scripts
- Bezier spline based motion paths for almost all objects (cameras, models, meshes, lights, ...)

Physics:

- NovodeX Physics Engine support (currently the LUA HostAPI has about 20 functions dealing with NovodeX Engine)