What is it?

kitten is a free, cute and fluffy open source 3d game engine framework written in C++ and designed for mobile devices running OpenGLES 1.x - but mostly just the iPhone.

It includes such crucial things as a SceneGraph, Primitive builder, Texture loader, and Context management.

In order to keep things simple, most major parts of the framework are modularised with minimal dependency's. For portability, the framework is built on top of a simple abstracted library which implements useful things such as IO, reference counted Objects and Strings.

kitten is largely based on the 3d engine released by the now-defunct Cat Mother Ltd.

Sounds great, how do i use it?

For new projects, a template is available - so look in the "templates" folder.

Wait a minute, where did all the cool Catmother code go?

In an effort to make things much simpler, most of the code present in the original catmother engine release has been removed or otherwise consolidated.

So if you want to ride on a motorcycle and shoot bad guy's with realistic skeletal animation presented in a kick-ass level, you're out of luck.

Still, this doesn't prevent you from being able to make something newer and better - which is great!

To conclude, what amazing features does this have that sets it apart from the competition?

Good question, and difficult to sum up as it's still early days for kitten at the moment. Still, to summarize the modules:

• anim
  • Keyframe animation code
• game
  • Basic game loop and event management
  • Texture cache
• gd
  • Graphics context management
  • Fixed function materials
  • Lights
  • Primitive management
  • Texture management
• io
  • File IO & Enumeration
  • Makes use of physfs
• lang
  • Threading
  • Reference counted objects
  • Unicode strings
  • Exceptions
• math
  • Colors
  • Matrices
  • Vectors
  • Noise
• pix
  • Image loading & processing
• sg
  • Scenegraph nodes
  • Lights
  • Cameras
  • Font rendering (popcap framework format)
• util
  • Allocators
  • Hash tables
  • Property lists
  • Vectors
• widget
  • Transformable Widgets
  • Buttons
  • Labels

So really, this code may or may not be useful as a full-blown engine. Feel free to use at your own discretion.