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About the C4 Engine

The C4 Engine has been in continuous development by Eric Lengyel since 1999. He leads a small team that is making a first-person shooter called The 31st.

We are making the C4 Engine available for licensing so that others can make their own games with the same tech or so they can learn about engine development by watching us make ours.

The best reasons NOT to use the C4 Engine

• You prefer code that’s hastily written in order to ship features as quickly as possible. Everybody knows that any good codebase contains a ton of TODOs and FIXMEs.
• You have surrendered yourself to the inevitability of frequent crashes in both the engine and the editor. You think you just have to live with it, and there’s no practical way to have anything better.
• You don’t mind if it takes 20 minutes to build the engine after a minor source change.
• You think having lots of dependencies is good. Every engine should use four different string classes and at least seven 3D vector types, right?
• You don’t get mad when wildly exaggerated claims about robustness or scalability turn out not to hold water. It’s OK because those marketing crooks were just doing their jobs!
• You enjoy working with a Frankensteinian architecture that was bolted together over two decades without any unifying vision, went through years of neglect by incompetent engineers, and is now held together with duct tape and string.