Terminology

This article will introduce you to UNIGINE 2 terminology. When working with the engine, you may not be able to recognize what are the meanings of some terms. For example, cameras in UNIGINE are represented with the word "Player" which means that the viewport, created into a world, is the first-person camera. Below you will find the basic terms used in UNIGINE with the links to more detailed articles.

A world is a scene that includes a set of different built-in objects with certain properties.

Interaction of the Main Components of the World

In general, the world includes the following: Built-in objects called nodes, which, in turn, may refer to other nodes (*.node), meshes (*.mesh), audio files (*.oga), paths (*.path) or scripts (*.h). Materials and properties organized in libraries. Shaders and textures to which material libraries refer. General rendering, physics, sound and game settings. For more information see Virtual World Structure article.

Nodes and node references are fundamental objects that form the world:

•   Node is a generic entity representing any object that is positioned and stored in the world.
•   Node Reference is a node that refers to an external file on the disk, which contains a pre-fabricated node (or a hierarchy of nodes) with all the material and property libraries that are required for its rendering.

For more information see Nodes reference.

UNIGINE provides a set of built-in objects allowing you to create a world containing practically all of the objects present in real life. For convenience, they are formed into several groups that are responsible for different kinds of operations:

Nodes include fundamental objects that form the world (nodes and node references), dummy nodes, layers, pivots and triggers. Light sources include objects providing different kinds of the scene illumination: global, omni-directional, projected, etc. Objects represent imitations of entities present in the real world: objects, sky, terrains, water, etc. Effects contain particles systems, physical fields, volumetric objects, decals, etc.

• Players represent different kinds of cameras.
• World Objects represent invisible nodes used for world management.
• Sound Objects represent sound sources and reverberations.
• Pathfinding Objects represent objects used for pathfinding.