1. At the heart of BetaCell there's an effect composer engine. What it does is take fxh files, which are known as functions at runtime, modify them if needed, and create fx files including the logic of the fxh files. This has 2 main advantages:
1. Allows the user to create effects by composing them. In my perspective, is really hard when you have 20 shaders in your application and you discover that part of it is going to be outdoors, so you need to add fog. If you still want to have your regular shaders, you would end up with 20 more shaders for a total of 40; the number of shaders increase exponentially with the characteristics. With BetaCell, you add effect functions together and let the toolkit make the effect for you.
2. The user can create effects on the fly at runtime.


2. Has many functions (fxh files) built in like environmental mapping, normal mapping, displacement mapping, shadow mapping, lightning calculations, texture effects
3. Has a particle effect framework that works by composing particle effect parts leveraged by the effect composer engine
4. Lets you create content in blender and HME, many developers don't have access to proprietary content creation programs
1. You can animate your meshes in blender and load the animated meshes using BetaCell
5. Has a flexible vertex definition, you create a vertex buffer with a call like this one: createVertexBuffer(position, color, vertexIndex, vertexWeight) , you pass the components you need
6. Has many built in encapsulated algorithms like
1. Ray picking
2. Terrain generating
3. Terrain Culling
4. Draw ordering
5. Procedural creation of solids: cubes, cylinders and spheres
7. A lot of documentation


1. Over 30 tutorials
2. A reference documentation online

Quote:

Lumina is a free crossplatform development environment for GLSL shaders. An ECMA script based language is used for tools and rendering control. Lumina provides maximum flexibility that allows the user to build renderer prototypes for deferred shading, depth peeling or HDR rendering, as well as vertex shader and instancing accelerated bezier objects, skinng or GPU based particle systems. This software requires an Opengl 2.0 capable card (GLSL, VBO and FBO).

• OpenGL 2.0 and 2.1 API support.
  
• Entirely new Shading Language code generator. See the
  Shading Language page for more information.
  
• Much faster software execution of vertex, fragment shaders.
  
• New vertex buffer object (vbo) infrastructure
  
• Updated glext.h file (version 39)
  
• Updated glxext.h file (version 19)
  
• GL_MAX_DRAWBUFFERS is now 4 (software rendering) so
  "multiple render targets" are really supported.