[5] The C4 Engine is based on the OpenGL library[6] on Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS platforms, and it uses a one-pass-per-light forward rendering model.

The engine internally generates the necessary shader code for each combination of material and light type that it encounters when rendering a scene.

[8] C4 also includes a graphical Shader Editor that allows complex custom materials to be created using a large set of predefined operations.

[11] During a post-processing stage, the engine can also apply full-scene cinematic motion blur to the final image using a technique based on a velocity buffer,[12] as well as glow and distortion effects.

The engine plays sounds using a custom mixer that provides capabilities such as frequency shifting, Doppler effect, reverberation, and atmospheric absorption.

Multiplayer gameplay in C4 is supported by a two-layer messaging system that uses the User Datagram Protocol to communicate among different computers connected to a game.

It provides a large set of drawing and manipulation capabilities that are used to construct world geometry as well as many game necessities such as lights, sounds, triggers, and special effects.

The script editor allows the user to place various "methods" into a directed graph connected by "fibers" representing action dependencies and the order of execution.

The engine provides an extensible set of "mutators" that can be applied to individual panel items to induce various forms of animation such as scrolling, rotation, or color change.

[20] One particular university research project involved the TactaVest technology developed at WPI,[21] and their use of the C4 Engine was featured in the Discovery Channel Canada television show Daily Planet airing on May 26, 2006.