Announcements

CIS 410/510 Game Development

Spring, 2008

5-29-08: Next Wednesday (June 4th) and Friday (June 6th) will be project "show and tell" days. The grad students will present on Wednesday, and I need some undergrad volunteers for Friday. So please email me if you would like to demo your group project on Friday. You may either bring your own laptop or make arrangements to get your project onto my machine.
5-29-08: You are free to use assets (but not code) from other groups, provided that you have their consent and give credit for borrowed assets in your final project writeup.
5-26-08: Extra Credit opportunity. Implement the shader from miderm 2 question 3A and/or 3B in Ogre or another 3D API of your choice. You do not need to utilize the shader from question 3B as a full-screen effect, but can instead utilize the shader to desaturate a material. You will need to implement a simple vertex program to accompany each fragment shader. Successful completion will replace your midterm 2 score for question 3A and/or 3B with 20 points each. When complete, stop by office hours or make arrangements to demonstrate your shaders. Please bring your mindterm 2 to the demonstration. This extra credit can be completed any time before the end of the term.
5-16-08: Dan White, CTO, and Shelby Wills, Producer, from Pipeworks Games have confirmed that they will give a presentation on what they are looking for in interns and programmers and what the daily life of a game programmer is like. The presentation will be Friday, May 30th in class, so please attend.
5-16-08: The version of ODE included with the OgreSDK does support heightmap Geoms. The necessary methods are declared in collision.h (e.g, dCreateHeightfield, dGeomHeightfieldDataCreate). Hint: Ogre::TerrainPageSourceListener declares a method pageConstructed(Ogre::TerrainSceneManager* tsm, size_t pagex, size_t pagez, float* heightData); the heightData pointer and the pagex and pagez parameters, along with the scale of the terrain from the TerrainSceneManager, give you enough information to create an ODE heightmap terrain.
5-15-08: Learning and integrating new APIs with your existing projects can be difficult (e.g., linking errors, path issues, DLLs) but is an important skill for C++ programmers. Documentation and code examples are typically sparse at best. These issues can be particularly frustrating, so please let me know if you are having specific problems and I'll do my best to help.
5-14-08: Here's a link to an Ogre forums post showing per-pixel lighting shader code. The code is for Cg shaders, but should port directly to HLSL. Also, a normal mapping example is included with the OgreSDK (i.e., DemoDot3Bump).
5-1-08: Extra Credit opportunity. Implement a 3rd person camera in Ogre or another 3D API of your choice. Mouse movements should modify the pitch and yaw rotation angles of the camera. The Page Up and Page Down keys should increase and decrease the camera's radius. The W, S, A, D or arrow keys should move the center of interest on the terrain. You do not need to handle camera collisions with the terrain or other objects. Successful completion will replace your midterm 1 score for questions 3A and 3B with 20 points total. When complete, stop by office hours or make arrangements to demonstrate your camera. Please bring your mindterm 1 to the demonstration. This extra credit can be completed any time before the end of the term.
4-28-08: Sketchup is a free 3D modeling package developed by Google which may be quite useful for your projects. There is also an Ogre exporter available for Sketchup.
4-18-08: Final Project details are posted.
4-18-08: The source and include files for the Ogre Demo_SkyBox demo demonstrate how to set a skybox. The material files defined in media/materials/scripts/Example.material demonstrate how to create a skybox material.
4-8-08: Assignment 2 is posted.
4-8-08: According to the Klamath lab staff, the left side of the Room B26 should now be set up to compile and link Ogre application. The right side of the room should be ready tomorrow afternoon.
4-8-08: Don't worry about the Ogre warning "WARNING: sphere.mesh is an older format..." These warnings are not critical and are common as Ogre is constantly being updated.
4-7-08: Ogre's StringConverter and StringUtil classes provide utility methods for converting to and from strings and other useful operations. Similarly, the Ogre Math class provides useful math utility functions.
4-3-08: An XCode (OSX) version of Assignment 1 (which will compile on the machines in Room 100) has been graciously supplied by 510 student Andy Isaacson. You may use this code as a basis for Assignment 1 and future assignments. OGRE provides instructions for building OGRE-based XCode projects.
4-1-08: The Windows SDK linked on the Assignment 1 web page will work on both XP and Vista.
3-31-08: Assignment 1 will be a group (of size <= 2) assignment for 410 students (groups are here). Assignment 1 will be an individual assignment for 510 students. Please email me if you are a 410 student that missed class on Monday or have been otherwise not been assignment a group but would like to be. Also, I am not posting student emails for privacy reasons, so please email me if you need more information to contact your assignment partner.
3-26-08: The Assignment 1 compile script has been fixed to properly use the $OgreSDKHome environment variable.
2-18-08: Assignment 1 is posted.

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Announcements

CIS 410/510 Game Development

Spring, 2008

5-29-08: You are free to use assets (but not code) from other groups, provided that you have their consent and give credit for borrowed assets in your final project writeup.

5-14-08: Here's a link to an Ogre forums post showing per-pixel lighting shader code. The code is for Cg shaders, but should port directly to HLSL. Also, a normal mapping example is included with the OgreSDK (i.e., DemoDot3Bump).

4-28-08: Sketchup is a free 3D modeling package developed by Google which may be quite useful for your projects. There is also an Ogre exporter available for Sketchup.

4-18-08: Final Project details are posted.

4-18-08: The source and include files for the Ogre Demo_SkyBox demo demonstrate how to set a skybox. The material files defined in media/materials/scripts/Example.material demonstrate how to create a skybox material.

4-8-08: Assignment 2 is posted.

4-8-08: According to the Klamath lab staff, the left side of the Room B26 should now be set up to compile and link Ogre application. The right side of the room should be ready tomorrow afternoon.

4-8-08: Don't worry about the Ogre warning "WARNING: sphere.mesh is an older format..." These warnings are not critical and are common as Ogre is constantly being updated.

4-7-08: Ogre's StringConverter and StringUtil classes provide utility methods for converting to and from strings and other useful operations. Similarly, the Ogre Math class provides useful math utility functions.

4-3-08: An XCode (OSX) version of Assignment 1 (which will compile on the machines in Room 100) has been graciously supplied by 510 student Andy Isaacson. You may use this code as a basis for Assignment 1 and future assignments. OGRE provides instructions for building OGRE-based XCode projects.

4-1-08: The Windows SDK linked on the Assignment 1 web page will work on both XP and Vista.

3-26-08: The Assignment 1 compile script has been fixed to properly use the $OgreSDKHome environment variable.

2-18-08: Assignment 1 is posted.