Essential Math for Games Programmers As the quality of games has improved, more attention has been given to all aspects of a game to increase the feeling of reality during gameplay and distinguish it from its competitors. Mathematics provides much of the groundwork for this improvement in realism. And a large part of this improvement is due to the addition of physical simulation. This tutorial deepens the approach of the previous years' Essential Math for Games Programmers, by spending one day on general math topics, and one day focusing in on the topic of physical simulation. Topics for the various incarnations of this tutorial can be found below. Current Materials Slides The latest available versions of the slides for the math tutorials at GDC 2015 are as follows: See below for further materials from past years that may be useful. Past Materials Presentations for the math tutorials at GDC 2014 are as follows: Presentations for the math tutorials (the physics presentations are available here) at GDC 2013 are as follows:
L-system L-system trees form realistic models of natural patterns Origins[edit] 'Weeds', generated using an L-system in 3D. As a biologist, Lindenmayer worked with yeast and filamentous fungi and studied the growth patterns of various types of algae, such as the blue/green bacteria Anabaena catenula. Originally the L-systems were devised to provide a formal description of the development of such simple multicellular organisms, and to illustrate the neighbourhood relationships between plant cells. Later on, this system was extended to describe higher plants and complex branching structures. L-system structure[edit] The recursive nature of the L-system rules leads to self-similarity and thereby, fractal-like forms are easy to describe with an L-system. L-system grammars are very similar to the semi-Thue grammar (see Chomsky hierarchy). G = (V, ω, P), where The rules of the L-system grammar are applied iteratively starting from the initial state. Examples of L-systems[edit] Example 1: Algae[edit] start : A
Guerrilla Tool Development I have a weak spot for cool game development tools. Not the IDE, or art or sound tools – I mean the level editors, AI construction tools – those that developers develop specifically for their games. Those that you know could help you multiply your content, and craft your game just a little bit better. Unfortunately, if you work on a small team, developing sophisticated tools like that is pretty much out of the question. That does not mean you have to hardcode everything, though. Here I will give you some ideas for getting tools for your game on a tight budget. Know your content creation tools inside out Before you even think about developing customised tools, it is extremely important to know your content-creation tools extremely well – even if you are not the content creator. As a programmer, you should focus on the following features: Automation Many art tools support some kind of batch processing. Data driven design This goes hand-in-hand with automation. Extensions Organisation Layers Tree
Robert Bridson Current Position As of August 2013 I am no longer a full-time professor at UBC, but retain adjunct status. I am now a Senior Principal Research Scientist for Visual Effects at Autodesk. Symposium on Computer Animation I helped organize SCA 2011, August 5-7 in Vancouver, just before SIGGRAPH: www.siggraph.org/sca2011 Past Industry Work I cofounded Exotic Matter, a graphics company which made physical simulation software for the film industry. My official screen credits are for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Adventures of Tintin, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Inkheart, but I have helped write in-house software at studios used in many other films. Animations and Images Books Publications I've supplied preprints in most cases, which may be missing figures or include typos etc. Resolving fluid boundary layers with particle strength exchange and weak adaptivity, X. Other Publications My Group Current: Todd Keeler (PhD)Xinxin Zhang (PhD)Yufeng Zhu (PhD) Past: Downloads Teaching Personal
Instancing Of In-Game Entities - Procedural Content Generation Wiki An increasingly common technique, particularly in middleware such as SpeedTree is to dynamically vary the parameters of in-game entities to create a large possible number of entities with a statistically insignificant chance of repetition. This could be the visible geometry of a tree or person, or the in-game properties of an weapon or piece of equipment. Various PCG techniques such as pseudorandom number generation can be used to instance the entities, while compressing the total amount of information required to be held by the game for each unique entity. Instancing impacts the game in a variety of ways: it should be seen as part of a continuum that has procedural generation at one end. The key difference is that instancing modifies game play, whether it be being blocked by the branches of a tree, or being able to recognise individuals in a crowd, to having a game winning object generated by chance. PCG Wiki References External Links
Cg Programming/Unity Cg programming in the game engine Unity is considerably easier than Cg programming for an OpenGL or Direct3D application. Import of meshes and images (i.e. textures) is supported by a graphical user interface; mipmaps and normal maps can be computed automatically; the most common vertex attributes and uniforms are predefined; OpenGL and Direct3D states can be set by very simple commands; etc. Preliminaries [ edit ] A free version of Unity can be downloaded for Windows and MacOS at Unity's download page . First, this part assumes that readers are somewhat familiar with Unity. Tutorials [ edit ] Note that the tutorials assume that you read them in the order in which they are presented here, i.e. each tutorial will assume that you are familiar with the concepts and techniques introduced by previous tutorials. Basics [ edit ] Transparent Surfaces [ edit ] Basic Lighting [ edit ] Basic Texturing [ edit ] Textures in 3D [ edit ] Environment Mapping [ edit ] Variations on Lighting [ edit ]
50 Tips for Working with Unity (Best Practices) About these tips (Edit: August 2016. I have revised these tips. You can find the new list here.) These tips are not all applicable to every project. They are based on my experience with projects with small teams from 3 to 20 people.There’s is a price for structure, re-usability, clarity, and so on — team size and project size determine whether that price should be paid.Many tips are a matter of taste (there may be rivalling but equally good techniques for any tip listed here).Some tips may fly in the face of conventional Unity development. Process 1. 2. 3. 4. It makes it unnecessary to re-setup each scene.It makes loading much faster (if most objects are shared between scenes).It makes it easier to merge scenes (even with Unity’s new text-based scenes there is so much data in there that merging is often impractical in any case).It makes it easier to keep track of data across levels. You can still use Unity as a level editor (although you need not). 5. Scene Organisation 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Art
Nvidia CG shader Tutorial The Cg Tutorial is now available, right here, online. You can purchase a beautifully printed version of this book , and others in the series, at a 30% discount courtesy of InformIT and Addison-Wesley. Please visit our Resources page to see all the latest whitepapers and conference presentations that can help you with your projects. This chapter has the following four sections: "What Is Cg?" 1.1 What Is Cg? This book teaches you how to use a programming language called Cg. Cg provides developers with a complete programming platform that is easy to use and enables the fast creation of special effects and real-time cinematic-quality experiences on multiple platforms. Cg stands for "C for graphics." On the other hand, if you are not familiar with C or even programming languages in general but you enjoy computer graphics and want to learn something new, read on anyway. Much of this chapter is background that provides valuable context for understanding Cg and using it effectively. Example 1-1.