OpenGL ES From the Ground Up, Part 6: Textures and Texture Mapping An alternative to creating materials in OpenGL ES to define the color of a polygon is to map a texture onto that polygon. This is a handy options that can give you good looking objects while saving a lot of processor cycles. Say you wanted to create a brick wall in a game. You could, of course, create a complex object with thousands of vertices to define the shape of the individual bricks and the recessed lines of mortar between the bricks. Or you could create a single square out of two triangles (four vertices) and map a picture of a brick wall onto the square. Turning Things On In order to use textures, we need to flip some switches in OpenGL to enable the features we need: The first function call switches on the ability to use two-dimensional images. The next call turns on blending. The last call specifies the blending function to use. Creating Textures Once you've enabled textures and blending, it's time to create our textures. Generating a Texture Name GLuint texture; The PVRTC Approach
Prep: The Graphics Pipeline In this preparation tutorial I will give an brief overview of the graphics pipeline. A basic knowledge of the steps that a graphics card performs while rendering is essential for using and understanding modern OpenGL. OpenGL is of course, a graphics rendering API. There are a few steps though between supplying the raw vertex data, and the framebuffer being displayed and this is called the rendering pipeline. Step 1. - Per-vertex Operations In this stage the vertices that are sent to OpenGL are normally transformed through the model-view-projection matrix into screen coordinates. Step 2 - Clipping and culling Primitives are clipped to the screen and faces that are marked for culling (e.g. backface culling) are culled before rasterization. Step 3 - Rasterization The vertices are formed into primitives and rasterized (filled in). Step 4 - Per-fragment Operations This stage can also be overridden by GLSL, this time using a fragment-shader. Step 5 - Framebuffer That's it!
Amit’s Game Programming Information What’s on this page? I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. Determining how to move around on a map is an interesting problem. These pages are about specific techniques for pathfinding and object movement: My current favorite algorithm is A*, because it can handle varying terrain costs well, and it seems to be faster than most graph searching algorithms. Code and Demos A* for Beginners (with Basic code)A Java Applet demonstrating A* (mirror site) (be sure to use the Fudge method for best results)A* Explorer [Windows application] Lets you step through the A* algorithm.Flash pathfinding demo, includes source code.Python code for A* and other search algorithms — note that the astar_search function is only four lines long! Many times I play a game and wish that the computer opponents were written better. What techniques are useful in game AI? Notices
Tutorial 1 : Opening a window | opengl-tutorial.org Welcome to the first tutorial ! Before jumping into OpenGL, you will first learn how to build the code that goes with each tutorial, how to run it, and most importantly, how to play with the code yourself. No special prerequisite is needed to follow these tutorials. Experience with any programming langage ( C, Java, Lisp, Javascript, whatever ) is better to fully understand the code, but not needed ; it will merely be more complicated to learn two things at the same time. All tutorials are written in “Easy C++” : Lots of effort has been made to make the code as simple as possible. No templates, no classes, no pointers. You don’t have to know anything, but you have to forget everything you know about OpenGL. All tutorials can be built on Windows, Linux and Mac. Update your drivers !! Detailed procedures will now be given for each platform. Building on Windows Updating your drivers should be easy. In the Build menu, click Build All. Building on Linux Install the latest drivers. Finally !
Getting Started So you want to take advantage of the power of the OpenGL API? If you are visiting this page because a game or software uses the OpenGL API, you need to install the appropriate graphic driver which enables usage of the functionality provided. To program using the OpenGL API, you need the driver and the development package (depends on platform and programming language). More platform-specific details are described in the sections below. This Wiki maintains a FAQ page for OpenGL. There is an older FAQ available, but information in it is more likely to be out of date. Downloading OpenGL In all three major desktop platforms (Linux, MacOS X, and Windows), OpenGL more or less comes with the system. Windows Appropriate Windows driver websites: Some sites also distribute beta versions of graphics drivers, which may give you access to bug fixes or new functionality before an official driver release from the manufacturer: Guru3D Linux Mac OS X Writing an OpenGL Application Initialization Getting Functions
Game Design Deep Dives Game Design Deep Dive: VR cockpit audio in Gunjack 2: End of Shift by Alex Riviere [04.13.17] "A great deal of realistic audio is incorporated in the player�s cockpit; various alarms, diverse weapon sounds, dialogues, cockpit physical audio representation, and enemy fire impacts on the turret." VR, Smartphone/Tablet, Audio, Design, Video, Deep Dive Game Design Deep Dive: Creating believable crowds in Planet Coaster by Owen McCarthy [01.04.17] "10,000 guests was what we targeted, and simulating each seemed like a challenge. This was where using flow/potential fields became very appealing." - Owen McCarthy, principal programmer at Frontier. Game Design Deep Dive: Turning Bloodline Champions into Battlerite by Peter Ilves [10.27.16] "Instead of investing resources into trying out new game mode ideas, we took the best pieces from Bloodines Champions and iterated, iterated and iterated." - Peter Ilves, co-founder of Stunlock Studios.
Megan Fox's Blog - Game Engines 101: The Entity/Component Model The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. There are many approaches to game engine design, and this is far from the best in all cases, but it is certainly the most common overall. Welcome to the wide world of component-based entities. First, let's address the way most people fresh out of Data Structures, CS 101, etc think of game objects: class Engine { int numberOfCylinders; .... } class Car : Public Engine { bool hasComfySeats; bool numSeats; ... } ... which is, in a word - bad. Let's take a peak at why. So we stop just short of hanging ourselves, back out, and realize that that route is unsupportable. Thus - enter components. class Entity { void AttachComponent(ComponentType, argumentList, name) void DetachComponent(name) void UpdateComponents() void UpdateComponentType(ComponentType typeOfComponentToUpdate) class BaseComponent { Done.
Fluid Simulation for Video Games (part 1) By Dr. Michael J. Gourlay Download Article Download Fluid Simulation for Video Games (Part 1) [PDF 1.2MB] Introduction to Fluid Dynamics Video games appeal to our desire to explore and interact with our environment, and adding real-world phenomena-such as fluid motion-allows game developers to create immersive and fun virtual worlds. To get started in fluid simulations, you need to understand the fundamentals of fluid dynamics. What Is a Fluid? A fluid is any substance that flows (in other words, a substance that can take the shape of its container) and does not resist deformation (meaning that it slides when dragged). But what about smoke? Varieties of Physical Simulation Whereas fluid dynamics might not be as familiar to most video game programmers, some forms of physical simulation have become commonplace. Particles are points that have position, mass, and velocity but (in principle) no size or shape, as Figure 1(a) shows. Figure 1. 1D. Figure 2. Fluids have lots of freedom of motion. .
Simulating Particle Effects using OpenGL | 3D Game Engine Programming Particle Effect In this article I will demonstrate one possible way to implement a particle effect in C++ using OpenGL to render the effect. This demo uses the fixed function pipeline and the host processor (CPU) to perform the simulation. In this article, I will use OpenGL and GLUT to render graphics to the application window. If you do not know how to setup an application using OpengGL and GLUT you can refer to my previous article titled [Introduction to OpenGL for Game Programmers] available [here]. Particles systems have been used extensively in games for many years. Geometry Wars - Particle Example There are several different types of particle effects that can be created. Billboard Particles: Billboard particles are flat textured quads that are rotated to always face the camera. In this article, I will demonstrate the billboard particle effect. A few dependencies are used by this project to ease the coding process and to make the material more readable. The ParticleEffect Header File