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Game Programming Thread
#15608 posted by megaman [92.73.87.146] on 2008/11/07 12:06:10

I was thinking about starting a game programming thread, where we could discuss and post links like http://levelofdetail.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/pixel-correct-shadow-maps-with-temporal-reprojection/ or less rendering related stuff ;)

basically some way to boookmark things and have others comment on them. Interest?


So, yeah, discuss game programming, people. Word.
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Hmm 
i dunno, can we please not make this into a 'q engine support thread'? ;) 
Free RPG Rules 
Networking 
AI - Steering Behaviours 
Hmm Description 
first one is a student's library iirc building on the second.

which is some guy who worked on dungeon keeper2 and used the steering behaviours there. The paper is very practical and describes what they did to get the system working nicely and how they combined it. worth a read if you're interested in actually using #4

3 is the course overview page where that guy held a talk

4 is the original reynolds paper.

i was using this in my project/paper i just completed a few days ago. 
Loads Of Stuff 
Mostly not read yet.


Lightweight Procedural Animation with Believable Physical Interactions Ian Horswill 2008 http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ian/AIIDE%20Twig%20paper.pdf

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Games as an Expressive Medium http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsvsZuFgBzc

GLee GLee (GL Easy Extension library) is a free cross-platform extension loading library for OpenGL http://elf-stone.com/glee.php

Real-time Shadow Algorithms and Techniques http://developer.nvidia.com/object/doc_shadows.html

Modernizing the Quake2 renderer http://jdolan.dyndns.org/quake2world/?q=node/69 wiat, that's from jdolan.

Order your graphics draw calls around! http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=86 (normally don't like the guy)

Ray Tracing News "Light Makes Right" November 8, 2008 http://tog.acm.org/resources/RTNews/html/rtnv21n1.html 
Hmm Networking 
i skimmed through the q3 networking article in class some days ago. one thing i didn't get was how they transmit events. They need to make sure SOMETHING reaches the client, so instead of doing some sophisticated system that handles events seperately from throwaway data (like tribes2 does), they just check that every packet reaches it? someone enlighten me, or i need to reread the description ;) 
Lol 
Can you do skeletal animation with QuakeC?
Within the standard engine limits?
Somebody figure out how to do it!!! :-) 
 
RickyT23 ask madfox he might now something about it!!! 
Only In Horrible Ways 
To do skeletal animation in standard qc you'd first have to make each bone a seperate entity, as they need to be able to move individually. Once you've done that, each bone has to have it's own model assigned, so you can't have any triangles which span joints on the bones. This severely restricts what you can do to make realistic organic models. You could do a robot a little more easily. You're also going to be expending a lot of entities on each model, so you'll hit the 600 mark in no time.

Once you've got over that, you have to actually program it in qc, which is bound to be painful considering qc has no support for arrays to store animation sequences in. You also have to battle with the engine, which by default only uses an 8 bit integer for sending rotation angles. This means any rotation you do will show up with a level of precision worse than 1 degree.

Basically, it won't work all that well. Someone did create a quake ragdoll style mod called "Sagdoll" which did pretty much follow this idea, I think there's a link to it on the qexpo site.

Things aren't much better in custom engines. Darkplaces supports some model formats with skeletal animation. But there's currently no facility to control the bones individually from qc, it's still just frame selection. The benefit of bones is to read orientations and attach other entities to them(plus smaller file sizes). 
Skeletal Animation 
When i worked on the Bones model, I converted the 3d model to 3dfx. Having an animation studio, which imports dfx I need only a standard model to create all animation frames from this base model.
These can be imported to QMLE and then rearanged to qc scripting.

An easier way can be, like I did with the ZDoom models, to open them in QMLE, and then copy some frames. THe copied frame you can change by moving the vertexes, so sugesting a moving patern.

I believe Milkshape has a way to use skeleton animation, but I never succeeded in finding out how. 
Sagdoll 
Has a thread at i3d 
don't get it. 
 
first there has to be something before you can or can't get it? 
Oh 
sorry, it's programming. I didn't see. 
Just Saw This And Thought It Might Be A Good Link 
Very Interesting 
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/45679/John-Carmack-Releases-Open-Source-Wolfenstein-iPhone-Port

Many different interesting and thoughtful bits in this. Highly recommended to anyone with a remote interest in game design. 
 
Did you know that Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book was available for free? I did not and I like it (I understand about 5%!).
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1698.asp 
Hmm Yeah I Knew 
Even if it's full of general optimization tips I'd not recommend reading all of it unless you find the antique examples terrible exciting.

10+ years ago I had a bad habit of reading programming books without actually writing much code myself (I think understand what I just read so I'll just keep on reading!) and I still have the paper copy around somewhere. I did pick it up to look at his bresenham's line drawing algo when doing a simple drawing program on the nintendo ds. 
 
Yeah, it's a good book but very out dated now. However, it DOES contain a bunch of Quake development tidbits and stories that I re-read from time to time. Like Carmack coming up with the BSP idea, the VIS break through, all the things they tried to get the best renderer, etc. 
Abrash's Black Book... 
was very interesting when i borrowed it from a friend a few years ago. Great to see it's online for free now, but that page seems to just give an ASP error right now... 
More Books 
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