Flocking
Not assigned, but lots of resources are listed on the Notes page
A discussion of the concept of flocking (simple crowd simulation). Mainly to give you something for the initial project. Plus, its a good preview of the kinds of topics we may talk about later.
What is Game Technology For?
Assignment: Play a Game
A discussion of what makes games interesting, and what technology has to do with it.
Introduction to Graphics
Reading: An Introductory Tour of Interactive Rendering by Eric Haines
official
A discussion of the issues in doing graphics in games, and a prelude to what is coming up.
What to do with Graphics Hardware
Assignment: How'd They Do That?
A discussion of some of the visual effects we see in games, and how we make use of the hardware to do that. How graphics hardware works. Ideas of programmable hardware.
Geometric tricks for Game Graphics
Reading: Chapters 12 and 14 from Real-Time Rendering
We'll talk about low level details of getting geometry to the hardware, as well as tricks for making graphics go fast. Simplification of meshes, smoothing, spatial data structures, ...
Approximation and Image-Based Tricks for Game Graphics
Reading:RTR Chapter 10, and others
A discussion of how we cheat by simplifying the visual appearance when necessary. The basic concepts of level of detail. Image-based methods for creating imagery.
More graphics programming
Reading: There's enough from previous lectures
More discussion of the kinds of visual tricks that people make use of in order to make compelling, yet high-performance, visuals.
GPUs and Visual Tricks
Assignment 3: What to do with a GPU?
Reading: Some GPU reading (see Main.Readings#GPU), and Chapters 3 and 18 from Real-Time Rendering. Note: you had a whole week to do this reading.
We'll talk about programming the graphics hardware, and some of the interesting things
Physics 101: The world as an ODE (or not)
There is a Physics programming assignment, due later.
Reading: To Be Determined
The goal of this lecture is to give you enough of a taste of what physics programming is about so that you can start to think about a physics programming project. And to have some idea of what the differences are in doing game physics and real physics, and what kinds of techniques might be useful in games.
Physics 2: Going Bump (Collisions)
There is a Physics programming assignment, due later.
Reading: To Be Determined
This lecture will talk about collisions, and some of the basic concepts in doing them. A big part of the lecture will be to convey a sense of what makes handling collisions really challenging. We'll probably talk more about avoiding these challenges (hacks you can use for a project) than the details of how to solve them correctly (that you'd probably use a physics engine for anyway).
