How’s that for a grandiose title, eh? Hopefully it’s not an entirely unassailable goal for the following blog post, though. At the time of writing I am approximately halfway through a yearlong software internship at Rare where I’ve been working on the recently-released Kinect Sports: Season Two for the Xbox 360. In theory, then, everything I’ve done to get here should be fresh in my mind. And hopefully some of it will be of use to other budding game programmers out there.
GLEE – or graphics/game library and extensible engine – is an “under-development” engine for 3D graphics and game applications written in C++ using the DirectX rendering API. It bears absolutely no resemblance to the television show of the same name. However, if it were sentient, it would probably enjoy show tunes.
My L-System demo was written in C for the PlayStation Portable, using an official PSP Devkit. It is designed to simulate moving through a virtual forest environment, with trees growing/shrinking as the user/camera moves through the world. The camera can be manipulated on the fly, allowing users to pause, look around, and admire their surroundings – if they so wish!
My simple ray tracer written in C++ demonstrates a recursive ray tracing algorithm for rendering a scene made up of 3D primitives (spheres and planes in this case). This method stands in contrast to traditional rasterization-based approaches which are typically supported by accelerated graphics hardware and used in real-time games. The following scenes were both rendered in under a second:
Unbeknownst to me ’till recently, Google provides an excellent (and free) introductory class for learning Python, which you can find right here. I found the link via Reddit and decided that after a solid week of reaping the benefits of Steam’s holiday sale, this was a perfect excuse to get back to programming.
My 3D software renderer was written in C++ and is capable of displaying 3D models loaded from id Software’s .md2 format. It utilizes the GDI+ graphics library to set pixels on the screen, but is otherwise entirely custom code. Early implementation details can be found here.
Escape from Alcatraz is a point and click adventure game inspired by LucasArts’ graphic adventure games from the 1990s, such as The Curse of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. It was developed using the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) over the course of several weeks.
Since my last update Escape from Alcatraz update I have implemented rudimentary conversation and inventory systems, both of which make exclusive use of Flash and Scaleform for their visual components.
Using the MIPS assembly language I developed a simple music sequencer capable of playing back music stored in a custom binary format. The MIPS architecture is the basis for the PlayStation Portable’s core CPU, but for this project I was using it in a simulated environment. MARS (the MIPS Assembler and Runtime Simulator) is an open-source MIPS IDE released by Missouri State University that I was able to use and extend.
As part of my Introduction to 3D Graphics Programming module on the second year of Computer Games Programming at Derby University I am developing a 3D software renderer using C++. At its core the renderer’s purpose is to take a series of vertices which make up a model defined in 3D space and transform them such that they can be displayed on a 2D surface (the screen). In addition to this the renderer will be responsible for texturing, lighting, and so on.