This tutorial is about two things: sprites and loops. Sprites will get you on your way to making interesting stuff move on the screen, whereas loops will help you write less code to do more. On with the show! Getting the stuff you need As with the last tutorial, we’ll Read more »
The previous tutorial introduced you to the project template. You can now draw some lines and print some text in all kinds of colors, but that's clearly far from the goal of making actual games, where bullets wizz past in glorious 3D and enemies flank you in the smartest ways. Read more »
As you noticed in the first article, setting up a project in Visual Studio can be quite a task. And we didn't (nearly) touch all the settings that you can adjust for a project either. To make your life a bit easier, we will use a project template from now Read more »
Welcome to the first article of Learning C++ tutorial series, provided by the IGAD program of the NHTV University! These tutorials are designed to take you from zero to block 3 entry level of IGAD's program in a somewhat smooth fashion. We start at the absolute basics: all that you Read more »
You don't tug on Superman's cape You don't spit into the wind You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger And you don't mess around with Jim The first time you heard the chorus of "You Don't Mess Around with Jim," you no doubt immediately wondered why Jim Read more »
Introduction A lot of people e-mailed me about my other MMO related articles, and expressed their wish to do a follow up with an article about setting an MMO economy, and here you have it. But first a disclaimer: This article is for your information only, and you should not Read more »
OK, this is it: The 7th installment of the ray tracing tutorial series. Over the last few weeks I worked very hard to improve the speed of the ray tracer, and I am quite proud of the results: Render times for the scene in article 4 (you know, the sphere Read more »
Welcome to the sixth installment of my ray tracing column. This time I would like to fix some things that I left out earlier: Texturing and a camera. Before I proceed I would first like to correct an error in the previous article. Some readers (Bramz, Thomas de Bodt) pointed Read more »
It's time to do something useful with the new speed that the regular grid brought us. Ray tracing speed is just like money: You always spend twice the amount you actually have. :) One of the finest things to spend it on is soft shadows. They are reasonably easy to Read more »
The last scene from the previous article (the one with the sphere grid to show off the new refraction code) took almost 9 seconds to render on my pimpy 1.7Ghz Toshiba laptop with 1600x1200 screen (I know resolution has nothing to do with it, but I thought I would mention Read more »
When you are deep in a raytracer project, you start looking at nature in an odd manner. I've noticed the same when working on a polygon engine: Building interiors suddenly appeared to have lots of 'polygonal detail' and 'wonderfully subdivided splines', but also 'poo... Read more »
In the first article I described the basics of raytracing: Shooting rays from a camera through a screen plane into the scene, finding the closest intersection point, and simple diffuse shading using a dot product between the local normal of the primitive and a vector to the light source. In Read more »
Hello and welcome to a new series of articles (or column, if you wish) on the topic of raytracing. For those that do not know me: My name is Jacco Bikker, also known as 'Phantom'. I work as '3D tech guy' at Overloaded, a company that develops and distributes games Read more »
Introduction It is fairly common knowledge that producing high-quality computer games is somewhat time intensive and normally involves a fairly large team of individuals. A list of such a team might include designers, programmers, animators, graphical artists, and sound effect artists, not to men... Read more »
Hello again fellow coders. I'm back after a fairly long hiatus with another tutorial on the OpenAL api. And I think this will be a beefy one. I would first like to thank the community for their support thus far in the series. I want to put out some special Read more »
A Look at Real-World Physics I know this will be boring review for anyone with a course in high school physics, but lets humour ourselves. The Doppler effect can be a very tricky concept for some people, but it is a logical process, and kind of interesting when you get Read more »
