Review: Game Engine Gems 2 by Eric Lengyel

Game Engine Gems 2 is the second book in a series from editor Eric Lengyel, one of the premiere game engine developers in the scene. I read the first book and I will say this second volume is even better in my opinion. There are a vast number of topics covered, and I found the depth in most of them to be thorough,

Tutorial: How To Make a Cube Roll On A Grid in Unreal Engine 4

In this tutorial, I will show how to make a cube roll from side-to-side on a grid. This project took me around 3 days to complete, though much of that was wrapping my head around basic things in UE4. Some of the areas explored here include setting up key bindings and action mapping, setting and clearing timers, and rotating around an arbitrary point.

Tutorial: How To Make a Textured Spinning Cube Using Unreal Engine 4

Today I will show how to create a textured spinning cube using Unreal Engine 4. Making a cube spin is basically what I consider the “litmus test” of 3D engines. How long it takes you to figure this out will show how convenient or capable the engine is. While I might have skipped this test (by jumping straight into creating Pong) I thought it was worthwhile

Making Pong in Unreal Engine 4 (My Very First UE4 Game!)

Today I’d like to unveil what I’ve been working on for about 2 weeks: Pong in Unreal Engine 4. Most of that time was spent reading documentation and watching tutorial videos just to figure out the basics. There is actually a *lot* of good material out there for Unreal Engine 4, the docs have been helpful and there are plenty of videos. Disappointingly,

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 25)

So it comes with great reluctance but I think I will have to suspend development on my 3D game engine, at least for the near future. Surely this will be a disappointment to anyone following the progress and I did not make the decision lightly. After spending some time thinking about it, I think it’s the right move. It’s just really hard to justify the

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 24)

  It’s been some time since the last 3D engine update, but I’m still sticking with it. Currently I am working on getting a physics engine implemented. The video you see above is the first glimpse of this custom physics engine. Obviously it’s ultra basic right now, but it’s a start. The algorithm is based on a verlet integrator, and the code is

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 23)

While I implemented frustum culling a little while ago, I never actually coded a proper bounding volume. For the  bounding test I was using a sphere, but I just set the radius to some hard-coded value. This was fine when I just had a bunch of similar sized cubes on screen, however it broke apart once I started getting varied models imported. This

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 22)

After struggling for a bit with the shadow mapping implementation, I finally have something presentable. I followed a tutorial from Microsoft and thought I understood what was happening. However, it required a lot of changes in the rendering code and it took a little while to get things working. Even once it was somewhat functional, I still had some issues with what they

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 21)

After a few days of hacking away at the code, I’ve got a new video up. In this update I have added normal mapping and specular lighting. I did have a few set-backs while working on the shaders, and it was made even more difficult since I was basically “flying blind” without a debugger. It seems that the Express version of Visual Studio