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

Review: Creating the Art of the Game by Matthew Omernick

Creating the Art of the Game by Matthew Omernick was a quick and easy read. However, I wish I had noticed the age of the book (and also the age of the reviews on Amazon). This book is seriously dated, and it has not aged well. Although some of the topics are still applicable, and lot of the stuff he talks about is

Review: Game Physics Engine Development: How to Build a Robust Commercial-Grade Physics Engine for your Game by Ian Millington

In this review, I will discuss my experience with Game Physics Engine Development: How to Build a Robust Commercial-Grade Physics Engine for your Game by Ian Millington. This is actually the first book I’ve ever read solely on game physics and I think I made the right choice here. Although I have developed several physics engines previously, they were only in 2D and the

Review: Digital Modeling by William Vaughan

There is no question, Digital Modeling by William Vaughan is a book every 3D modeler (or aspiring modeler) should read. It really captures the essence of what makes a good model, and doesn’t get bogged down with technical details of specific modeling packages. In this review, I will briefly go over why I think everyone with any interest in 3D art should pick up

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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 20)

Spent the last couple days adding in skybox support into the engine. Currently it’s a little hard-coded, but it does seem to be working well. I also bumped the field of view (FOV) up to 90 (from 45) so you can see more of the sky. I wanted to make sure I was only using my own artwork for this engine demo. Unfortunately,

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 19)

While getting models loaded was pretty exciting, I ended up dealing with major load times on the demo. Granted, my XML parsing code is probably slow as all hell, but I don’t think COLLADA is really designed for real-time engine use. With simple plane and cube shapes the loading wasn’t that bad, but with my soda can model (around 600 triangles) the loading

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 18)

What you see above is a custom model I made in 3ds Max, exported as a COLLADA *.dae file, and imported into my DirectX engine. I figured I’d start with something simple, like a soda can, and I plan to make a lot more models going forward. Although I hadn’t touched Max in years, I found it to be a comfortable experience and