Game Engine Architecture

Preface xix Acknowledgments No book is created in a vacuum, and this one is certainly no exception. This book would not have bee ...

xx Preface lead engineer on the Hydro Thunder project at Midway San Diego, for their mentorship and guidance over the years. Whi ...

I Foundations ...

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1 Introduction W hen I got my fi rst game console in 1979—a way-cool Intellivision sys- tem by Matt el—the term “game engine” di ...

4 1. Introduction cobble together valuable tips and tricks across a wide variety of game technol- ogy areas. However, I have bee ...

1.1. Structure of a Typical Game Team 5 1.1 Structure of a Typical Game Team Before we delve into the structure of a typical gam ...

6 1. Introduction z Concept artists produce sketches and paintings that provide the team with a vision of what the fi nal game w ...

7 1.1.3. Game Designers The game designers’ job is to design the interactive portion of the player’s experience, typically known ...

8 1. Introduction ment team, the marketing department (or a team that liaises with an external marketing group), administrative ...

1.2. What Is a Game? 9 of what we call “fun,” just as a joke becomes funny at the moment we “get it” by recognizing the patt ern ...

10 1. Introduction At the core of every real-time system is the concept of a deadline. An obvi- ous example in video games is th ...

11 1.3 What Is a Game Engine? The term “ game engine” arose in the mid-1990s in reference to fi rst-person shooter (FPS) games l ...

12 1. Introduction Clearly this is not a black-and-white distinction. We can think of a gamut of reusability onto which every en ...

1.4. Engine Differnces Across Genres 13 ality and optimality still exists. A game can always be made more impressive by fi ne-tu ...

14 1. Introduction First-person shooters typically focus on technologies, such as z effi cient rendering of large 3D virtual wor ...

15 ronment being rendered. For example, indoor “dungeon crawl” games oft en employ binary space partitioning (BSP) trees or port ...

16 1. Introduction Super Mario Brothers. The 3D era includes platformers like Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, Rayman 2, Sonic t ...

17 in these same games; nor can it be compared to the fi delity of the player avatar in a third-person game. In a platformer, th ...

18 1. Introduction State-of-the-art fi ghting games like EA’s Fight Night Round 3 (Figure 1.6) have upped the technological ante ...