Week 1

INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

OBJECTIVES:

1. Demonstrate how to evaluate game concepts

2. Demonstrate an understanding of various tools that are used in game development
3. Demonstrate an understanding of the game development process
4. Demonstrate an understanding of 3D computer environments
5. Demonstrate an understanding of game development tools
6. Demonstrate an understanding of how to analyze the different uses of textures
7. Demonstrate an understanding of level design, creation tools, and editors
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Computer Game Programming: The famous game design Sid Meier

once defined a computer game as “a series of interesting and
meaningful choices made by the player in pursuit of a clear and
compelling goal.” A somewhat more concrete definition of a computer
game, due to Mark Overmars, is “a software program in which one or
more players make decisions through the control of game objects and
resources, in pursuit of a goal.”
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

A Brief History: Today’s computer games constitute a multi-billion

dollar industry. There is an incredible variety of game genres: strategy,
sports, shooter, role-playing, racing, adventure, and so on. Some games
induce their players to dedicate long hours in pursuit of a distant goal,
and others can be picked up and played for just a few minutes. Some
games create astoundingly realistic and complex three- dimensional
worlds and others involve little more than a simple 2-dimensional grid
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

The Early Days: Computer games are as old as computers. One of the
oldest examples was from 1958. It was a Pong-like game called Tennis
for Two, which was developed by William Higin- botham of Brookhaven
National Lab in 1958 and was played on an oscilloscope. Another
example was a game developed in 1961 by a group of students at MIT,
called Spacewar.
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The 70’s and 80’s: During the 1970s, computer games came into
people’s homes with the development of the Atari game console. Its
popularity is remarkable, given that the early technology of the day
supported nothing more sophisticated than Pong. One of the popular
features of later game consoles, like the Atari 2600, is that it was
possible to purchase additional cartridges, which looked like 8-track
tapes, allowing users to upload new games.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Recent Trends: Game technology continues to develop in terms of the

complexity and scale of games. Recently, with development of relatively
inexpensive head-mounted displays, there has been a resurgence of
interest in systems virtual reality and augmented reality. This
technology increases the sense of immersion into the game’s world.
Improvements in sensor technology has led to more sophisticated
controls based on voice recognition and gestures.
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Elements of Computer Games: While computer games are fun to play,

they can be terrifically challenging to implement. These challenges
arise from the confluence of a number of elements that are critical to
the execution and performance of the game.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

These include the following:

•Real-time 3-dimensional computer graphics: Most high-end computer games involve the
generation of photo-realistic imagery at the rate of 30–60 frames per second.

•Large, complex geometric models: Large-scale models, such as factories, city-scapes,

forests and jungles, and crowds of people, can involve vast numbers of geometric elements.

•Complex geometry: Many natural objects (such as hair, fur, trees, plants, water, and clouds)
have very sophisticated geometric structure, and they move and interact in complex
manners.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

•Complex lighting: Many natural objects (such as human hair and skin, plants, and water) reflect light in
complex and subtle ways.

•Artificial intelligence: The game software controls the motions and behaviors of nonplayer entities.

•Motion and Navigation: Nonplayer entities need to be able to plan their movement from one location to
another. This can involve finding a shortest route from one location to another, moving in coordination
with a number of other nonplayer entities, or generating natural-looking motion for a soccer player in a
sports game.

•Physics: The physical objects of a game interact with one another in accordance with the laws of physics.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

•Networking: Multiplayer online games use a network to communicate the current

game state between players. Due to the latency inherent in network communication,
the games states that individual players perceive are momentarily inconsistent.

•Databases: The game state, especially for multiplayer online games, is maintained in
a database.

•Security: Since the origin of games, there have been people who have sought ways of
circumventing the games.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

The Scope of this Course: At some universities, game development

constitutes a series of courses on various topics. Here, we will be able to focus
on only a small part of the spectrum of relevant topics. While most game
designers make use of sophisticate software tools (for graphics, modeling, AI,
physics), it is not within the scope of this class to teach a particular set of
tools (even though we will discuss game engines for the sake of project
development). As in most upper-division computer science courses, our
interest is not in how to use these tools, but rather how to build these systems.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Computer Game Architecture: A large computer game is a significant

technical undertaking, involving a large number of interacting
components. Of course, not all computer games require the same level
of complexity. Different genres of games require different capabilities.
The combination of components used for a simple casual 2-dimensional
game like Tetris) is very different from a high-end 3-dimensional first-
person shooter (FPS) game like Halo and Call of Duty.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Computer Game Engine Architecture: One way to better

understand the software structure underlying a generic game is to
understand the structure of a typical game engines.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Here is a summary of the levels, from low to high. These are illustrated in the figure below.

•System: This includes low-level software for interacting with the operating system on which the game engine
runs as well as the target system on which the game executes.

•Third-Party SDKs and Middleware: These are libraries and software development toolkits (SDKs), usually
provided from a third party.

•Platform Independence Layer: Since most games are developed to run on many different platforms, this layer
provides software to translate between game specific operations and their system- dependent implementations.

•Core System: These include basic tools necessary in any software development environment, including assertion
testing, unit testing, memory allocation/deallocation, mathematics library, debugging aids, parsers and serializers
(e.g., for xml-based import and export), file I/O, video playback.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

•Resource Manager: Large graphics programs involve accessing various

resources, such as geometric models for characters and buildings, texture images
for coloring these geometric models, maps representing the game’s world.

•Rendering Engine: This is one of the largest and most complex components of
any real-time 3- dimensional game.

•Low-Level Renderer: This comprises the most basic elements of producing

images. Your program interacts with the GPU by asking it to render objects.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Graphics Device Interface: Since the graphics device requires

updating 30–100 times per second, but some operations (such as
displaying messages to the user) occurs at a significantly different time
scale (of multiple seconds), these components shield the programmer
from some of the low-level timing issues when dealing with the
graphics system.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Scene Graph: Game entities are naturally organized into hierarchical

structures. This is true for dynamic and static objects. For example, a
human body consists of a head, torso, arms, legs; an arm consists of a
hand, lower-arm, and upper-arm; a hand consists of fingers. Thus,
there is a natural structure in the form of a rooted tree.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Collisions and Physics: These components simulate the movement of

objects over time, detect when objects collide with one another, and
determine the appropriate response in the event of a collision (like
knocking down the houses where the little pigs live). Except in very
simple physical phenomena, like a free-falling body, physical simulation
can be very difficult.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Animation: While the game may direct a character to move from one location
to another, the job of the animation system is to make this motion look
natural, for example, by moving the arms and legs in a manner that is
consistent with a natural walking behavior.

Input Handlers: These components process inputs from the user, including
keyboard, mouse, and game controller inputs. Some devices also provide
feedback to users (such as the vibration in some game controllers).
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Audio: Audio components handle simple things like playback for

background music, explosions, car engines, tire squealing, but they may
also generate special audio effects, such as stereo effects to give a sense
of location, echo effects to give a sense of context (inside versus
outside), and other audio effects (such as creating a feeling of distance
by filtering out high-frequency components).
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Multiplayer/Networking: Multiplayer and online games require a

number of additional supporting components. For example, multiplayer
games may have a split-screen capability. Online games require support
for basic network communication (serialization of structures into
packets, network protocol issues, hiding network latency, and so on).
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Gameplay Foundation System: The term gameplay refers to the rules

that govern game play, that is, the player’s possible actions and the
consequences of these actions. Since this varies considerably from one
game to another, designing a system that works for a wide variety of
games can be quite daunting.
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Event System: Game objects need to communicate with one another.

This is often handled by a form of message passing. When a message
arrives, we can think of it as implicitly signaling an event to occur,
which is to be processed by the entity. Game objects can register their
interest in various events, which may affect their behavior.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Scripting System: In order to allow game developers to rapidly write

and test game code, rather than have them write in a low-level
programming language, such as C++, it is common to have them
produce their code in a scripting language, like Python. A sophisticated
scripting system can handle the editing of scripts and reloading a script
into a game while it is running.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Artificial Intelligence: These components are used to control the

behavior of non-player characters. They are typically modeled as AI
agents. As we will discuss later, an agent is an object that can sense its
environment, maintain a memory (or state), and can respond in
potentially complex ways depending on the current input and state.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

Game Specific Systems: This is a catch-all for any components that

are so specific to a given game that they don’t fall into one of the other
categories. This may include aspects like the mechanics controlling a
player’s state, the algorithms by which a camera moves throughout the
world, the specific goals of the game’s non-player characters, the
properties of various weapons, and so on.
Week 1: INTRODUCTION TO GAME PROGRAMMING

The Graphics Pipeline: The key concept behind all GPUs is the notion
of the graphics pipeline. This is conceptual tool, where your user
program sits at one end sending graphics commands to the GPU, and
the frame buffer sits at the other end. A typical command from your
program might be “draw a triangle in 3-dimensional space at these
coordinates.” The job of the graphics system is to convert this simple
request to that of coloring a set of pixels on your display.
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Rasterization: The job of the rasterizer is to convert the geometric

shape given in terms of its screen coordinates into individual pixels,
called fragments.

 Fragment Processing: Each fragment is then run through various

computations. First, it must be determined whether this fragment is
visible, or whether it is hidden behind some other fragment.
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Blending: Generally, there may be a number of fragments that affect

the color of a given pixel. (This typically results from translucence or
other special effects like motion blur.) The colors of these fragments
are then blended together to produce the final pixel color. The final
output of this stage is the frame-buffer image.