Thursday 12 July 2012

PC and PS3 Sledding game.





As part of my masters degree in games programming at the University of Hull, we were split into groups of six and asked to produce a sled racing for both the PC and Playstation 3. This was both exciting and daunting for me since the only other devices I had ever programmed for besides the PC were mobile phone and the PSP. In terms of game design, decided to go for a checkpoint style racing game in which the player has to follow an arrow indicating where the next checkpoint is, and they must hit that way point in order to progress. Instead of making two different versions of the game for each platform, we decided to implement a cross platform engine in which the one game can be built on. Therefore we would only be making one game in one go to run on both platforms. The rendering API for the engine was OpenGL on both platforms, bullet was used for physics (both platforms), fmod (for PC only) was used for sound and CG by nvidia was used for shaders (both platforms). Interms of what I personally did for the project, I was mostly responsible for the playstation3 part of the engine. I wrote the PS3 version of the renderer and I was also responsible for making sure that the game and all the third party libraries built and ran on the PS3. I was also responsible for intergrating bullet to our engine and implementing some of the physics for the game. I was also responsible for intergrating CG with our engine and writing some of the shaders for the game.

OpenGL Seasonal Snow globe



This was my first application using OpenGL, since previously I had only ever used direct X. This was part of my masters degree in games programming at the University of Hull. All the lighting was done using shaders, per pixel ligthing and normal mapping(for the ground, water and house). The specs were to implement a snow globe, with a house, a pond, grass and a tree. It has/feature 3 seasons, firstly spring which has the tree growing, and then leaves grow on the tree. After the leaves have grown, we have autumn, in which the leaves change colour to yellow and fall and then the tree catches fire and burns away. After that we have winter, in which the snow falls down to the ground and smoke comes out of the chimney. After winter the cycle goes back to spring. Each time, the tree will grow differently. This was achieved by simply using a binary tree for the branches and trunk. The tree is also reflected in the water.