CMSC 23800/53800
Game Construction

General Information

Course:	CMSC 23800/53800
	Game Construction
Instructor:	John Reppy
	Ry 256
Lecture:	TR 4:30-5:50
	Ry 276
Mailing list:	https://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmsc23800
Wiki:	http://cmsc23800-wiki.cs.uchicago.edu/index.php
Gforge server:	http://cmsc23800-gforge.cs.uchicago.edu

Overview

Computer games are one of the most exciting applications of computer technology. Computer games are also large software systems that embody cutting-edge graphics as well as techniques from scientific simulation, networking, AI, and databases. This course is an introduction to the issues of computer game construction. Students will work in teams to design and create their own games using existing libraries for graphics, physics simulation, etc. While students are not expected to be experts in everyone of the technical areas that underly computer games (e.g., graphics, scientific computing, networking, etc.), expertise in one or two of these areas is required, as is a strong background in programming.

Text books

Title:	Introduction to Game Development (2nd Ed)
Editor:	Steve Rabin
Publisher:	Charles River Media, 2009
Title:	Chris Crawford on Game Design
Author:	Chris Crawford
Publisher:	New Riders Publishing, 2003

The project

Possible topics for individual reports

Resources

Libraries

Here are links to some potentially useful libraries:

• Open Scene Graph is ab open-source 3D graphics toolkit,
• G3D Engine is an open-source 3D engine written in C++.
• Ogre 3D is a open source 3D game library/engine.
• GLVU An open-source library of OpenGL utility code written to support various research projects at The University of North Carolina. While not supporting a full scene-graph, it does include object and image loaders, math utilities, and various other useful classes.
• OpenSteer is a C++ library for constructing steering behaviors. There is an associated web page that provides links to relevant papers.
• Particle System API is a C++ library for implementing particle-system effects.
• Bullet Physics SDK is an open-source physics engine written in C++.
• Open Dynamics Engine is another open-source physics engine written in C++.
• Boost is a collection of C++ libraries that you may find useful.
• The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) is a research platform for AI research.
• enet is a reliable datagram library that runs on top of UDP. It was originally developed for the FPS game.

Tools

The Macs in the Mac Lab have a number of content-creation tools installed. These include

• Audacity is an Open-Source sound-editing program that works on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
• Blender is an Open-Source modeling and animation program.
• SketchUp Pro, which is a commercial 3D modelling program (a free version is available from ).

In addition, there are a number of free (as in beer) 3D modeling programs that you can find on the web.

• Art of Illusion is a 3D modelling and rendering tool that is written in Java. It supports exporting models as OBJ files.
• Wings 3D is a modeler based on the winged-edge data structure. It is written in Erlang.

Web sites

There are many game-programming websites on the internet; here are a few that I have found useful.

• Amit's Game Programming Information
  This site has a whole host of links and articles about a wide range of game-programming topics.
• Path planning tutorial from AAAI 2008.
• The Art of Computer Game Design This is an electronic version of the classic text by Chris Crawford.
• Sound and Music Programming Tutorials
  These tutorials are Windows-oriented, but then show how to use OpenAL in a number of situations.

Other stuff

Here are links to lecture materials, etc.

• The slides from Jon Riehl's lecture on Python and the related source code.
• The slides from Tara Teich's lecture on game AI.