Advanced Game Technology CMPCD3026 - CMPSEM044

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Advanced Game TechnologyCMPCD3026-CMPSEM044
Abdennour El Rhalibi Room 723 a.elrhalibi_at_livjm.ac
.uk
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Course Details (Attempt)

• 3D Game Engines Components
• DirectX D3D, 3D Modelling and Rendering
• Meshes , Level Loading and Editing
• Terrain Rendering and LOD
• Camera Setting and Animation
• Spatial Data structure BSP and PVS
• NPC Behaviour and 3D PathFinding A, Flocking,
  Scripting
• 3D Collision Detection and Response
• Shading languages
• Game networking Issues Architecture, Protocol,
  Event Synchronisation
• Introduction to Console Programming

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Meshes, Level Loading and Editing Lecture 3

• Abdennour El Rhalibi

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Overview

• 3D Primitives
• Meshes
• D3D Data Structures
• Vertex Buffers (VB)
• Flexible Vertex Format (FVF)
• Loading and Editing
• Meshes
• Setting World and View
• Transforming

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Meshes

• A scene is a collection of objects or models. An
  object is represented as a triangle mesh
  approximation.
• The triangles of the mesh are the building blocks
  of the object that we are modeling.
• We use the terms all interchangeably to refer to
  the triangles of a mesh polygons, primitives and
  mesh geometry.
• Triangles are primitives, but Direct3D also
  supports line and point primitives.

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Meshes

• Meshes are data structures that hold several
  primitives to create complex shapes
• You can associate vertices, faces, materials,
  textures, and more to a mesh
• Meshes can be created with a modeling software
  (like 3D Studio) and then exported to .X file
  format and loaded

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Types of Primitives
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Vertex Buffers

• Vertex buffers, represented by the
  IDirect3DVertexBuffer9 interface, are memory
  buffers that contain vertex data
• Vertex buffers can contain any vertex type -
  transformed or untransformed, lit or unlit
• The flexibility of vertex buffers make them ideal
  staging points for reusing transformed geometry
• Vertex buffer is described in terms of its
  capabilities if it can exist only in system
  memory, if it is only used for write operations,
  and the type and number of vertices it can
  contain traits described by D3DVERTEXBUFFER_DESC
  

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Flexible Vertex Formats

• A flexible vertex
• format (FVF) code
• describes the contents
• of vertices stored
• interleaved in a single
• data stream
• struct BLENDVERTEX
• D3DXVECTOR3 v // Referenced as v0 in the vertex
  shader
• FLOAT blend1 // Referenced as v1.x in the vertex
  shader
• FLOAT blend2 // Referenced as v1.y in the vertex
  shader
• FLOAT blend3 // Referenced as v1.z in the vertex
  shader
• // v1.w 1.0 - (v1.x v1.y v1.z)
• D3DXVECTOR3 n // Referenced as v3 in the vertex
  shader
• FLOAT tu, tv // Referenced as v7 in the vertex
  shader
• define D3DFVF_BLENDVERTEX (D3DFVF_XYZB3D3DFVF_NO
  RMALD3DFVF_TEX1)

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3DStep1 Example

• The following example introduce 3D programming
  with reference to a minimal example program
  called 3dstep1 - which
• loads a 3D object from disk
• displays the lit object on screen
• allows the user to rotate the object around the y
  axis
• Allows the user to extend the transform to rotate
  the object around the x an z axis and to
  translate in all the plans
• The Example use DXU library which provides high
  level D3D functions See DirectX 9.c
  documentation for information and examples in L
  drive.

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Modelling and Loading
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Rendering modes

• Can be set to solid, wire-frame or point

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Initialise 3D world

• Any 3D world must have . . .
• Some sort of camera and viewing system
• Lighting and rendering settings
• Objects and ways of transforming them

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Initialise 3D world- The matrices

• To initialise the 3D world in D3D we have to
  specify three matrices
• The world transformation matrix defines how to
  translate, scale, and rotate the geometry in the
  3-D model space.
• The view transformation matrix defines the
  position and rotation of the view. The view
  matrix is the camera for the scene.
• The projection transformation matrix defines how
  geometry is transformed from 3-D view space to
  2-D viewport space.

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Initialise 3D world

• A D3D 3D world must have . . .
• A camera - set in D3D by setting a (camera)
  matrix and a perspective projection matrix
• Lighting - in D3D could be directional, point,
  spot, or ambient lighting
• Device rendering settings - fill and backface
  culling modes, depth (z) buffering
• Objects - 3D objects, created on the fly, or
  loaded from disk in the D3D .x file format (which
  you may have modelled in 3DStudio MAX)

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D3D Z buffering

• D3D uses z (depth) buffering in order to work out
  which polygons to display on screen
• Considering what colour a particular pixel will
  be a ray is cast into the scene
• any number of polygons may be intersected by the
  ray
• the z buffer is used to determine which is
  nearest and therefore visible

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So to Initialise the 3D world . . .

• Need to
• Turn on depth buffering
• Set rendering (fill) and backface culling modes
• create a camera matrix and set its parameters
• set the camera matrix to be the device camera
  matrix
• set the perspective projection matrix
• set the projection matrix to be the device
  projection matrix

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Turn on depth buffering

• Two lines of code are needed to turn z buffering
  on using the DXU library

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Back face culling

• Back face culling is used to remove surfaces that
  should be facing away from the camera
• Can be set to none, clockwise, or anticlockwise
• The orientation is calculated from the surface
  normal vector
• Whether the inside or outside surface is shown
  depends on whether the polygon vertices are
  specifies clockwise or anticlockwise

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Back face culling

• None
• Clockwise
• Anticlockwise

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Set Rendering (fill) and cull modes

• One function call each . . .

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Setting up the camera matrix

• To set up camera matrix we specify
• the cameras position in space
• where the camera is looking
• and which way is up

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Setting up the projection matrix

• Need to specify
• the field of view (how much of the scene we can
  see)
• view aspect ratio (image width height ratio)
• distance to front clipping plane
• distance to back clipping plane

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Effect of changing field of view
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The world matrix

• Transformations of the world matrix will
  transform all items in the world
• Set to identity matrix - no transformation

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Putting it all together - Initialise3DWorld
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Camera aspect ratio

• Aspect ratio is device width/device height
• Screen is usually 640 by 480 1.333
• Wrong aspect ratio leads to image distortion
• eg rotate car with screen 400x400 and a. ratio
  1.33

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Lights

• There are three main types of lights
• Point lights - a point in space emitting light
• Spot lights, like real spot lights
• directional lights, light that comes from a
  certain direction and exists everywhere in the
  world - doesnt occur in real life but probably
  the most useful type to use
• Also ambient light - exists everywhere in scene -
  by itself its like cartoon rendering - solid
  colour with no shading

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Ambient light

• Background light, is modelled as a constant
• With ambient light alone, all surfaces have equal
  brightness

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Putting it together - the InitialiseLights
function
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Dealing with 3D objects

• In D3D objects are stored in .x files
• To load an object into your program you need to
  define a data structure to store it
• The DXUMESH struct does this for you
• You can draw the mesh with the DXUDrawMesh()
  function
• When you are finished with the mesh you should
  dispose of it with the DXUReleaseMesh() function

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Dealing with 3D objects - code
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Transforming an object

• We can transform an object by transforming the
  WORLD matrix
• This is easiest way to transform
• BUT it actually applies the transformation to the
  whole world
• Which is OK if we only have one object, but is
  NOT OK if we need to transform objects
  independently

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D3DXMatrixRotationY() function

• To set up a matrix for rotation we can use
  D3DXMatrixRotationY() which we pass a pointer to
  a matrix and an angle in radians
• Then if we set the device World matrix to be a
  matrix with rotation then the world will be
  rotated
• (in the following code the DegToRad() macro
  converts from degrees to radians)

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Putting it together - the UpdateWorld () function
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3DStep1 - functions

• Discussion so far has described in detail three
  functions in the program
• Initialise3DWorld()
• InitialiseLights()
• UpdateWorld()
• We just need a main loop and a functions to load
  the world, render it, and release it - to
  complete the program

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3DStep1- LoadWorld()

• This loads the car mesh, a font for writing, and
  initialises the 3D world and lighting

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3DStep1- RenderWorld()

• Draws the mesh and string

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3DStep1- Release World

• Release resources

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3DStep1- WinMain()

• The Winmain() function does the D3D, windows, and
  input initialisation
• It calls LoadWorld() to initialise the world
• Game loop calls updateWorld and renderWorld
• Cleans up on exit()

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GAME 3D - ENGINE
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Model Viewer

• The purpose of this example is to provide an
  introduction to the engine functionalities.
• This example does not use the full engine, only
  the components needed to load and view a model in
  3D (S3D format), but all the components to
  develop a game will be provided.
• This presentation will cover the code and
  concepts needed to make this example.

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Key Topics

• The following areas will be investigated
• Controls
• Renderer
• Models
• GameBase
• Resources
• Input
• DirectoryManager

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Summary

• You should be able to take any of the examples
  and do various things like
• load up a different object
• load up two objects
• play around with the lighting parameters
• create another light
• transform the object around the other axes
• Etc