Thread: When to start 3D Game Programming?

Here's a screenshot of my 3D maze so far.

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2417/crazykzd.jpg

I get confused sometimes creating the wall in 3D. Do I need to draw the 3D first in a graph paper? Do graphics programmer do that?

By the way, I didn't apply any linear algebra here. I don't know how to apply it here in opengl. I hope someone will teach where to use it.

I can visualize everything if it's only x and y axis but when the z axis is included, it really burns my brain. rofl. I'll try to draw it on a piece of paper for now. Maybe I'll get used to this someday, I hope.

Imagine viewing the maze from the top. Then it's quite easy. There is a third axis, being Y, but it's always a wall of the same height.
But you're coming along well. I'd say, when you're able to render the walls, do this:
- Collision detection. Not an advanced algorithm, just easily checking whether a move would cross a wall or comet too close to a wall.
- Lighting. Not even required for this game, but it will teach you a lot when you find out how it works.

For giving sound advice?

It comes down to the age old dilemma of a debate becoming a personal attack. Regardless of our horribly poor examples in society around the world where opposing opinions tend to be squashed, ridiculed, or ignored there is actually a proven sound way to debate an issue and/or give advice without becoming personal.

If you were wanting to create your own retail game as in the context of an upstart company then you would definitely want to get a license for an existing engine. You would do this so you could get the product done and out the door and start making money on it. However I would imagine that every employee or at least every employee on the core game dev team would understand how to go about creating their own engine. It really would come down to the cost of the engine vs the cost of the development of an internally developed game engine.

Now if you are a hobbyist programmer and do not ever intend or think it possible to release your game and are only trying to learn then I say roll your own. It is highly probable that those who come here and ask questions about game dev either do not know enough to create the game and/or do not truly understand the concepts behind the graphics engines. Therefore recommending an existing engine to them would only serve to confuse and confound and thus discourage their attempts.

So in short:

Hobby and want to learn more: Roll your own.
Hobby and understand most of the fundamentals: Use an existing engine
Professional: Based on cost you can either choose to develop an in-house solution or you can use an existing third party solution.

Hello gurus,

Here's the 3D maze screenshot so far.

Nothing special
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/3136/boredjbp.jpg

I somehow improve visualizing shapes in 3D now.

-x = left
+x = right
-y = down
+y = up
-z = back
+z = forward

Cool. I can now create simple shapes. How about a teapot? lol

Weird Lighting
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/6625/lightingh.jpg

I'm playing around with the glNormal3f for lighting though. I still can't get it work correctly with multiple triangles. I think I did something wrong.

Blending
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/3227/blendk.jpg

I tried playing around with the glColor4f(); and glBlendFunc(); but still don't get why the ceiling and the floor is not affected. Did I do something wrong?

For the Collision detection: It just check if the camera is too close the wall. So I somehow make it work on the borders by using few if and else but still can't get it work with multiple maze. But I'm trying... really. lol

Hey m3rk:

In an earlier post in this thread you asked if programmers put graphics designs on paper.

No, not in many, many years. We will usually work with art departments.

However, in the earlier days, even then, one of the first common themes was to use the basic game engine to create simple modeling tools. That way you can place walls, doors and other objects in the scene with much less effort.

These days, though, I usually use 3DS Studio Max or Blender (the latter can be downloaded while the former is expensive), and Blender is quite good.

You also said:

"But I'm trying... really. lol"

Ok, then you should do yourself a favor and pick up a good text on the subject.

Frankly, I found that a book published by Morgan Kaufmann called "Mobile 3D Graphics", which is primarily aimed at OpenGL ES, was an excellent ground up discussion of nearly everything important. I think 95% or more of the code examples work in OpenGL 1.5.

Other books in the Morgan Kaufmann series are good, and many are quite in depth.

I think you deserve to have the benefit of a well guided path through the study. It will be much smoother, and faster, with better foundations of how things really should be done.

Even if you're just browsing the subject, instead of serious study, it all makes much more sense from a really good book on the subject, and not an old one, because OpenGL has been through several versions, and there are more than one way to accomplish the same thing, many of which are now no longer used because significantly better methods have been implemented in OpenGL.

Especially due to the mobile use of OpenGL ES, and it's basis on pre-2.0 versions of OpenGL, it is still worth studying a bit of the old and then the new versions of OpenGL, if your targets may need to be compatible with modest hardware.

@JVene

I though graphics programmer are like engineers/architect, lol.

Yeah, I'm creating a md2 loader for my program right now and I don't know what data structure to use. See this link (Data Structure to store unlimited dynamic vectors)

I didn't finish all the collision for all the maze but it works on the end of the map.

I dumped the immediate mode(ie glBegin, glEnd and etc) and studying the advance like using buffers to squeeze more frame rate. I think I'll just focus first in advanced 3D concept and later the collision.

BTW, I bought the book beginning opengl game programming and it's quite good. But I need a more advance book because most of the concept there are immediate mode.

Careful mk27

Please don't take my reply to your points negatively, I hope to advance the discussion from the viewpoint of experience in the field.

I agree with part of the general thrust of you point, and I would put it this way; as programmers, we're consumers of math, not mathematicians.

However, the more one understands linear algebra, or the calculus (when it comes to a physics engine), the better of we are at choosing a method.

Let me take the point about glRotate as an example. A call to glRotate is a simple means of applying a rotation to the current transformation matrix. It is usually implemented in the client, meaning that the math is executed in the CPU, though in theory an implementation could choose to accelerate that in the GPU, I'm not aware of many implementations that do.

The call is performed by creating a matrix representing the rotation you're performing, the multiplying that matrix by the current matrix (one could think of that as applying that rotation to the matrix).

The usual implication is that a typical 4x4 matrix by matrix multiplication is performed. However, if you understand that the rotation matrix is 3x3 (upper left portion of the 4x4), and if you know that your rotation is the first one, you can simply drop the appropriate values into the correct positions as part of filling out an identity matrix, making a considerable performance optimization, if this is something performed in a critical interior loop. Whereas a typical OpenGL sequence might be to call glLoadIdentity, then call glRotate, and then likely a glTranslate - implying two 4x4 matrix multiplications - setting up a matrix according to knowledge of linear algebra (that is, knowing how the matrix is layed out) means you can avoid any matrix multiplication of a simple series like this, greatly improving performance.

("Normal" in this is just a global variable used with calls to glNormal3fv(), since there is no need to keep more than one at a time anyway).

I'm not sure what you mean by this, so I'm setting it aside and describing what is typically done with normals, just in case this ends up misleading the OP, or you.

Generally, at least in modern OpenGL, normals are supplied in interleaved buffers, and there's one per vertex. It is a good choice to prefer this to calling glNormal3fv because the data is sent to the graphics RAM much faster.

Models usually have a normal per vertex, which is why I'm not sure what you mean by a global variable for use with calls to glNormal3fv.