There are core tasks that programmers face when scripting intelligent life like behaviour for npcs these core tasks are as follows.

synchronization of synthetic speech gestures, the rexpression of emotion and personality by means of body movement and faical display, the coordination of the embodied conversational behaviour of multiple characters possibly including the user and the design of the artificial minds for syntheic characters.

topology analizer is a script that analizes the 3d world of a game is measures all of the shapes within the game and tells the npcs various things

it identifys all potential locations from where an enemy can easily shoot and hide

The 3d topology analyser will dynamically identify all potential loctations from where one can shoot at a VIP. You will then be able to position body guards in order to cover these threats also the 3D topology analyser will dynamically identify the different ways to reach enemies to organize an opposite flank assault

it even positions your camera properly, the 3D topology analyser will identify the best perspective that gives you the best understanding of scene topology

Game developers are constantly working to fix blindness of NPC’s in games, they are making the constantly pushing the envolope and making npcs smarter, realistic and more human. they have put in a trajectory computation into the dynamic world enabling NPC’s to react to any changes to the games scenery say if the user blocked the door to a room. they would try and find a way in and if not they would try somthing else, like throwing grenades through the window.

Aswell as all of this games developers have also changed the way the NPC’s reacts to enemy movement. say the npc had a rocket launchers and the rocket took a while to travel throught the air, and the npc had to shoot a enemy vehicle that was traveling pretty fast. the npc would judge the speed the vehicle was moving and try and shoot the rocket so it hit the vehicle

npc stands for non playable character, npcs are characters a video game that the user dosnt controll insted the npc is controlled by the game itself using A.I which stands for artificial intelligence

the core tasks of an npc aresynchronization of synthetic speech and gesture, the expression of emotion and personality by means of body movement and facial expression

also the conversational behaviour of multiple characters possibly including the user and the design of artificial minds for synthetic characters

npcs character require data to move intelligently these are;

the data must cover

.identify all potential locations from where an enemy can easily shoot and hide

. the 3d topology analyser will dynamically identify all potential locations where one can shoot at a vip. you then be able to positiob body guards in order to cover these threats.

. the 3d topology analyser will dynamically identify the different ways to reach enemies to organize an opposite flank assault.

.to position your camera properly, the 3d topology analyser will identify the best perspective that gives you the best understanding of scen topology

accurate world navigation is also known as path-finding

world navigation is broken down into to areas these are know and world navigation and local navigation

world navigation handles all the rooms doors and general geograph ad works out how to get the play or character from point A to point B in the game world

then there is local navigation where you move the npc from where he is in the world to where he thinks he just heard a noise

i would say that local navigation is more dynamic that world navigation because in theory its harder to do. making the npcs come in contact with objects and changes with that the players changes i.e

nocking on a wall, this looks more realistic when done correctly as it makes the npcs seem more human

Flocking algorithms are the rules given to an NPC this has an effect the way the NPC acts and interacts with objects and other NPCS in the game world. flocking algorithms have three main rules.

Separation makes the NPC’s Avoid crowding with other npcs there is also alignment which Makes the NPC’s steer towards average heading of other NPC’s

finally there is Cohesion which makes npcs steer towards average position of other npcs in the gaming world.

A group of npcs working together as a unit inside a gaming enviroment

Peter Molyneux believes AI with change the way games are designed because over time our technology are processors and graphics cards become more powerfull eventually the graphics in games will reach a point where they are virtually real. and connot progress anymore. he thinks thats it is up the the ai to makes games better and more realistic he wants to makes the AI makes us feel emotions like a film or a book or even a person in real life would make us feel.

Emotions like love and friendship he wants us to bong with the characters in games. so that the games become more immersive and enjoyable and also leave an impact on the people playing them instead of oh lets just shoot 300 people. like most generic first person shooters that keep being plopped out by the like of microsoft which have no story at all i.e halo3

which only selling point realistically is the multiplayer which is poor at best.

Jess Crable thinks that balance is important in games because if a games AI is too realistic then the fun will be gone. if the game isnt fun then user will never want to play it and people will not buy the game. He also thinks that there should be variety and randomness in the games. he thins that there should be variety in some behaviors and also some unpredictability, as long as it is believable.

Chess is example of emergent gameplay because it has a set of rules that the computer follows. But the computer can play play the game anyway it wants but it must it stays within the rules and everytime you play you get a different game. you will never ever get the same game twice this is why is it is an emergent game

starcraft can be considerd an emergent gameplay game the user can go into skirmish and play the computer and the

computer builds a base and attacks just as a human player would do and you will never get the same game twice

another emergent game is command and conquer

both command and conquer generals and starcraft are real time strategy and can both be played against the computer in skirmish mode getting a different game everytime

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Disadvantages of a mesh system

the disadvantages of a mesh based system is that the about of vertices in memory gets multiplied by the amount of frames ie 300 vertices in one frame and overall there are 1- frames there will be a total of 3000 vertices

this stacks up very quickly

The Advantages of skeletal animation

The advantages of skeletal animations system are that this system is very realistic it makes the model appear more lifelike and realistic and also you only have to animate the skeleton (which is about 50 bones a model) which saves alot of memory

i these pictures you can see a skeleton and a mes based character.in these pictures you can see the weigh curves the bigger the curve the bigger effect

the weight on a vertex is effect the bone has on the mesh, the bigger the curv is on the modle the bigger the effect it has on the mesh when you decrease the weight the skeleton the mesh dosnt deform properly hwne the skeleton moves and ends up looking like the picture in the right

API

api stands for application programming interface

an API is a source code interface that another computer application provides support requests to for services made of it by a computer programme there are many examples of APIs such as windowsAPI, OpenGL, YoutubeAPI and DirectX

in summary an API is an interface that programmers use to get there rpogram to use another program so an API would use the command jump so the programmer would program a line of code saying when the user presses this or types this ie a button or type hop, jump in the API is activated

Lighting in Open GL

there are the open gl lighitng vertex, pixel and polygon

also there is normal

Vertex Lighting

the advantages of vertex light are that

each polgon will point in a slightly different direction and will wind up gradating and interpolatinf light colours across a the polygon and you get smoother lighting as a result

also the hardware can be used faster using transform and lighting

the drawback of vertex lighting is that it dosnt produce shadowing

trasform and lighting is the two major steps in the 3d Grpahics pipeline

the trasform is the data taken from the world space and gets ‘trasformed’ into screen space

Shaders

Shaders are algorithms that conrtols how the object reacts to light shaders can make things look shiney or dull and make the object seem more lifelike

if i was going to use a shader to make my object appear shiny i would use Phong because it Gouraud make the obejct look a little dull

Lightmaps

Lightmaps light map is a static lighting used in games/programs it is basicly a canned effectthis works well but when the game has dynamic lighting then you have to change the light maps frames to go accordingly with every change that has been made

lightmaps are still used today in games because its so cheap

Foggins comes in handy because you can fade out what is in the distance and so you dont seen the scene and models popping up as you moves towards them

a clipping plane decideds what Models can be scene at a certant range when the models come into the range they appear

Volumetric fod is considered an object. it is a cloud of fog chaging as you move into and that you can pass through and come out on the other side 

A Read-Modify-Write operation is wen for example fog needs to be renderd in the game the fog needs to be transparant so you have to get the pixels behind it mix in the fog and then put the gblended pixel in its place

 There are two different blend modes one is Straight Aplha blending this addes a percentage of the background pixel to the one infront of it

another way of blending is Additive blending which takes a percentage of an old pixels and addes a specific of the new pixel

Culling methods

Three hundred triangles are very bad for games designers because they slow down the game drastically and make it had for the game to reach 60 fps a jey goal for every single game made

If they do not have 60 fps the game will look choppy and slow and will ruin the game and no one will buy it

The different with marketing polygon rates and real world polygon rate are that the marketing rate tell you how many polygon the graphics card can take like ie 800,000 but it doesn’t take in consideration the fact that the graphics can is also doing the details of every single polygon like lighting so in fact it actually takes less polygons than said in the marketing rates

A primitive is the lowest rendering unit a graphics card it uses a three-point triangle method

The advantages of using higher-order surfaces in games are that you can make harder edge softer edges and terrain editing. Higher-order surfaces are used to try out some experimental technologies.

But with using higher-order surfaces you cannot depend on it’s on its rendering strategies and take up a lot of processing power.

There are lots of occlusion culling methods like portals and bsp trees.

The game sorts out all the cameras and objects in the game then the game passes the information to the renderer and it checks the size it then decided what is not in the shot and determines what is too far away to see

The world visualization system determines what is in the shot of the camera

Basic Graphics pipeline Flow summarised.

The Game decides what objects are in the game what models and textures they have and what animation they use and where they are located in the game.

The game also determines where the camera is in game

The game passes the information to the rendered. the models get sized up and the camera is located and then determined if the object is even onscreen

The world visualization system determines where the world camera is and what polygons of the world can be seen from the camera.

The render transforms all the polygons according to maths to be

The renderer looks at the texture of the polygons and makes sure the api/grapihics card is using it as the base then sends off the polygons to the api

Z-buffering affects the polygons with transparency because it makes it less important to render the furthest away polygons for the ones with transparency 

Ati and NVIDIA (agp pci-e) are examples of apis

T&L allows the card to render the polygons of whatever you are trying to draw at the right place in the world to where you camera is

Is also does calculates for each point or vertex and does clipping operations to see if the polygon is visible or not

The lighting operations work out how bright the textures are depending on the light hits it

Cpus used to do these jobs but modern day cards do it for the cpu so the cpu has less of a workload

Anti-Alising Takes the pixels in the game and blurs the edges of them so that the Hard spikey edges would not be visable

there are two was a 3d card can generate anti-aliased images here are the pros and cons of both

one was is to render each individual polygon from back to front veiw so it can blend appropriately with whats behond it

sadly if you render out of order it can have unusual effects on the game

the second way is to render the whole scene at a higher resolution that what is to be needed then scale down the frame this soud blend away all of the sharp jagged edges

this can get good results but it takes up too much space and some graphics cards cannot handle the frame because of the added pixels

This is an interesting article I found about what the next stage in games development

Computer games are approaching the end of the line when it comes to graphical detail, according to developers, and the only place left to go is character development.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,2121470,00.htm

I think that to be a good level designer you need both because you want the players to be in awe of what there looking at because they use games escape reality, they don’t just want to see some dust bin in the corner they want to see massive towers like the citadel from half life two visible to the player throughout the level

But they also need the game to flow there is no need in having great scenery if the game is too choppy from the low frame rate

You can’t have enough flow in a level but yet you need to be immersed in the game

Sometimes you won’t even notice the amazing scenery in the game because your fighting through all the enemies and exploring the level

Also the level should never annoy the player like putting stupid jumps in that the player dies a lot at or hard to find takes or quests anything annoying to the players should be removed because if you have difficult jumps hard to find items and over the top enemies the player will die too many times get annoyed and curse the game never to play it again. it ruins the flow of the game

In conclusion to make a good level designer you have to get it bang on in the middle because too much scenery high frame rate and slows the game down in overall game play.

But on the other hand people need something to look at otherwise they don’t get immersed.

What is a digital architect?

A digital architect is someone who designers levels for games they use there skills in levels so much that they need to think like an real life architect

They reason there called digital architects is because they make amazing buildings scenery and the whole 3d environment just as a architect would make a cathedral or an opera house in real life

But they create it in virtual reality so they are called digital architects

Moore’s law means for future digital architects is that they will be able to make even better landscape than crisis ever dreamed off they will get better and better until they are life like

Moore’s law mean they can make everything on a whole new scale meaning more of everything

Also the more people will be needed to make a level meaning that there will be a lot more digital architects meaning that the need for digital architects will be a lot less so they will get paid less and wont get work as easy as they used to as the market will be flooded

Also there will be a need for prop designers to make things in barren space they used to use ‘clutter’ to make environments more life like chairs and tables and so on.

Level designers are glue chefs because

They are like chefs because they will get all there ideas together getting all the ingredients and make something special whilst following the guidelines of the design document ‘recipe’

They are glue because they make everything come together they make the ideas of the maps come together in the end

They are the glue because they are considered some of the most important people in the design process

The level designer take everybody’s hard work and puts it all together they take the texture made by the artists and places them in his level or asks the artist to creat a custom piece of work for his level he will figure out where to place the enemies of the level that was created by the programmers and the 3d artists while everything is being rendered by the engine programmer

Peer criticism is great if the level designer ask someone for criticism they tell them what they think is wrong and thus making the level better they could be told something by the criticism that puts everything into a new prospective and give the level designer new ideas on how he is going to make the level

Criticism is good because it makes the product better

i think that for a good level design they need to plan everything before hand but when they come to the level design keep there mind open for things that could be improved or completely changed you never know when your going to get a enw idea whilst making a level so why restricted yourself to what you thought up 2 weeks ago

good things can happen in the spur of the moment

so I think they it should be planned because they will make the level better get rid of a lot of bugs and make the level a lot more fun for the player but keep some improvisation in as well. Because they could just have an epiphany and realise how to make the whole level better

Renderers are very important in games because without them you wouldn’t see anything. They use up 50% of the CPUs processing time so it takes up a major part of the users processor

APIs are 3d accelerator card, API stands for Application program interface

It is harder to make a renderer for the pc because the PCs hardware is constantly improving so the developers don’t usually know the spec of the PCs the players are using

It is easier to make a renderer for the a console because the consoles hardware stays the same until the next console is out they are a ‘frozen snapshot in time’

So they know the specs and what they should aim for

Vertices are 3d objects stored as points in the 3d world these points make up the things in the game like chairs guns dinosaurs and other things

They are all points that have a relation with each other kind of like a vector but 3d

In big complicated games like half life 2 they have thousands and thousands of vertices

In a good games engine the renders are replaceable so that it is very easy to make ports of the game to play on other platforms like releasing a game on Xbox ps3 and pc