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

  

Game sorts out the cameras    Passes onto the renderer and it sorts out what is onscreen or not And sizes up the models    The world visualization system determines where world camera is    The renderer transforms the polygons according to math    The renderer checks if the api card is using it as the bas    The render sends the polygons to the api/graphics card

                

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

Genre means type in French it is used the group types of media products together like comedy.

A  genre is made by people repeating the same type of media product, like someone will make a great film that no one has never done before that revolutionises film, like i.e a stealth thriller or somthing and people will make a similar film because it did so good in the box office.

 People like genres because people in general stick to what they like they are hnot very open minded. they are more likly to buy the same type of music over and over insted of changing suddenly one day

so pople build up connections with certant bands and music types and if a band in that genre changes their style to a different genre they will lose all there fanbase because they dont like their music anymore and wont buy it.

Then more people make it and then you have a genre of films. ‘stealth films’

people expect things from genres like people who are into a type of music like rock and they buy the new rock album and they have changed the background into jazz blues

people are going to be offended

there are many genre types for each media products

 Film Genre

Horror, Action, Thriller, Action-Thriller, Crime, Sci-Fi, Comedy, Rom-Com, Drama, Documentary, History, Adult, Family, Anime, Cartoon, Martial Arts,

Games

Stealth, Survival-Horror, Role Playing Games, First Person Shooter, Third Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy, Family, Platform Games, Adventure, Life-sim

 Television

Sit-com, Comedy,Reality Tv, History, Adventure, Film, Crime, Makeover, Quiz, Music, Play, Kids, Cartoons, Shopping,

Magazines

Adult, Car, Computers, Girl Magazines, History, Gardening, House hunting, Music, Film, Puzzle, Collectables magazines, Cooking,Computers,  Antiques, Yacht, Fishing, Gaming, Computer Building,

Radio

Talkshows, Comedy, News, Music, Sport, Quiz,  

Internet

Adult, Streaming, Social-Networking, Dating, Games, Shopping, News, Kids, Cartoons,

Music

Rock, Soul, Motown, Funk, Jazz, Hip-hop, RnB, Rap, Dance, Techno, Punk, Indie, Pop, Metal, Classical, Grunge, Grime, Niche, House, Drum and Bass, Electro, Reggae, Crunk, Latin, Country, Christian, Bounce, Tribal, Experimental, Scat, Trance, Blues,

Ign (Website)

target audience is young men in teens and people in their 20s that play video games

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

File Format ResearchVector Graphics (geometric modelling, Object-oriented graphics)

Vector images are similar to jpegs and bitmaps but they are different and much more useful because vector images can be stretched and twisted and the stays the same. Vector images can also be edited alot more for example. the detail of the images can be removed to make an images for a leaflet or sign. Vector images are different to raster images because they record points on the entire picture just like star constellations and this means that the images can be remembered. They are remembered because of lots of mathematical equations

Raster Images

Raster images are usually made a very a large group of rectangles called pixels each of these pixels have a colour this makes up the picture and how the picture is coloured and looks. Unlike vector images when raster images are stretched the squares become bigger and because further squares are not added the images becomes very very blocky giving the picture less definition therefore ruining the picture .On the other hand raster images are very small in size compared to vectors so you sacrifice quality for quantity. As you can store more raster images then vectors this means raster images are more practical in everyday use than vectors but vectors have better quality overall. So in summary raster images should be used for everyday purpose and vector images should be used for the specialist jobs like graphic design for websites or concept art for games.

Bitmap

 Bitmaps are images that are based on lots of small squares know as pixels. Every single pixel has a different colour and place given to it.  A disadvantage of bitmaps is that when you resize the images to look bigger or smaller they become distorted and look blurry ruining the picture your trying to edit Bitmaps can be used for artwork in painting programs and photos You need to choose the operation system when you save bitmaps like windows or  OS/2Also these files can only go up to 32 bits in the colours range

 Vector

 Vector graphics look good at any size so you can rescale them to any size and they will end up looking like the original picture, so these are good for logos or maps as well as being better to resize vector graphics are smaller in size than gifs meaning they take up less space and can be downloaded faster

 MPEG 

  Mpeg stands for moving pictures experts group, This is also refers to the family of digital video compression standards and also the file compressed done by this group MPEG is able to get a high compression rate because it only stores the changes from one frame instead of each other frameThis is very very good because the space is so small you can store many many mpegs on your computer it is also a lot easier to share the files with your friends or add them to a personal website on the internet Overall it’s the most useful if you want to show quick funny video you have made to you friend over msn and have a laugh  

Photoshop .psd .pdd

 This is the default save file format for Photoshop, these files may be big because they contain all the information about the layers channels and effects so that people can edit the picture more.The files can then be saved as a different format like a gif or an mpeg this reduces the size of the fileThe main purpose of this file is so that you can go back to your image and continue to edit it from where you left off Like in collage you doing images for your website and don’t get it finished in time you can save it and edit it tomorrow or when ever you like The bad thing about these files is that if you’re doing a lot of editing the file becomes bigger and takes up a lot more space so if you edit a lot it will take up all your space The great thing about these files is that you can come back and edit your files and take your canvas with you on a usb or a hard drive Also the ability to make your image into a vector or lots of other different file formats is very handy alsoLarge Document Format .psbPsb files are only used in Photoshop cs and cs2. this file holds documents of 300,00 pixels so it if very good for when your working with a large file

   CompuServe GIF .gif 

The gif is the most common type of file format found today most images that are on the internet are gifs This is because of the small’s size and acceptable quality The bad thing about gifs are that if you resize the gif to a bigger size that it originally was the picture will be distorted and hard to find out what it is Gifs are the most practically for everyday use because of its small size so it means that more of them can be store don peoples computers and easily uploaded onto the internet GIF stands for graphic interchange format and was made to compress images.This format is used a lot on the internet GIFS can be used to make small animations like flipbooks Gif pictures can have up to 256 bits  

Photoshop EPS .esp 

 As well as a shorted version for Spain (espanyol)  Esp files are used for when images are to be imported into other programs like PageMaker or Quarkxpress Also esp is used for printed images and CMYK mode As well as all that esp allows you to save paths but sadly not alpha channels 

Print 

All esp files are used in print because they have a vector format. This is because they look good in any resolution for any printerIt is made thinking about the print colour space The bad thing with these files is is that it looks really bad on the screen because it uses a very low resolution and bad colouring but when it is changed to a postscript printer it looks great 

Changing of the file formats

 Mostly every graphic on the internet today are bitmaps like gifs and jpegs but there is an increase of vectors for people website logos and pictures they have drawn like art and animations A while ago the only vectors used on the internet where in flash but now there are others coming out that use vectors like SVG This lets web site designers use vectors which will make there graphics look amazing this has increased the quality of the websites on the internet today 

File Formats And Colour

 Different images file formats can have lots of different colours Each file format will have its own bits per pixel that it can support 1 bit per pixel refers to an image with 2 colours 4 bits per pixel refers to an image with up to 16 colours 8 bits per pixel refers to an image with up to 256 colours 16 bits per pixel refers to an image with up to 32, 768 colours 24 bits per pixel refers to an image with up to 16, 777, 216 colourssssss

Bit Depth

a bit is the smallest unit used for measuring on computer information. each bit can either be a 1 or a 0 (off or on) Bit Depth is used for the number of  colours that can be shown on the computer. ther bigger the bit depth the more colours can be displayed in the picture.this increases the files size

 

Bit Depth	Formula	Number of Colors
1-bit	21	2
2-bit	22	4
3-bit	23	8
4-bit	24	16
5-bit	25	32
6-bit	26	64
7-bit	27	128
8-bit	28	256
24-bit	224	16,777,216

Graph Taken from

http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/webtech/CS2/unit_graphics1/gb_print.html.

Colour Space

Grayscale:

Grayscale is when you change all the colours in your picture to gray, everything is changed into black white and gray.

grayscale picture are very different to just black and white pictures because when its black and white, black and white are the only colours in the picture but garyscales adds gray giving the image a bigger range of colours.

RGB

RGB

 simple stands for red green and blue. RGB is when the lights of all three colours gets combined and make alot of various colours, RGB is used for televisions

YUV