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A Layman’s Guide to Projection in Videogames « Significant Bits Oftentimes when a videogame has a skewed, overhead point of view, we call it isometric. That’s rarely the accurate term, though, and it’s not just pointless semantics. Although Echochrome uses a single projection type, its gameplay is based on constantly rotating and morphing its 3D structures. Projection basically means taking a three dimensional object and displaying it on a 2D plane (i.e., a screen). So what exactly are these projection types? 1). Orthographic projection relies on a lack of perspective and a consistent relationship between its axes. The side, top-down, and bird’s eye Orthographic views, with some faking. Top-down views tend to look a little awkward rendering pyramid-shaped structures. A side-view Orthographic projection is often simulated in platforming games, showing a scene as viewed through the player’s eyes. These views are pretty prevalent in 2D games, especially since so many of them rely on blocky tiles, but they usually end up breaking a few projection rules.

Resource for Photoshop tutorials, textures, brushes, and actions Understanding Steering Behaviors: Pursuit and Evade - Tuts+ So far we have looked at the seek, flee, arrival and wander steering behaviors. In this tutorial, I'll cover the pursuit and the evade behaviors, which make your characters follow or avoid the target. Note: Although this tutorial is written using AS3 and Flash, you should be able to use the same techniques and concepts in almost any game development environment. You must have a basic understanding of math vectors. What Is a Pursuit? A pursuit is the process of following a target aiming to catch it. When pursuing something, the pursuer must follow the target, but it also has to anticipate where the target will be in the near future. Predicting the Future As described in the first tutorials the movement is calculated using Euler integration: As a direct consequence, if the current character's position and velocity are known it is possible to predict where it will be within the next T game updates. The key for a good prediction is the right value for T. Pursuing Improving Pursuit Accuracy

Ray Tracing and 3D Links - 3D Model Sites back to main link index Starship Modeler A plastic modeling resource that has pictures and blueprints that can also be valuable to the 3d modeler. Categories include star trek and star wars as well as babylon 5, 2001 and 2010, space 1999, mecha, and real spacecraft. Don't miss it! Starship Schematic Database The best source for 5-view starship (blueprints for Star Trek and Star Wars. Thomas Models Thomas Models, your source for truly authentic resin and vacu-form Trek type model kits. 3DS Models 3Dimension 70+ free models 3ds, dxf, lwo many excellent objects 3D Majik Small collection of free 3ds models most are pay for models 3D Models 6 Free - .3DS format - Book,Candles, Stero Cab, Hand ... 3d Models Free .3ds StarWars, StarTrek, Babylon5 Very high quality 3D Models 15 Free .3ds Models Swords, misc Medium quality 3DS and COB Models Football (.cob), Mech (.cob), Warrior bug (.3ds), Futurecar (.3ds) 3DS Models Free - Sci-Fi - Babylon 5, Starwars, Star Trek High quality Arkons Free Models Free .3DS models.

Quick Tip: Cheap 'n' Easy Isometric Levels - Tuts+ If you're hacking a game together for a jam or #1GAM, you're probably not too concerned about doing it "the right way". In this article, I'll share some tips for drawing and coding pseudo-isometric levels quickly and easily. Technically, "isometric" refers to a projection where the angle between the x-, y-, and z-axes (in screen dimensions) is 120°. But forget that! Check this out. Start with a grid like this (I'll call this a Cartesian grid): Rotate it 45°: Squash it 50% vertically: Done! That grid's not going to make much of a game on its own. Here's the object I'll use (from The Noun Project): We don't need to rotate it or squash it to make it fit on the grid; just scale it down appropriately: As you can see, the base (the guy's feet, in this case) should just go in the centre of the grid space. We could use trigonometry or a transformation matrix or something, but there's some simple algebra that'll do the job. Measure the diagonal tile half-width and half-height (in screen dimensions):

3D CAD Browser - Home Very Informational The guide to implementing 2D platformers | Higher-Order Fun Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details. The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you have any sort of feedback, correction, request, or addition – please leave it in the comments! Disclaimer: some of the information presented here comes from reverse engineering the behavior of the game, not from its code or programmers. I can think of four major ways in which a platform game can be implemented. Type #1: Tile-based (pure) Character movement is limited to tiles, so you can never stand halfway between two tiles. Flashback, shown with tile boundaries Examples: Prince of Persia, Toki Tori, Lode Runner, Flashback How it works Advantages of this system include simplicity and precision. Type #2: Tile Based (Smooth) Slopes

Math for Game Developers Video Series I've launched a new Youtube series, Math for Game Developers. Each week I'll be showing how to solve a new problem in game development using math, and I'll be building up a math toolkit that you can use to solve any game dev problem. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. This is very basic stuff, just showing the basics of vector maths, buteventually I'll be progressing to explaining the math behind moreadvanced things. I hope to help out people who are just starting their game dev career soplease let me know if I can improve the videos (other than the lowquality audio, a problem I'm working on) or if you didn't understandsomething

The Guide to Implementing 2D Platformers - Game Programming This article was written by Rodrigo Monteiro and originally published on his own blog at Higher-Order Fun and reprinted on our site (thanks to Rodrigo) in order to provide everyone with this great resource. Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details. The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you have any sort of feedback, correction, request, or addition – please leave it in the comments! Disclaimer: some of the information presented here comes from reverse engineering the behavior of the game, not from its code or programmers. It’s possible that they are not ACTUALLY implemented in this way, and merely behave in an equivalent way. I can think of four major ways in which a platform game can be implemented. How it works

A* Pathfinding for Beginners By Patrick Lester (Updated July 18, 2005) This article has been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Finnish, German, Greek, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish. Other translations are welcome. See email address at the bottom of this article. The A* (pronounced A-star) algorithm can be complicated for beginners. While there are many articles on the web that explain A*, most are written for people who understand the basics already. This article does not try to be the definitive work on the subject. Finally, this article is not program-specific. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Introduction: The Search Area Let’s assume that we have someone who wants to get from point A to point B. [Figure 1] The first thing you should notice is that we have divided our search area into a square grid. These center points are called “nodes”. Starting the Search We begin the search by doing the following: [Figure 2] Path Scoring where H can be estimated in a variety of ways. 1.

N Tutorial B - Broad-Phase Collision SECTION 3: Object Grid The grid structure described above can also double as a spatial database used to manage dynamic objects. Just as each cell contains information about the tile located in that cell, it can also contain information about each dynamic object currently located in the cell. There are two approaches that can be taken when using a grid with dynamic objects: "normal" grid: each object is associated with all of the cells it touches. . pros: each object needs to look in at most 4 cells to find other objects it might collide with . cons: each object needs to be inserted/removed from up to 4 cells every time it moves; also, additional logic needs to be added to the collision code to deal with a case where, for instance, two objects touch the same two cells. "loose" grid: each object is placed in a single cell: that which contains its centre. In our implementation, each cell has: .next //the head of the linked list .prev //always equal to null since .next is the first list entry