Date post: | 21-Jan-2018 |
Category: |
Technology |
Upload: | kashif-shamaun |
View: | 4,757 times |
Download: | 1 times |
Game Engine for Serious Games
An Overview by
Flt Lt Kashif Shamaun
What are Serious Games
• A game designed for a primary purpose otherthan pure entertainment. The word “serious“is generally appended to refer products usedby industries like defense, education,scientific exploration, health care, emergencymanagement, city planning, engineering,religion, and politics.
Examples
Basic Components of Game Visuals
• Game Engine aka Rendering Engine
• Image Generator the hardware
• Visual Database
GAME ENGINE
Component I
Game Engine
• Controls the presentation of game world– Geometry and Texture
– 3D Sound
– Simulation (i.e. Physics)
– AI
– Network Traffic
– Environment
– Multiplayer
What is there in Game World
Environment Physics Model Physics
3D Models
3D Sound
Terrain
Texture
AIObject Physics
Geometry & Textures
• Terrain
• 3D Models
Satellite Images + DEM = Terrain
Satellite Images DEMTerrain
How Terrain Looks Like
3D Models
Poly Model Shaded Model Textured Model
3D Sound
3D Sound
• 3D audio– Sounds are part of the scene graph
– Each sound has a geometric location
• Dolby Pro Logic and Dolby Digital– “5.1” channels:
• 2 main, center, 2 rear surround, subwoofer
Simulation or Physics Engine
• Models behavior in game world
• Collision detection
• FDM in case of Flight Simulator
Artificial Intelligence
• Design of intelligent agents where anintelligent agent is a system that perceives itsenvironment and takes actions whichmaximize its chances of success.
• Computer generated forces or enemies
Network Traffic
• Synchronize game clients
– Game world is a distributed database
– Scene graph derived from game world
• Industry standards
– HLA (High Level Architecture)
– CIGI (Common Image Generator Interface)
– DIS (Distributed Interface Simulation)
Environment
• Visibility range
• Cloud layers, solid or variable patchiness
• Wet & snow-covered surfaces
• Thunderstorm cell, lightning flash & bolt
• Volumetric ground & patchy fog
• Sea states 0 through 9
Multiplayer
Multiplayer on LAN or WAN
Game engine operations
• The Game Engine generates an image from models.
• Converts 3D models into 2D images.
Scene Graph
Rendering Stages
Rendering Process
IMAGE GENERATOR
Component II
Typical IGs
Serious Games’ IG
IG Architecture
Modern Graphics Hardware
• Pipelining– Number of stages
• Parallelism– Number of parallel processes
• Parallelism + pipelining– Number of parallel pipelines
1 2 3
1 2 3
1 2 3
1 2 3
1
2
3
Performance parameters
• Caching
• Update Rate
• Display resolution
Gen Lock & Frame Lock
• Genlock & frame Lock is a technique where the video output of one source, or a specific reference signal, is used to sync other picture sources together.
Anisotropic Filtering
• It is a method of enhancing the image qualityof textures on surfaces that are at obliqueviewing angles with respect to the camera.
Light point capacity
• The number of light points that can be handled.
Levels of detail (LOD)
• LODs are sets of models that represent the same object or terrain area with varying degrees of complexity
Levels of detail (LOD)
Antialiasing
• Antialiasing, as the name suggests, is a technique used to combat an effect known as aliasing.
Addressable moving objects
• The number of moving or animated models per frame.
Blend zones and Alpha transparency level
• Alpha blending is the process of combining a translucent foreground color with a background color, thereby producing a new blended color.
• The number of alpha blending in a frame is blend zones.
• Alpha transparency level is the level of transparency that can be handled.
z-Buffer
• It is the management of image depth coordinates in three-dimensional (3-D) graphics
• It is designed to improve efficiency by selectively choosing which elements in a scene need to be rendered
Iteration rate
• The "physics" iterations performed every second.
Polygonal capacity
• The polygon capacity of an image generator is most often expressed in polygons per second.
• The polygons per second number is divided by any frame rate to yield the polygons in each image.
Other Features
• Output modes
• Number of channels
• Database Type Supported
The secret to good IG
Optimize
Maximize
References
• Presages Creator Manuals• “Game Hardware and Engines” by J. Scott Hofmann• www.wikipedia.org• www.gamedev.net• “Game Development All in One” by Bruno Miguel Teixeira
de Sousa• Quantum 3D IG brochures• Medellin 6000 brochure• Images from www.google.com and www.bing.com search
engines• “3D Engines in games” by Author: Michal Valient• “Introduction to Graphics Hardware and GPUs” by Yannick
and Tom