Microsoft XNA (a recursive acronym for XNA's Not Acronymed) is a freeware set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates video. The Axiom 3D Engine is an open-source, cross-platform 3D graphics rendering engine for.NET and Mono. GameDev.net is a platform for game developers to learn, share, and connect with other game developers around the world. Join the active game developer forums, learn. Fig 1 – LRO Color Shaded Relief map of moon – Silverlight 5 XNA with Kinect interface. Silverlight 5 was released after a short delay, at the end of last week. Sun. Burn Game Engine for C# / . Net / Mono. Sun. Burn Game Engine. See your games come to life! Build stunning games with beautiful visuals. On February the 5th, 2013, the company went on to create Torque 2D. Torque 2D was a game engine designed for 2D games based on the Torque Game Engine. Sun. Burn Game Engine. Sun. Burn puts professional tools and technology in your hands, making it. AAA quality games. Powerful renderer with support for hundreds of high- quality dynamic lights. Ultra- fast built- in light mapping for highly complex scenes. Edit scenes, materials, lighting, and more with the in- game editor. Material system with full support for custom shaders. Audio, physics, component systems, and much, much more. Direct. X 1. 1 / Open. GL 2. 0 and up with support for Shader Models 2. Free updates for life of the product! Quickly build games with Sun. Burn's easy- to- use editor and api, for: Android. Mac OS XLinux. Windows Phone. Windows Surface. Windows Store. Xbox 3. 60. And more! Join the tens of thousands of developers who already know the power of Sun. Burn! Single API and Multiple Platforms. No porting is necessary, simply create games in C# then run on Windows or. Mac / Linux machine, Surface, tablet, retail Xbox 3. Windows Phone and enjoy! Sell your games online (via Steam, Desura, and similar), on Windows Store, Xbox LIVE Marketplace, Windows Phone. Marketplace, and more, and start making money! All without Dev. Kits, contracts, or additional paid software. Easy Asset Creation. Create buildings, characters, and props using your favorite art tools. Sun. Burn. provides support for Blender, 3. D Studio Max, Maya, Softimage, Modo. Easily create custom file importers and geometry using the Sun. Burn content pipeline. Build scenes and make changes mid- game while playing, and see them in real- time using Sun. Burn’s. built- in editor. Sun. Burn uses native OS controls, not a rendered ui, for fast and. Completely Modular. Use Sun. Burn out- of- the- box or plug in custom code and components. Sun. Burn’s. modular design and access to low- level classes makes it easy to add, customize, and. Best Support in the Business. We provide great products and helpful support for over 1. Sun. Burn. Get help and advice from the Sun. Burn development. Sun. Burn community. And we never charge for product updates – who else can say that? Become a Sun. Burn developer today! And work with a company that understands indie and professional developers alike! Features at a Glance. Check out many of Sun. Burn's key features. For more information and additional. Rendering. Advanced Deferred Rendering. Post Processing, AO, and HDRBlended Terrain with LOD2. D Sprite Rendering Lighting and Shadows. Dynamic Lighting and Shadows. GPU Accelerated Light Mapping. Cocos2D-XNA is a 2D/3D game developer’s framework that is written specifically for XNA. XNA is the game API developed by Microsoft for independently published games. Components have become pretty popular these days and I’d like to share some issues we had with them in our game projects. I was experimenting with component-based. Screen- space Ambient Occlusion. Material- level Ambient Occlusion. Material- level Indirect Lighting Components. Control Object and Light Behavior. Add Custom Components. Plug- in New and Replace Built- in Systems Licensing. Release Unlimited Number of Products. Royalty- Free. No Revenue Restrictions. Build and Release Games and Apps. Build and Release Desktop Applications. Physics. Primitive and Mesh Collisions. Trigger Collision Events. Add Custom Collision Handling Audio and Sound. Play 3. D and Ambient Audio. Place Audio Emitters in the Scene. Both Continual and Fire- and- Forget Materials and Shaders. Diffuse, Bump, and Specular Mapping. Parallax, Emissive, and Color- Specular. Custom HLSL FX Shaders Scripting and Entities. Add code to scene- object events. Write event code in C# Tools and Resources. In- Game World Editor. Live View of External Assets. Place Custom Object Types in Editor. Create and Place Prefabs. Premium Examples and Resources. Create multi- platform games using the same assets and code - no porting is necessary. Sun. Burn's unified API provides the same API, features, and behavior across every platform and device. Rendering. Lightweight, flexible renderer provides both Synapse Gaming’s advanced deferred. Fully supports Sun. Burn Platform Framework Models, custom meshes, and raw vertex and index buffer data. Ideal for games, visualizations, rapid prototyping, and offers access to low- level. Lighting and Shadows. Vibrant lighting system creates smooth, consistent dynamic lighting and shadows. Full range of light types including: point/omni, spot. Efficiently handles hundreds of visible dynamic lights and a variety of lighting models. Built- in shadows use shadow mapping with continuous level- of- detail (LOD), allowing. Ultra- fast built- in GPU accelerated light mapping can bake- down complex scenes in. Light mapping uses the same rich lighting and shadows as Sun. Burn's dynamic lighting. Provides automatic generation of light map UVs (auto- unwrap) and can also utilize user. Automatic material- level ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, and soft fill. Physics. Efficient physics allow scene objects to collide with each other and the scenery. Supports polygon accurate mesh collisions and primitive box, sphere collisions. Trigger events when objects collide and non- collideable object pass through one. Audio and Sound. Flexible audio system supports both location based 3. D emitters and ambient non- 3. D sounds. Play audio continuously or in a single "fire- and- forget" shot. Place audio sources in the scene using the Sun. Burn editor or in code. Automatically balances. Editor. In- game world editor provides control of scene objects, lighting, shadows, materials, terrain. See real- time changes to externally edited assets like textures in- game while working. Built- in project manager allows artists to work on projects entirely from the editor, without. Visual Studio. Create custom scene object and entity types (classes). Custom types are fully supported by. Windows- based interface provides a much smoother, more familiar environment than engine- based. Clean, artist- centric design, which is comfortable, efficient, and easy to use. Materials. Flexible built- in materials automatically support all scene objects, and include. Additional material effects. Edit materials real- time through the Sun. Burn editor, as well as outside of the. Sun. Burn material files. Import many material options directly from. Custom Materials / Shaders. Provides automatic support for custom, user- created shaders using HLSL FX files. Standard Annotations and Semantics (SAS). Custom shader properties are editable through both the Sun. Burn editor and material. Sun. Burn provides automatic lighting, shadows, material (bump, specular, …), and. Terrain. Rich, light- weight terrain visualizes both large scale and small scale worlds. Terrain. materials includes diffuse, normal, specular, and color specular mapping, as well as. Detail based on height map data for easy terrain creation, and to support dynamic effects. Full control of mesh tessellation. LOD) distance, and more. Post Processing, Ambient Occlusion, and HDRBuilt- in High Dynamic Range (HDR) processor provides bloom, tone mapping, dynamic scene. Built- in Screen- space Ambient Occlusion (AO) processor simulates real- time radiosity by darkening. Post processing system allows creating custom full- screen effects such as motion blur. D Sprites. Build complete 2. D worlds with full lighting, shadows, materials, post- processing, and more. Fast and familiar XNA Sprite. Batch- like interface for rendering 2. D sprites. Introduces static. Easily mix 2. D, 2. D, and 3. D objects in the same scene. Includes default orthographic view. D projections for mixing 2. D sprites with 3. D worlds. Art Pipeline. Artist- friendly pipeline provides support for all modeling and texture applications compatible. Sun. Burn Platform Framework including: 3. D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, Modo, Blender, Photoshop, Gimp, and many. Native support for popular file formats including: Fbx, Direct X model (*. Jpeg, Tga. Png, Bmp, Direct X texture (*. Imports many material options directly from the modeling application. Takes full advantage. Sun. Burn Platform Framework content pipeline offering access to both the standard Visual Studio based pipeline, and. Sun. Burn editor (which can run without Visual Studio). Developer Hub. Centralized developer hub can manage and build Sun. Burn projects, provides quick and easy. Keeps you up- to- date with. Architecture. Modular component design ideal for integration into both new and existing games and engines. Quickly plug in custom and 3rd party code, libraries, and systems. Easily override built- in. Control scene object and light behavior with object- level components. Apply components to. Custom components are automatically discovered and available. UI. Create custom scene object and entity types (classes). Custom types are fully supported by. Access to low- level objects such as effects, shadow maps, lights, helper objects, and more. Development Resources. Access to “how- to†code examples, which show common integration techniques, including the. Sun. Burn demos, sample projects, as well as Visual Studio. Starter Kits. Includes Sun. Burn's helpful development community, documentation, and community resources. Article: Making a Game Engine: Core Design Principles - Game. Dev. net. See Also: Making a Game Engine: Transform Hierarchy. Before I get started I want to say a few things. Typically, you don't want to make a game engine, you want to make a game. I hope that this article can help you work on some core design concepts that you can apply when making your game. If you use good architecture you will find your game is less buggy and much easier to maintain. You will also find that you will be able to reuse a lot of code between projects. This reusable core becomes your game engine. Now before I talk about some game- engine- specific design I want to discuss some good design principles for programming in general. General Programming Concepts. While the field of software architecture is vast and volumes of books could be written on the subject, I have chosen to focus on a few important principles that I find to be very important to making a solid game engine. This article alone does not intend to be enough to make a solid core for you game. That is a vast topic and would make a very large article if put in one place but I do hope to help you get one step closer to your goal of completing a game. Cohesion. A highly cohesive class is one that has one and only one clear purpose. I think the best way to understand this is to give a bad example of cohesion then suggest ways to fix it. Player player. Enemy[] enemies. Enemy enemy in enemies). Math. abs(enemy. y - player. Enemy. Sight. Range & & Math. Towards(player. x, player. Down('left')). player. Enemy enemy in enemies). So let me point out a few things wrong with this design. First of all, the class Game has knowledge that there is a single player and a list of enemies. Why is this a problem? Because this class is not reusable nor is it very flexible. Let's say we were using this code and decided we wanted to make the game multiplayer. With the current code, we have single player hard- coded into the game class so adding another would likely be a difficult and buggy procces. Also, the enemy game logic is inside the game class as well. It doesn't belong there. Another subtle problem with this design is that both the player and enemy directly have an x and y variable. This x, y position should be grouped together and the player's position should be accessed using player. The last thing I want to point out is that the game class directly draws the players and enemies and that the player and enemies each have draw methods as well. The problem here is the way the player or enemy is drawn is linked directly with all other attributes of the player. This may not seem like such a problem on the surface but can create problems as things get more complex. It is better to remove drawing code from the player class and putting it into a seperate class. So when writing your games how can you avoid low cohesion and classes and know when you need to break things up? The best way is to describe what that class does in words. If you cannot do it in one sentence without using the word 'and' then you probably should break up the functionality of the class. In the example above the responsibilities of the game class are updating the enemies and updating the player and drawing the player and enemies. So how do you fix this? First of all, create a generic game object and add components to it that each have a specific task. One component to render it, another to handle game logic, another for physics, (etc..). This is far better than making sublcasses of a game object class to add custom behaviour. More on this later. Coupling. Coupling refers to classes using other classes. An example would be a player class containing a weapon class. In this case the player is coupled to the weapon. To promote good design you want to have classes as decoupled as possible. You cannot, of course, remove all coupling between classes, because at some point one class will have to you use another class, but you want have as few dependencies as possible. So again I am going to give a poor example and show why it is less than ideal. Player. Renderer. Player player. bool is. Flashing. if (Player. Touching. Enemy()). So this class also has some cohesion problems: the renderer is responsible for colliding against enemies and flashing the player, but I want to focus on the coupling problems. First of all, There is a player renderer. The name of the class Player. Renderer implies that this class depends on the player but it is also a render system. This class also has a reference to the player collider in it. This means that the drawing system is no longer independent from the collision system and the game logic. Now, changes in the collision system or on the player can effect the render code. Another issue is that the collider class has a is. Touching. Enemy method. This means that the collider knows about the enemies in the game. When a program is tightly coupled like this bugs in one part of the system can propagate and cause problems in seemingly unrelated places. By removing theses inter- dependencies you make it much easier to make changes in one part of the code without worrying about the rest. You could change entirely the rendering engine without touching the collider code. Why would this be useful? Well, if you wanted to make a game engine to support both Direct. X and Open. GL all that needs to change is the render module. The same thing applies with porting games to consoles. All of the game logic can stay the same, all that needs to change is the rendering system, input sytem, and any other hardware- related systems. How do you fix the problem in the code above? By making a generic renderer and a generic collider. These classes should have no knowledge about what type of object is using them. You should just be able to give them parameters, such as what image to draw and other parameters such as color and position and the sub system handles the rest. You then write a class that can interact with these different subsystems and orchestrate them together into a single working game. More on the subject later. The Singleton. Singletons are evil. Don't use them. To elaborate on this more, the use of singletons often creates problems for maintaining the code. They create implicit dependencies in the code and often lead to poor coupling. Since the singleton is accessible anywhere in the code, many times it is used everywhere in the code. If at any time you decide you don't want to have only a single instance of a class you are out of luck. The singleton is already all over the code and it will be a difficult process removing it. Another reason, and possibly one of the the biggest for not using singletons, is that they are often used because they are quick and easy and don't require you to think about the design. Meaning you don't have to carefully plan out your code. You simply make all of the major systems a singleton and allow any object to access anything else at any point. This usually ends up putting code where it doesn't belong and makes certain parts of the code do things it shouldn't be responsible for. When I stopped using singletons I found that I was able to come up with much better design decisions in my code. Because I thought more about how variables and objects would be passed around, it forced me to assess my design and think about it more. Do yourself a favor and don't use singletons. Game Engine Design. So now that we have discussed some general design concepts lets focus on an example of how to structure the core of your game. Keep in mind that the method I am going to describe is not the only way to write a game engine. There is no one right way to make a game. Game Loop. Before I get into game objects and scene I wanted to mention the game loop. Simply put, a game loop first updates the game, then draws a frame and continuously repeats those two things. The game loop should regulate the frame rate to match the refresh rate of the monitor and also compensate with larger time steps when the frame rate begins to drop. I am not going to spend any more time on this subject but here is an excellent article on the game loops. Scene. The scene is what manages all of the game objects. It should receive update and draw messages and pass those onto the components attached to game objects in the scene. A scene represents a level in a game. You can add terrain, enemies, objects, lights, cameras and anything else that belongs in games into the scene. The structure of a scene may look something like this. Game. Objects[] game. Objects. Event. Dispatcher event. Dispatcher. Scene. Renderer scene. Renderer. Input. State input). Dispatcher. send. Event("update", timestep, input). Dispatcher. sent. Event("render", scene. Renderer). void create. Game. Object(). Game. Object result = new Game. Object(). game. Objects. To. Scene(this). // add any component in the game. Object to the event. Dispatcher. // so it can receive update and render messages. Now the scene is completely decoupled from the specifics of what kind of game this is. This core scene class can be reused in any number of game types and serves as part of the foundation of the game engine. A scene can also contain addons, such as the scene renderer or physics engine. Game Object. A game object simply combines a bunch of components. The most common components are going to be the object's transformation, the renderer, physics, and game logic. The game object can also hold a reference back to the scene so the game object can query the scene for information, such as determining if the player is visible to an enemy by accessing the physics engine component of the scene and doing a raycast. The components on a game object should be able to access the other components on the object. Game. Object. Component[] components. Scene scene = null. Component(new Transform()). To. Scene(Scene new. Scene). scene = new. Scene. void add. Component(component). To. Game. Object(this). A transformation holds information about the game object's position, orientation, and size.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |