Lighting

API
API originally meaning Advanced Programming Interface, is now more commonly known as Application Programming Interface. An API is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be ade of it by computer programs, in other words, it serves as a way for two programs to interact with [...]

What is a games engine

A games engine is the core of any game. It can make it run on multiple platforms like Xbox, playstation and Wii. It provides a working enviroment to quickly and efficiently design and create games. The games with the best engines have better graphics, better sound and would probably include Havoc physics. Havoc is an [...]

Anti-Aliasing

Anti-Aliasing is where the 3D card blurs pixels so that you don’t get jagged edges on polygons.
There are two ways for a 3D card to generate anti-aliased images. One approach is at the individual polygon level, requiring you to render polygons in back to front of the view, so each polygon can blend appropriately with [...]

Culling Methods

Three hundred thousand triangles are a problem for game coders because even the best coders can’t handle that much at once. Without severely lagging (FPS below 60). To combat this problem, culling was introduced as a method of the engine removing polygons that are not visible to the camera.
The difference between marketing and real world [...]

History of video games 1972-1985

The 70’s were the golden age of arcade games and when Japan caught on it was made even better. When Japan caught onto what the rest of the worlds technology was doing. They caught up, made it better started mass producing it and making it cheaper. In 1978 Tomohiro Nishikado was the first to latch onto the [...]

History of video games 1958-1972

Video gaming is a multi billion pound industry with possibly the largest group of customers ever. Back in the days of 8 bit colour making games was difficult but now making a game is like producing a movie, it takes a lot of time and even more money.
Video games orginated from computer systems used in [...]

Renderers

 Rendering is the process of creating a 3D image

A CPU spends over 50% of its processing time on rendering. 
API stands for Application Program Interface. 
It is more difficult to build a renderer for a PC because its hardware changes over time; on a console it stays the same. 
Vertices are points in the 3D world. Which, [...]

Game Physics

The main purpose of a physics engine are to make life like physics involving gravity, collision detection, particles such as explosions and, in more sophisticated engines, ragdolls.  
Ragdoll physics treats a characters “dead” body as a series of rigid bones connected by hinges at the joints, making it react as it would in a real life situation.

Unreal engine

The Unreal game engine is a significant game engine as it was the first to integrate rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networkng and filesystem into one complete engine. (Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine).
 Unreal Engine 1 was created in 1998 with the game “unreal”. After that, Epic have made two other variations. Unreal Engine 2 in 2003 then [...]

2D games engine history

 The first succesful 2D computer game was Pong for the Atari, created in 1972 by Atari Inc. Pong is a first generation video game, a term used to describe the video game industry between 1972 and 1977, we are now in the seventh generation.

2D game engines are used to create single perspective games, normally viewed from [...]