Vector Graphics

Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and polygons, which are all based upon mathematical equations to represent images in computer graphics.

This is a vector graphic.

A vector graphic is made up of points in space called vectors. The advantage of vector graphics, in comparison to bitmaps, is that it can be rescaled without lowering the quality. Another advantage is that Vector graphics take up less memory space than bitmaps. Many modern graphics programs can create vector images. Good examples would be Photoshop and Macromedia Flash.

Vectorising an image is a good way to take uneccesary detail from an image.

Images: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

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 what is behind it. If you render out of order, you can end up with all sorts of strange effects. 

In the second approach, you render the whole frame at a much larger resolution than you intend to display it, and then when you scale the image down your sharp jagged edges tend to be blended away in the scaling. This second approach gives nice results, but requires a large memory footprint and a lot of memory bandwidth, as the card needs to render more pixels than are actually in the resulting frame. Most new cards handle this fairly well, but still have multiple antialiasing modes you can choose, so you can trade off performance vs. quality.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park Video

Pixels

A pixel, meaning picture element, is a point in a picture comprised of one colour. Pictures are made up of thousands, sometimes millions, of pixels. When these pixels are put together they appear to be connected and make a picture. Depending on the amount of pixels and the quality of the display system the resolution will change. VGA systems display 640 by 480, or about 300,000 pixels. In contrast, SVGA systems display 800 by 600, or 480,000 pixels.

History of video games

Eventually game designers realised that there was only one thing missing from games, a story. A game, much like a film, needs a story to connect with the player. To make a story the designers needed a hero but were only held back by the amount a processing power in the early 70’s. Shigeru Miyamoto, an aspiring artist and story writer, created Mario. The first true game hero

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 polygon rates is that marketing rates are the theoretical amount of polygons that a card can achieve. Real world rates are a realistic amount.

The lowest rendering unit that all graphic cards use is a primitive which is almost always a three point triangle.

The advantages of using higher-order surfaces like patches is that they can create a higher polygon rate

Types of occlusion culling techniques include Portal Rendering, which divides a scene into rooms and portals (doors), and computes which sectors are visible by clipping them against portals, and PVS (Potentially visible set) which divides a scene into regions and pre-computes visibility for them.

The five stages of the Basic Graphics Pipeline

1: The game decides what objects, models and textures will appear in the game.

2: The game passes the information to the renderer. In the case of the models, the renderer might first look at the size of the model and where the camera is located and then determine whether the model is onscreen or off-screen.

3: The world visualization system determines where the camera is located and what sections polygons of the world are visible from the camera viewpoint.

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 the video game industry and created one of the most memorable games ever. Space Invaders, where a player is attacked by never ending waves of alien invaders. It took off instantly. The only bad thing about this game was that it always ended in the players defeat, there was no way to win.

In 1980 Namco created Pacman, the first video game super star with games still being released today after 25 years. Pacman or Eatman in Japan, was the first game to have a hero.

In 1983 the video game market crashed because of a very large amount of bad and poorly made games. But halfway around the world in the USSR Alexey Pajitnov had created one of the most addictive games ever, Tetris. The game was sold around the world and made millions. The games created in this era, the golden era for video games, set the foundation for the next era of gaming.

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 the cold war to simulate war games. In 1958 a nuclear physicist, William Higginbotham, who had worked on the first atomic bomb turned two lines and a bouncing ball into the worlds first interactive form of entertainment on a computer “Tennis for two”. He used a scilloscope, one of the most expensive pieces of equipment at that time, to create his game.

In the early sixties programmers with an interest in the space race began to make use of the first computers, a programmer named Steve Russel figured out that with a computer he could create to spaceships that would fire missiles at each other, unfortunatly the computer used at the time, a PDP-1, cost around $120,000. He found his game boring and people asked him if he could make something blow up. So he did, he created a game where two ships shoot missiles at each other AND blow up. This was the most popular computer game for about two years, but only because it was the only one. The code for the “Spacewars” program was passed around from programmer to programmer and soon anywhere with a PDP-1 computer had Spacewars.

Ralph Baer created the first home video game console, the Magnovox Odyssey aka. the brown box. Ralph started working on this idea in 1966 and it was eventually released in 1972.

In the late sixties and early seventies Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, realised that war games weren’t going to be very popular. The time of peace and love. Hippys! He had an idea to create Pong, inspired by a game that he had played on the Manavox Odysey. Nolan Bushenell was the first person to think he could make money off of video games and launched the video game industry. The programmer who programmed Pong, Al Alcorn, had it working, with sound, in just three days. Pong was released in 1972 as an arcade game and the video game industry was born. The odd thing about pong was that it was a two player game, it required two people to play, unless you wanted to be playing against yourself. Suprisingly the game was played more by women than men, simply because they were better at it.

Genres

Audiences

select texts on basis of genre, often because texts are arranged at retail outlets by genre (just pop along to HMV). Also, certain genres are considered appropriate to certain ages/genders in society, and choices are made accordingly eg teen movie, ‘chick flicks’ have systems of expectations about the content and style of a text, according to its genre. This enables them to take particular pleasures in the text, those of repetition, and of predicted resolution. Pleasure may also be drawn from differences. identify with repeated elements in generic texts and may shape their own identity in response (eg fans of a particular genre of music dress in a specific way – metalheads in their band t-shirts, for instance)

Producers

market texts according to genre because a niche audience has already been identified as taking pleasure in that type of text standardise production practices according to genre conventions, thus cutting costs subscribe to established conventions of versimilitude, thus reinforcing genre conventions, but also allowing creativity within a given format eg) it is an accepted convention in science fiction that spaceships make noises, which helps create excitement in battle scenes, but it is a scientific fact that no sound travels through the vacuum that is space.

http://mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/genre.html

A genre is useful to both audiences, so that they know what they are going to watch, read or hear and media producers so that they know what audiences they are trying to appeal to.

There are many different Genres for each type of media here are some of the most common for each

Theory Into Practice

Some groups of people are more interested than others in specific areas of the media. This Yachting Magazine would only be bought by a very wealthy person with a lot of disposable income.

 

Cheshire Life is a magazine for the wealthy home owners of Cheshire. It would only be bought by people who are middle class and are reasonably well off.

 

A local paper will tell you about people and events from the surrounding area, whereas a national paper will tell you about country or world wide events. In a local paper you can learn about current house prices, economy and other matters to do with your area. In a national paper you get the world news, the economy of the entire country and other things that may concern the entire population.