A new adventure has begun… The wrath of Khan!

Welcome back you all! Spring break is over, and I am already two weeks into the quarter. This time I will use this blog to talk about the second Game Engine Programming class (GAM575). Same professor (Ed Keenan) and same students (well, actually only the ones the survived the first class, some were lost in combat … minute of silence … ), but new cool and interesting adventures. Let the fun start!

First assignment is up! I started working on it yesterday, so let me use this post to introduce you to how this quarter is going to be distributed. There are going to be 3 big programming assignments in total. According to Keenan they require less code than the previous quarter, but a more intelligent design and approach. Here you have a little description for each assignment:

• Assignment #1 – FBX Converter: during this quarter we will be using standard format FBX for loading complex models into our engine. Therefore, this assignment is about building an offline format converter to read FBX files and extract all the vertex and polygon information to create a run-time file format that can be loaded directly in the engine without using any type of conversion (array of vertex, normals, UV coordinates and triangle indices).
• Assignment #2 – Animation Engine: once again we will build an offline converter that extracts Animation data from an FBX file (Skeleton and Animation) and stores it in a run-time file format. In addition, we have to create the functionality in our engine to support animation running. Finally, we have to be able to do interpolation between animations (transitions in-between).
• Assignment #3 – Skinning:  we have to extract Skin and Bone information from an FBX file (another offline converter) and display the animation of the rigid body. We are going to learn to ways of doing this: EA technique and Midway technique (don’t ask me what are they about, don’t know yet).

That’s about it, three (3) assignments; they look really interesting and should be great bullet points for my resume. I will be back soon with more information regarding Assignment #1. 

Adios!

P.S.: I also have another blog for the Multiplayer Game Development class I am taking. Enjoy it!