Related classes (both at GaTech and other schools)

Video interview with Aaron Lanterman about the class, conducted by gamezombie.tv at the 2007 Game Developers Conference

Original course proposal webpage - explains some of our original motivations for putting the class together (although some of what's described will be out of date)

Research by people in the game industry:

• Valve Publications (including papers on shading in Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2)
• Insomniac R&D - notice how deep they are into Cell SPU assembly programming!

 

8/20: Session 1 - Introduction (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• Videos: Halo 3 Documentary HD, Ratchet and Clank (PS3) Insomniac Net-Gen Game Design Interview HD
• Not shown during lecture, so be sure to check it out: Ian Bogost on The Colbert Report

8/22: Session 2 - History of gaming hardware: the 2-D era (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• Videos: Intellivision TV Commercials - Plimpton Sports, Major League Baseball, Star Strike; Colecovision 1980s Commercial Atari E.T. Commercial; Sega Genesis - Young Bobby Engles, SEGA Commercial - Sega vs. Nintendo ("Blast Processing") Genesis Does What Nintendon't

8/24: Session 3 - History of gaming hardware: the 3-D era (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

Videos: Insomniac's "Disruptor", Rare's "Goldeneye 007", Namco's "Soul Calibur", John Carmack's "id tech 5" demo at WWDC

8/27: Session 4 - 3D Rendering Pipeline (I), Day 1 (PPT slides, video)

8/29: Session 5 - 3D Rendering Pipeline (I), Day 2 (video)

• Supplemental material: PPT on rotations around an arbitrary axis - not covered in lecture

8/31: Session 6 - 3D Rendering Pipeline (II) (PPT slides updated on 9/10, video), Day 1

9/3: Labor Day

9/5: Session 7 - 3D Rendering Pipeline (II), Day 2 (video)

9/7: Session 8 - 3D Rendering Pipeline (III), Day 1 (PPT slides, video)

9/10: Session 9 - 3D Rendering Pipeline (III), Day 2 (video)

9/12: Session 10 - Direct3D Basics (I), Day 1 (PPT slides updated on 9/15; because of technical difficulties, no video for the main lecture is available)

• Example code for lectures on "Direct3D Basics (I)" (adapts Win32 template code by Frank Luna; D3D internals code mostly written by Prof. Lee)
• F. Luna, Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct X 9.0c: A Shader Approach - The class has no required texts, but if you wanted to get more into Direct3D game programming and wanted to pick up a book on the topic, this is probably one of the better ones.
• Moon Labs website for Frank Luna's books (including a lot of example code)
• Prof. Lee also recommends www.directxtutorial.com

9/14: Session 11 - Direct3D Basics (I), Day 2 (video)

9/17: Session 12 - Direct3D Basics (II), Day 1 (PPT slides, video)

• Some example code for lectures on "Direct3D Basics (II)" (adapts Win32 template code by Frank Luna; D3D internals code mostly written by Prof. Lee)

9/19: Session 13 - GPU Architecture (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

9/21: Session 14 - Guest speaker: Jose Caban, Software Engineer (Tiger Woods PGA Golf), Electronic Arts Tiburon

• No time off from EA's cool capers, Orlando Sentinel, Oct. 15, 2007.

9/24: Session 15 - Direct3D Basics (II), Day 2

• Even more example code for lectures on "Direct3D Basics (II)" (adapts Win32 template code by Frank Luna; D3D internals code mostly written by Prof. Lee)

9/26: Session 16 - Architectural Overview: Xbox 360 vs. Playstation 3 (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• Xbox 360 System Architecture, IEEE Micro, Vol. 26, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp. 25-37.

9/28: Session 17 - Programmable Shaders, Day 1 (PPT slides, video)

• Example code for lectures on "Programmable Shaders" by Prof. Lee

10/1: Session 18 - Programmable Shaders, Day 2 (video)

10/3: Session 19 - Environment and Bump Mapping (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• The Cg Tutorial - This class has no required texts, but this is a good introduction to shader coding and typical tricks, and formed the basis of a lot of the lecture slides. (It is a bit short on info on hooking your Cg code into the main 3D API; you'll need to look elsewhere for that.)
• The Cg Tutorial resources from the NVIDIA website - you can download the Cg Toolkit and the example code from the text here. It's fairly easy to install and run the examples. All of the code shown in lecture was from The Cg Tutorial.

10/5: Session 20 - Projective Textures and Shadow Maps (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• C. Everitt, Projective Texture Mapping
• C. Everitt, A. Rege, C. Cebenoyan, Hardware Shadow Mapping

10/8: Fall break

10/10: Session 21 - Phong vs. Gouraud Shading; C# Gotchas (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

10/12: Session 22 - Introduction to Multithreading (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

10/15: Session 23 - Multicore Strategies for Games (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• Bruce Dawson, Coding for Multiple Cores on Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows (the code examples are C++, not C#, but many of the ideas still apply)
• Bruce Dawson, Lockless Programming Considerations for Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows

10/17: Session 24 - More on Multithreading (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

10/19: Session 25 - Introduction to XNA (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

10/22: Session 26 - Xbox 360 Deployment, Debugging, and Profiling (video)

10/24: Session 27 - Collision detection: convex objects (video)

• Jeff Lander, When Two Hearts Collide: Axis-Aligned Bounding Boxes (requires you to sign up for Gamasutra, which is free)
• Unreal Engine 2 Collision Tutorial

10/26: Session 28 - Collision detection: line with triangle (video)

10/29: Session 29 - Rigid Body Physics, Part 1 (video; supplemental material on quaterions: PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up)

10/31: Session 30 - Rigid Body Physics, Part 2 (video)

11/2: Session 31 - Animation (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

• Jeff Lander, Skin Them Bones: Game Programming for the Web Generation

Note: The Cell/B.E. lectures below are based on slides presented by Hema Reddy of IBM at the One-Day IBM Cell Programming Workshop at Georgia Tech held 2/6/2007.

11/5: Session 32 - Cell/B.E. Introduction: Architecture (PDF slides, video)

• Introduction to the Cell multiprocessor, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vo. 49, 2005, pp. 589-604.
• Synergistic Processing in Cell's Multicore Architecture, IEEE Micro, Vol. 26, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp.10-24.

11/7: Session 33 - Cell/B.E. Introduction: Software Development (PDF slides, video)

• The Cell project at IBM Research
• Programming high-performance applications on the Cell BE processor, Part 1: An introduction to Linux on the PLAYSTATION 3
• The Insomniacs: Can a team of scrappy game programmers save Sony's monster chip?, IEEE Spectrum, Dec. 2006, pp. 24-29.
• The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing

11/9: Session 34 - Cell/B.E. Hands-On - The Hello World Program (PDF slides, video)

11/12: Session 35 - Postprocessing in XNA (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

11/14: Session 36 - "Classic" GPGPU (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

11/16: Session 37 - Introduction to CUDA (video)

11/19: Session 38 - Cell/B.E. Programming: DMA (PDF slides, video)

11/26: Session 39 - Cell/B.E. Programming: SIMD (PDF slides, video)

11/28: Session 40 - Cell/B.E. Programming Tips & Techniques (PPT slides, video)

11/30: Session 41 - Cell/B.E. Programming Models (PPT slides, video)

12/3: Session 42 - Playstation 2 Architecture (PDF slides, PDF slides 4-up, video)

12/5: Session 43 - Guest Speaker: Stephen Chenney, Emergent Game Technologies

12/7: In-class closed-book closed-notes written job interview simulation