November 25, 2003

3D Engine-A "Spare Time" Project

Around the end of September, I decided to revisit my 3D Great Hall demo (the one I submitted as my creative sample, and showed the other week in Seminar). Some say I should abandon it and use a prebuilt engine, so that I can create a game more quickly. That makes a lot of sense, and yet...as much as I deny it, and as much as I want to do the creative over the technical...I guess I just like programming. It's funny though, I used to work as a programmer and do 3D art & video in my spare time. And now that I'm doing creative stuff full time, I'm programming as a hobby!

So anyway, the engine. I've code-named it Tantallon, after the castle that inspired the great hall portrayed in my demo. I'm going for a highly-organized, fully object-oriented approach. I'm writing it in C++, with OpenGL for graphics, and DirectX for sound and input. The work's going slowly, but it is, after all, a hobby, and if I decide I want to rapidly prototype a full-fledged game, I'll consider an alternative approach!

For anyone who's interested in this type of thing, check out these websites for some cool tutorials:

www.gametutorials.com
nehe.gamedev.net

Posted by msteffen at November 25, 2003 02:23 AM

Comments

Hey Michael,

I would really like to learn some of this. Any way you could do some teaching in study hall for OpenGL and C?

Posted by: Mike Brinker at December 2, 2003 10:02 AM

Yes, I would definitely be interested in doing some teaching on this. In addition to this spare-time project, I worked for a year as an OpenGL/C++ software developer, so I know a lot about this topic. I could do an overview of how to create a simple OpenGL program, as well as get more into some graphics programming theory (which I'm fairly good at explaining to the layman).

Posted by: Michael Steffen at December 3, 2003 09:38 AM

Awesome! Yeah, I'm an Animation and Visual Effects student at the Savannah College or Art & Design and just saw your blog on a web search for research. Nice to see people are doing great work in 3d programming and all! Just thought I'd leave a hello.

Posted by: Dee at January 25, 2004 11:39 PM

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