CSE3AGT – How to fail the Exam Paul Taylor 2010

Things to forget: What is Barry? A hamster or a Guinea Pig? The differences between Dx9 and Dx10 What is a shader? What can Textures be used for? 3D Textures? Is collision detection important in a video game?

Things to forget: How easy is lighting to perform? What are BSP Trees good for? – What are they bad for? The Vertex Pipeline – World, View and Projection Matrices What do each do? What order? – What is back-face culling?

Things to forget: Pixel Shaders – Where do they output to? – Is OpenGL4 similar to Dx10 / Dx11? Light Maps – What are they? – Why? Input – What is the difference between Xinput and DirectInput?

Things to forget: What new features are in Dx11 when compared to Dx10? What is the difference between a Normal Map and a Bump map? – Which needs more pre-processing / more post- processing? What does a Geometry shader do? Are there any difficulties when developing a cross-platform game engine?

Things to forget: What is the architecture of REYES (Renderman)? – How is it similar to developments in game engines? What are vertex layouts? – Do they need to match shader formats? What does a swizzle do?

Things to forget: What is the standard pipeline from a RAW set of vertices through to a bunch of pixels on the display? ( How do you translate, rotate and scale objects in 3D space? – Is the order important? Could you highlight the required relationships between a vertex layout and a VS + PS shader?

Things to forget: Particle Systems – How do they work? – What types are there? What are they good for? – What are force fields? How do they help particle systems? – How could you create a really efficient particle system utilising the GPU?

Things to forget: Fog! – What is it used for? – What benefits does fog give the game engine? – How does fog work? Multi-Texturing – What can different texture layers be used for? Do they need to be visible? Texture animation – How, why? UV Wrapping and offsets

Things to forget: Zones, Portals and Anti-portals – What are they? – How do they improve your game engine?

Things to forget: (hardcore) Ray Tracing – Can it be done efficiently? – How would you optimise it? 3D Texture uses – What could you do with a 3D texture?

The End! Thanks for doing AGT in 2010! -Paul