1. Project 3 Guidelines CS248 Computer Graphics Help session November 7, 2001

2. Outline Four guidelines, covering: –Your time allocation –Our bucket grading system Expectations for advanced features –Grades are proportional to effort –Doing more than required

3. Guideline #1: time allocation You are given 4 weeks for the assignment Spend 2 weeks on general game engine Spend 2 weeks on advanced techniques We expect roughly a student-week of work for each advanced feature. If it looks hacked into your game in hours, full credit is unlikely.

4. Guideline #2: grading system Bucket grading system (-,  -, ,  +, +) Your grade depends on difficulty of implementation

5. On-screen control panel Too easy: restart and quit buttons, a couple scores updated occasionally Better: UI widgets customized to game, like 2-axis control stick for airplane or radar map Advanced: realistically modeled 3D airplane cockpit, detailed texture-mapped dashboard, dynamic gauges

6. View frustum culling Too easy: only discard objects behind eye or pre-computed 2D culling Better: general 3D view frustum culling of bounding volumes, either in eye space or world space

7. Level of detail control Too easy: not drawing objects beyond a distance threshold Better: multiple, simplified versions of models offline and choosing between them based on distance from viewpoint, rendering load, projected screen area, etc. Advanced: geomorphed/blended transitions between LODs or dynamic continuous level of detail adjustment, such as progressive meshes

8. Occlusion culling Too easy: pre-computed coarse-grained list of 2D/3D scene areas not-visible from certain zones (i.e. only render the floor of the building the user is in) Better: BSP trees, portal culling, offline PVS calculations Advanced: Handling dynamic moving objects, hierarchical occlusion masks, etc.

9. Procedural modeling Too easy: procedural 2D textures, e.g. using Perlin noise Better: fractal mountains, modeling using implicit functions Advanced: flowing water modeled using particles, volumetric modeled smoke, genetic textures; see book, Texturing and modeling, by Ebert, Musgrave, Peachey, Perlin, and Worley

10. Collision detection Too easy: simple hard-coded tests based on your knowledge of the size of some object; axis-aligned walls and points Better: efficient collisions of arbitrary polygons with each other Advanced: collisions of procedural objects (not converted to polygons) with each other, predicting time of impact for curved trajectories

11. Simulated dynamics Too easy: some object moving according to basic Newtonian physics Better: springs, friction, damping, interacting systems behaving according to physical laws, e.g. articulated objects Advanced: cloth, hair, deformable objects (in real time)

12. Motion capture animation Better: playback of motion capture data loops (walking, running) modifying hierarchical transforms in simple articulated character Advanced: smart interpolation between motion captures samples and loops, with realistic “skinning” of animated limbs

13. Advanced rendering effects Too easy: environmental reflectance maps, multiple textures blended together Better: shadows using multi-pass rendering, lighting using projected textures Advanced: bump mapping, displacement mapping

14. Sound Too easy: system(“plaympeg my_sound.mpg”) Better: internal control over sounds, played with low latency, linked to motions or events in game, mapped to some parameters (attenuated with distance, etc) Advanced: modeling for speed of sound, Doppler shift, sound reflection from environmental objects

15. Artificial Intelligence Too easy: Enemy characters walk straight towards user Better: computer-controlled agents do path- finding with A* search algorithm or demonstrate simple “learning” over time Advanced: neural network learning, sophisticated emergent flocking behaviors, etc.

16. Networked multi-player ability Too easy: multiple players on the same keyboard or sharing information via the file system Better: multiple players on different machines, using the network Advanced: Kalman filtering or similar predictive techniques to overcome latency

17. Game level editor Too easy: choosing between defined levels or permutations Better: control over shape of world and any objects/obstacles within Really advanced: control over all game parameters. Interactive graphical editors are worth more than text-based editors

18. Guideline #3: grade  effort If features are implemented at “too easy” level, you’ll probably get less than a B Teams with reasonable implementations of advanced features at the “better” level will probably earn roughly a B+ or A- To get an A, we need to see outstanding effort. In general, a few features done well is better than many mediocre ones

19. Guideline #4: doing more More complex requirements for a feature are only needed for your official advanced techniques If you want to add more features beyond the required number, the quality of their implementation won’t hurt you