CSE 788.14 - Special Topics: Advanced Game Design

Syllabus

Instructor: Roger Crawfis
Course Time / Place: TR 3:30-4:48, DL-280
Office: 683 Dreese Labs
Telephone: 292-2566
e-mail: crawfis [at] cse [dot] ohio-state [dot] edu
Course URL: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~crawfis/cse788GameDesign/index.html
Course Wiki:

Course Summary

This is a project-oriented course on Game Design and Game Programming. Students will work in teams to design, implement and test a three-dimensional game with interactivity, animation, sound, constraints, and networking capabilities. We assume the student is already a graphics expert and we will cover the software engineering and control/state aspects of developing a high-end video game.

Objectives

This is a project oriented course aimed at advanced development. It should be able to be used as a Capstone course in Engineering. In particular, the student will emerge from the course with:.

• Mastery of event-based programming
• Mastery of resource management as it relates to rendering time, including level-of-detail and culling.
• Familiarity with the various components in a game or game engine.
• Familiarity with leading open source game engine components.
• Familiarity of game physics.
• Familiarity with game animation.
• Exposure to network-based gaming issues.
• Exposure to AI for games
  

Prerequisites: CSE 581, CSE 630, and CSE 560. Fluency in C++ and object-oriented software development. Recommended: CSE 781 and/or CSE 682.

Texts (To be Determined)

• Game Programming in C++ by Erik Yuzwa, Thomson / Charles River Media (2006) (Amazon link)
• Pro Ogre 3D Programming by Gregory Junker, APress (2006).
• (recommended) Head First Design Patterns, Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra, O'Reilly (2004).
• (optional / reference) Game Programming Gems, Volumes 1-6, Charles River Media.
• The World-Wide Web

Topics (Tentative)

These are unordered. See the Schedule page for the presentation order.

• Game Genre (FPS, RGP, MMORPG, Racing, etc.)
• Software Engineering for games (Object-oriented, Plug-in architectures)
• Modern Game Engine components and structure
• The Ogre3D game (graphics) engine
• Skeletal animation and tools
• User input and control (keyboard, mouse, joystick, gamepad, ...)
• Three-dimensional sound (OpenAL, DirectSound, DirectMusic, FMod)
• Scene Managers (Octrees, Cell-Portals, Terrain paging, BSP-Trees)
• Collision detection
• Testing for games
• Physics engines (ODE, GanstraWrapper, etc.)
• Scripting (Lua, Python, etc.)
• Networking and cheating (Client-server, Peer-to-Peer, scaling)
• Multi-threading (Synchronization, game balance)
• Performance analysis (GPU counters, VTune, etc.)

Curriculum Committee Materials

• Official Syllabus (proposed and from the CSE database)
• Questionaire answers (partial)
• Feedback on Spring 2006 (in progress)

Last Modified January 20, 2006