thad01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Noadays, a course in CG can easily be used to provide the needed skills. Lab
> > exercises just need to involve more games. Music is music and sound effects
> > can relate to other courses, usually relating to film, or maybe theatre. As
> > for an engien that 'glues' everything together, Open Source projects exist.
>
> I'm not so convinced that a CG course is enough. Rendering a decent
> image to the screen is only one of the challenges. You also need to
> strike the right balance between resources allocated to rendering and
> to the sim. You need the sim to progress in a time consistent manner
> and not be effected by the amount of activity in game or processes
> outside of the game. There could be issues related to multithreading,
> or networking, or AI, or any number of other things that could come
> into play depending on the type of game. Moreover, there are issues
> around overall program design and structure that are unique to real
> time games compared to I/O bound programming or non-interactive
> simulations.
>
> Of course that's just my thinking on it (having coded up a few games).
> I'm still curious to hear the opinions of others.
>
> The challenge with this course is that the university wants it to
> be available to students very early on without a huge pile of
> prerequisite courses... perhaps Programming I and II, Data Structures,
> etc, but not the higher level things you might expect like Computer
> Graphics, Simulations, or Artificial Intelligence. I think their
> purpose for the course is to increase enthusiasm for the CS program
> in general and stem some of the early attrition that the program
> currently suffers with.
I don't know how you could do this in one course. Will the course be
dealing only with the programming aspects of the game and how to get
the game assets onto the screen and how the player interacts with them?
Or will it also deal with the theory of game design? I'm not sure one
course could cover all the necessary steps from game concept to
finished product.
It used to be a a programmer or two could sit down in their basement
and churn out a pretty good game, but anymore, modern games require
many many people involved in all stages of the project.
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