Lectures – CS679 Computer Games Tech – Fall 11

Lecture 11-16-11: Quaternions and Rotations

Mike Gleicher — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:04:18 +0000

This lecture was a crash course in rigid transformations, leading up to an attempt to tell you what a Quaternion is, why Unit Quaternions can encode rotations, and a sense of why you might want to do it.

The notes I used were a pile of old notes from previous classes. There is no actual notes for the lecture.

Some things to refer to:

2008 Games notes on Quaternions

Lecture 11-14-11: AI

Mike Gleicher — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:09:21 +0000

This was a brief scan through some ideas in AI and path planning and algorithms for games and …

I had a rough outline, and referred to old notes. Topics

AI Overview (what is AI, why for games?)
Reactive vs Contemplative -> Maps
Chessboard transforms, EDT, Geodesic transforms
Search in Discrete spaces
Trees, Minimax
Pathplanning, Navigation Meshes, PRM
Dijkstra’s algorithm, A*
Believable vs. practical AI

AI Notes from Previous Games Class

ai-notes (old and outline for 2011)

Lecture 10-19-11: Advanced Shading

Mike Gleicher — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:11:51 +0000

Most of the class was spent on a discussion of the Javascript object model. No notes, but I strongly recommend this:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide/Details_of_the_Object_Model

For a good handle at making sense of the it.

There was also the beginnings of a conversation of what kinds of graphics programming go into games, and a sense of what kinds of lighting goes on in the real world, and how we have to cut corners to approximate it.

Lecture 10-17-11: Deadlines, Source Control, Shading

Mike Gleicher — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:06:19 +0000

Most of the class was taken with a discussion of the class schedule, some discussion of source control, and some discussion of anti-aliasing in shaders.

There are no meaningful lecture notes.