[gameprogrammer] Re: 18 hours

I think I need to clarify this a bit. 

This last year I taught the first ever game programming class at Austin
Community College. The plan was to offer a 7 week 2D game programming
and a 7 week 3D game programming class. I always had enough students to
be able to run the first class. But never quite enough people signed up
for the second class. OTOH, there were a lot of people asking for a
combined 2D/3D class. 

There were other problems with the class. The division between 2D and 3D
seemed reasonable when we planned the class. But, not so reasonable when
I was teaching the class. Who do you talk about just 2D when the
underlying APIs and the hardware are all built for 3D? Even 2D projects
were using a Z buffer to keep sprites in order on the screen.

This year we are going to offer a 10 week game programming class that
includes both 2D and 3D programming. So the 3D programming will be a
section in a longer game programming class. 

In my old class I based the grade on a single project. They students had
to write a simple game during the class. The best fun was the last night
when people demoed their games. This time I want to do the same thing
but require that the games have a 3D component. There will be a lot of
practical examples all through the course.

When it comes to math I am hoping to focus on the practical applications
and not on the details of how it works. For example. I want to show them
the many ways you can use a function that tests a line segment for
intersection with a polygon without having to go through the gory
details of how it works.

I know I am going to have to spend a *lot* of time on vectors and how
they are used. I know from experience that a lot of programmers have a
hard time getting used to the idea that even colors are vectors.

I also spend a lot of time in my class taking about finite state
machines. So much of everything in a game is best described as a state
machine. 

                Bob Pendleton

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 15:26 -0600, Bob Pendleton wrote:
> Some time this year I will be trying to teach the basics of 3D graphics
> for game programmers in 6 classes of 3 hours each. It has been a looong
> time since I learned 3D graphics and so I only vaguely remember what was
> hard to learn and what was not. The assumption is that the students know
> how to program in C/C++, but there is no math requirement and no
> graphics requirement. I have a few other lectures that I plan to use to
> cover the basics of graphics hardware and I concepts such as a pixel and
> a surface and so on. 
> 
> What I would like to hear from you is what you, as game programmers,
> would want to learn. What do you think are key concepts. What was hard
> for you to learn, and so on. You could help me a lot by telling me about
> your experiences learning 3D graphics. 
> 
> Oh, yeah... before I forget. What are the books and websites that helped
> you the most? I tend to stick to Foley & van Dam "Computer Graphics,
> Principles and Applications". But, I have had complaints from students
> about using that book. 
> 
> Putting this all together will not only help me with my class, but it
> should (might) help all of us and future programmers learn the material
> in a way that is relevant to game programming.
> 
> 
>               Bob Pendleton
> 
> 
> 
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