Game Development
- NEW DEMO: Scaling Ambient Animations for Improved Game Experience.
Game developers want to deliver the best - and fairest - experience for each player. But in a multi-player situation, this poses a dilemma: How can gameplay be consistent across all computer platforms to ensure players on high-end systems don’t have an advantage? This article demonstrates one way to do it, using a free demo called Horsepower.
- Do-it-yourself Game Task Scheduling.
According to Jérôme Muffat-Méridol, 20-year software development veteran, Intel® Threading Building Blocks is a really elegant and slim library... and it's also way too big to use for 64K demos. So he created a scale model of Intel® TBB: a minimal task scheduler called Nulstein that can be adapted to most game platforms.
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Multi-threading Line-of-Sight Calculations to Improve Sensory System
Performance in Game AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is only as good as the information it gets. Even if you have delays of a few seconds or simply not enough information, it will show in the behaviors. Avoiding such undesirable behaviors is typically the responsibility of the sensory system. This article addresses the biggest challenge for performance: Line-of-Sight (LoS) queries.
- 3D Modeling and Parallel Mesh Simplification.3D geometric models are common in computer graphics and are usually built as a collection of vertices connected together to form a polygon mesh. But complex models can contain tens of millions of polygons, which pose considerable challenges for developers. This article describes mesh simplification algorithms to dramatically reduce the number of polygons while remaining faithful to the mesh topology.
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Becoming More Godlike: How Demigod* Appeased the Masses with Intel®
Graphics Performance Analyzers.
Millions of potential gamers are running their systems on Intel® Graphics chipsets, and the projected numbers are steadily increasing. To better reach this audience segment, game developers are tuning their games for integrated graphics. Gas Powered Games is one of those developers. Read how they worked with Intel - and used Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers - to turn the dials on Demigod and achieve optimum play performance on Intel Graphics chipsets.
- Rasterization on Larrabee.
Read how RAD Game Tools applied the new Larrabee instructions to rasterization, including how vector programming can be applied to a semi-parallel task.
- The Muddy Beauty of Dirt* 2: Where Rally Realism Meets the Raw Road.
Even after 10 years of the multi-million-selling Colin McRae Rally* games, UK developer and publisher Codemasters still maintains a laser-like focus on simulating that pedal-to-the-metal rubber-on-the-gravel reality.
- Designing Artificial Intelligence for Games (Part 4).
Donald Kehoe, game development specialist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, shows you how to organize your system to take full advantage of task and data parallelization for your AI characters.
- Multi-Core Simulation of Soft-Body Characters Using Cloth.
Soft-body physics is a popular feature used in video games, but it's used sparingly due to computational intensity. This article demonstrates how the processing power of a multi-core CPU plus cloth-simulation techniques can make soft-body characters much easier to create.
- Two Brains are Better Than One.
To maximize your AI's potential, you need to use the entire CPU... which means threading. This article examines how to thread a simple AI and some of the challenges in writing an AI that scales with multi-core CPUs.
- Behind the Scenes with Codemaster's Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising*.Get the developer perspective and behind-the-scenes insights on the creation of the game, including Codemasters used Havok Physics, Intel® VTune™, and Intel® GPA to create the visual depth, detail, and realistic physics in this game for the Intel® Core™ i7 platform.
- Optimizing a Video Game: Smoke -- Fanning the Flames to Really Make it Burn.
In this 6-part video series taken at IDF 2009, Paul Lindberg, Intel Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer, walks you through the Smoke Game Demo, using it to demonstrate how Intel® software tools can help you remove bottlenecks and find new speed in your games.
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Blogs
- Blog: Chris Cormack - Intel Lead Product Designer.
Chris is obsessed with Intel GPA... which is a good thing. Read his assessments and highlights of the tool suite that's been successfully used by Terminal Reality and Gas Powered Games.
- Blog: Matt Ployhar - Intel Visual Computing Evangelist.
With a focus on graphics, multimedia, and gaming., Matt comes to Intel after 12 years at Microsoft (and yes, he even worked on Windows 7). Read his posts on all things visual computing.
- Blog: Arti Gupta - Intel Community Manager.
Now in her 12th year at Intel, Arti has made the rounds as a software developer, architect, and program manager. Turning her eye towards the Gaming Community, Arti offers a broad range of insight.
- Blog: Bob Duffy - Intel Community Manager.
Since his start as a graphic designer in the 1980's, Bob's career has run the gamut from IT guy to dotcom VP to business owner to social-media strategist. With that kind of experience, Bob's got a lot of opinions... and the insight to back them up.
Tool-Talk & Downloads
- NEW UPDATE: Quick Reference Guide to Intel® Integrated Graphics.
This at-a-glance guide shows how video and audio features perform on select models of 2010 Intel® Core™ processor -based desktop and laptop systems.
- Intel® GPA 2.2 Update Release Walkthrough.
Chris Cormack, Lead Product Designer for Intel® Graphicc Performance Analyzers, discusses the new features enabled in the recent GPA 2.2 release. The main three features added to this release include: DX10 support, Windows 7 support, and frame-based metric counting in System Analyzer.
- FREE Unreal Development Kit Download.
The world’s best game engine is now at your fingertips. Experience the power and potential of Unreal Engine 3. Create amazing games, lifelike scenes, and fantastic worlds... for FREE! Get the latest December beta release now.
- C++ Larrabee Prototype Library Guide.
Get the 411 on the C++ implementation of the Larrabee new instructions. (And you can link to the library itself via a .ini file near the top of the guide.)
- Epic and the Intel® Core i7 Mobile Processor.
Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, discusses how the right combination of tools (including the Intel® Core™ i7 processor, Intel® Threading Building Blocks, and the Epic Unreal* Game Engine 3) will dial up the creativity and opportunities for game developers.
- Get Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers - FREE!
Optimize your game code for integrated graphics with Intel® GPA tool suite. And if you're a member of the Intel® Visual Adrenaline Developer Program, you get it free (that's a $299 value). Not a member? Takes about 10 seconds to sign up.
- Intel® Performance Analyzer Comparison.
Intel offers several performance analyzers, each with its own strengths. This document provides a quick overview of the tool features to help you make an informed choice.
- SDK for the Intel® Core i7 Processor Family.
Download and review an in-depth collection of resources and learn how you can enable your software to take advantage of the capabilities in the Intel Core i7.
- Havok™ Physics and Animation Software for the PC.
This binary-only bundle includes all of the standard features and functionality of both the Havok™ Physics and Havok™ Animation products.
Artist/Animator Resources
- Smoother Animation with Intel® Core™ i7 Processors.
Not long ago, computing power for creating fluid movement and seamless-looking joints simply wasn't there, and 3D animators were stuck with creating stiff-jointed, scarred-looking automatons. But today, animators can create characters that move naturally with the computing power of Intel® Core™ i7 processors, and Non-Uniform Rational Basis Spline (NURBS) geometry. This article shows you how.
- Simulating Real-World Film Lighting Techniques in 3D.
With all the advances in modeling and animation, an often overlooked but absolutely critical area of 3D scene creation is the proper use of lighting and rendering techniques. This series of tutorials covers both the mechanics of lighting within the Autodesk* Softimage*|XSI* software package, and how to incorporate the language of light used in fine art, theater, and film into your 3D scenes.
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