Getting started, 3d world

From Red Blob Games's Blog

I'm starting a new game project, not because I think I'll write a cool game, but because I want to explore some ideas (economic simulation and transportation networks). I decided to use 3d graphics for two reasons:

• I want to learn more 3d programming. I've played with GL and OpenGL for a long time but I've never been completely comfortable in a 3d world. Each time I write an OpenGL program, I learn more about 3d graphics programming.
• Ease of programming. I believe it's easier to work in a 3d graphics system than in a 2d graphics system, until you get to the point where you want artwork. Since I don't expect to have nice artwork, I think 3d graphics will be easier. The graphics card handles things like isometric views, filling polygons, gradients, lighting, and textures. There are simple approaches for mapping screen coordinates to game coordinates and back, because the graphics card does the mapping. It's very simple to alter the appearance of objects for highlighting and mouse manipulation; you can just change the color or lighting. And the CPU is freed up for doing things like AI and world simulation.

I started out writing a simple GLUT program that set up a window and the camera, then drew a simple triangle. Once I got it running, I added stub code for the standard set of GLUT callbacks (mouse handler, keyboard handler, window resize handler). I changed the scene from a simple triangle to a square grid, added a mouse handler that highlighted the current square, and made the right mouse button drag the camera around. I then started refactoring the simple GLUT program into modules (mouse, camera, timer, vector algebra, etc.), added simple lighting, improved the camera dragging code, and added some cubes to the scene. I implemented collision detection between rays and boxes and then used that to highlight the object the mouse pointed to.

Working a little bit each night, I've spent a week on all of this. It's all graphics code and no real game code. Have I gotten stuck in a “tar pit”? No, although there are some things like lighting and gradients that are dangerous to spend too much time on, I think this initial time setting up the 3d world will be well worth it later on.

When I work with programming languages, I really appreciate having an interactive prompt. Lisp, Scheme, and Python are much more approachable because they have this. I can just start Python and inspect variables, create and change objects, explore, test, etc., all without having to go back to my code and insert new commands. You can also do this with interactive development environments (like Smalltalk's). I want something similar at the game level, where I can move around freely and click on an object to see all of its properties. I'd like to create, destroy, and modify objects as the game is running. I don't expect to build all of this at the very beginning, but having an infrastructure that exposes all the game objects in a uniform way will help me later on. How much do I really need at this point though?

Two of the approaches used to uniformly represent 3d objects are scene graphs and spatial partitioning (BSP trees, octtrees, bounding box trees, etc.). Scene graphs are useful for representing changes to lighting, scale, rotation, translation, color, material, textures, and objects with shared components. For example, instead of representing a complex soldier 3d model for each soldier object, you'd store it once and have it occur multiple times in the scene graph, each time with a different rotation and position. Spatial partitioning is useful for collision detection. For example, instead of testing every vehicle against every other vehicle to see if any of them collided, you would partition space into smaller areas and only test vehicles if they are in the same part of the game world. Both scene graphs and spatial partitioning can also be used to render only the objects that are visible in the scene; this can greatly speed up the rendering.

I've decided that the number of objects in my game is small at the moment and is likely to stay small for some time, so I will use the brute force approach. I'll test against every object for collision detection, I'll render every object and let the graphics card figure it out, and I'll replicate geometry (vertices, colors, normals, etc.) for each object. At some point I may need scene graphs and spatial partitioning, and I'll go back and add them in. Code that depends on whether I have a list or a scene graph should remain as isolated as possible, so that I can switch later.

Having written a minimal 3d world rendering system, I'm ready to go back to designing more of the game. While exploring new ideas, I tend to alternate between design and implementation. What I learn from implementation feeds back into the next round of design, and working on the design lets me step back from the implementation to see the big picture.

All the code for this game is open source, under the MIT license.

Labels: project