CS 419G -- CS Skills for Simulation and Game Development

Fall 2011

http://cs.oregonstate.edu/~mjb/cs419g

IM	Classes	Grades	VHR

This page was last updated: April 10, 2012

Announcements:

• 4/10/2012 The web site to register for the EECS Departmental Graduation the evening of June 16 is now open! You are eligible to participate if you have a graduation date anytime from Summer 2011 through Fall 2012. But, you must register. Go here to register.
  Part of the registration process asks you to participate in voting for staff and faculty awards. If you are not registering for the EECS graduation, but still want to vote for staff and faculty awards, click here.

• Finals Week Office Hours are:
  

  Monday	11:00 - 2:00
  Tuesday	11:00 - 11:40

• The Myth Busters' parallel rendering demo can be found here.

• If you want to run Joe Graphics's particle system program, it is here. You will also need glut32.dll to live in the same directory as this executable.

• Brian talked about the interviews being "brutal" because they test your CS knowledge. Fortunately, there is a great book called: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job It prepares you for interview CS questions by revealing strategies and giving a nice review of data structures, recursion, and other programming information you might be asked about. Best of all, the OSU library has it in PDF so anyone can get to it right away. (I have a paper copy of it if you'd like to see it. It's $16 on Amazon.)

• You can get some of the Microsoft packages for free through OSU's participation in the MSDN Academic Alliance. This includes Visual Studio and Project. To do this, go to the teach system,: http://engr.oregonstate.edu/teach. Under External Links, click MSDNAA Site Login. This will allow you to download software for free.

• Please print (or at least look at) the following notes from the Class Note Handouts section or from the Projects section:

  For:	Print or Look At:
  Nov 18	Parallel Programming
  Nov 21	Physics / C++ Quiz Questions
  Nov 30	3D Viewing
  Nov 30	CUDA
  Nov 30	OpenCL
  Dec 2	More Info

What We Will Be Doing (and Not Doing) This Quarter

This is not a game-programming course. We will not be creating any games. Game and simulation development is very much a data and math-intensive activity. So, this is a middleware CS course that will fill in many of the missing pieces for those wanting to enter the simulation and game development worlds in a software tool-building capacity.

Similarly, this is only a little bit a computer graphics course. We will not be writing graphics programs, but you will sometimes be given graphics program skeletons to test your coding.

Even if you aren't looking for a job in one of these fields, you will likely find these fast-paced and varied topics useful and enjoyable.

CS 419G topics include:

• Parametric lines
• Vectors: dot product, cross product, uses for dot and cross products
• Matrices: definition, multiplication, transpose, determinant, inverse
• C++ vector and matrix classes and methods
• 3D coordinate systems, transformations
• Forward kinematics (hierarchical transformations)
• Newton's method for solving for roots of nonlinear equations
• Inverse kinematics using Jacobian matrices
• Rigid-body constant-acceleration kinematics, projectiles
• Rigid-body dynamics, integrating equations of motion
• Collisions, impulse-momentum, rebounding
• Particle systems
• Multithreading, OpenMP, pthreads
• Multicore architectures
• CUDA, OpenCL
• Modeling the world as a mesh of springs (e.g., cloth)
• Guest Lectures

For your programming assignments, you will have access to the graphics systems in OSU's Computer Graphics Education Lab (CGEL) in Batcheller Hall 244.

Prerequisites

Professor

Office:	Kelley 2117
Phone:	541-737-2542
E-mail:	mjb@cs.oregonstate.edu
Web site:	http://cs.oregonstate.edu/~mjb

Office Hours:

The Virtual Hand Raise (VHR)

I recognize that it takes a certain amount of courage to ask a question or express an opinion in class. But, the worst thing of all is to not say anything! So, this class has a feature called the Virtual Hand Raise. Click here to get into it. It will allow you to send me a question or comment, completely anonymously. I will answer questions submitted this way at the start of the next class.

Textbook

Class Note Handouts

Guest Speaker Note Handouts

1. Here are Brian Apgar's slides from his talk in class on October 12.

2. Here are Dan White's slides in one, two, and six slide per-page formats.

Class Schedule

To see an academic year calendar, click here.

The class lecture time is: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 11:00 - 11:50. Unless otherwise specified, all lectures will be held in Kearney 305.

1	Sept 26	Introductions. Discussion of class objectives and how we will go about it. Project #1. Parametric line equation.
2	Sept 28	Project #1 (the web form) is due at 23:59:59 tonight! Vectors, I
3	Sept 30	Vectors, II
4	Oct 3	Matrices
5	Oct 5	Transformation matrices
6	Oct 7	Forward Kinematics
7	Oct 10	Solving nonlinear equations -- Newton's Method
8	Oct 12	Brian Apgar, Buzz Monkey, speaking on: Hardware Matters: Multiplatform Game Development
9	Oct 14	Inverse Kinematics, I
10	Oct 17	Inverse Kinematics, II
11	Oct 19	Constant acceleration physics -- projectile motion
12	Oct 21	Constant acceleration physics, II
13	Oct 24	Test #1 review. Mechanical dynamics, I
14	Oct 26	Dan White, Pipeworks, speaking on: Game Programming -- The Big Picture
15	Oct 28	Test #1
16	Oct 31	Go over test answers Mechanical dynamics, II
17	Nov 2	Collisions
18	Nov 4	Prof. Bailey out of town -- no class today
19	Nov 7	Collisions Particle Systems
20	Nov 9	Particle systems
21	Nov 11	Meshes of Springs, I
22	Nov 14	Meshes of Springs, II
23	Nov 16	Cache Performance
24	Nov 18	Parallel Programming, I
25	Nov 21	Parallel Programming, II Physics / C++ Quiz, I
26	Nov 23	No class today. I'll be in my office during class time. Treat it as Office Hours. Come by for any reason.
27	Nov 25	Thanksgiving Holiday -- no class today
28	Nov 28	Physics / C++ Quiz, II 3D Viewing
29	Nov 30	3D Viewing CUDA
30	Dec 2	Class Evaluations. Test #2 review. CUDA, OpenCL Where to find More Information.
T2	Dec 6	Test #2 Tuesday, December 6, 12:00 - 1:30, Kearney 305.

Projects

Click here to get a copy of the Bonus Day Submission Form. Fill this out and turn it in the next class period after turning in your project.

After the due date, after you have exhausted all your two eligible Bonus Days, projects can still be turned in for up to 50% credit, as long as you turn it in (1) no more than 2 weeks after it is due, and (2) before the end of Week #10. Send me an email letting me know you have turned this in, so I know to go looking for it.

Project Turn-In Procedures

• Your electronic turnin will be done at http://engr.oregonstate.edu/teach and will consist of:
  
  1. Source files of everything (.cpp)
  2. A Windows .exe file if needed. This file must be able to run on the CGEL machines.

  Electronic submissions are due at 23:59:59 on the listed due date.

• Your project will be graded and the score posted to the class web page.
  If you disagree with the score, or want to know why you did not receive full credit, come ask me about it.
  You have one week after the grades are posted to do this!

Grading

Click here to see the current grade posting.

CS 419G will be graded on a fill-the-bucket basis. There will be 8 projects and two tests. You get to keep all the points you earn.

Your final grade will be based on your overall class point total. Based on an available point total of 850 grade cutoffs will be no higher than:

Attendance at the Guest Lectures will count 5 points each, making it possible to earn a bonus of 10 points to add to your total.

Class Rules

• Lab Rules: No propping the CGEL doors open, no food in the lab, drinks only in closed containers. (I am not being a jerk about the no-food requirement -- ask to see my shrine to the cockroaches that once inhabited the CGEL. Their friends are no doubt waiting for a reason to come back.)

• Keep the air conditioning in the CGEL running -- we have had problems with systems in that room failing when the temperature gets too high.

• Computer Security: We take computer security very seriously. Please use intelligently-chosen passwords and protect them. Anyone caught abusing the system or causing deliberate damage will be asked to drop the class and the matter will be turned over to the Dean's Office.

• Working Together: It is OK to work together by sharing information, but each person's projects must be original work with no sharing of code.

• Academic Dishonesty: You are expected to do your own work. Helping each other, with explanations or clarifications, is OK. Sharing code, however, is considered cheating. Anyone caught cheating will fail this class, and the matter will be turned over to the Dean's Office.

  See Oregon State's Statement of Expectations for Student Conduct

  If there is any parts of this document that you don't understand, ask me!

• The only address I will ever use to email you will be mjb at some Oregon State domain. If you get an email from a different address claiming to be me, do not respond to it, and let me know right away.

Students With Disabilities

Accommodations are collaborative efforts between students, faculty and Disability Access Services (DAS). Students with accommodations approved through DAS are responsible for contacting the faculty member in charge of the course prior to or during the first week of the term to discuss accommodations. Students who believe they are eligible for accommodations but who have not yet obtained approval through DAS should contact DAS immediately at 737-4098.

Other Useful URLs:

• Game Development:
  • Game Developer: http://www.gamedev.net
  • Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com
  • Select Parks Game Development Information: http://www.selectparks.net

• Local Companies:
  • Buzz Monkey: http://www.buzzmonkey.com
  • Pipeworks: http://www.pipeworks.com

• Regional Discussion Groups:
  • Corvallis Gaming Special Interest Group: http://www.sao.corvallis.or.us/drupal/node/26
  • PAGDIG: Portland Area Game Developer Interest Group: http://www.pagdig.org

• Conferences:
  • Game Developers Conference (GDC): http://www.gdconf.com
  • E3Expo http://www.e3expo.com
  • SIGGRAPH http://www.siggraph.org

• OpenGL:
  • Industry-wide OpenGL Information: http://www.opengl.org
  • OpenGL specifications: http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs
  • OpenGL Man Pages: http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man
  • OpenGL SDK: http://www.opengl.org/sdk
  • GLSL Quick Reference Guide: http://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/OpenSceneGraph/glsl_quickref.pdf
  • OpenGL Tutorials: http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/tutorials.shtml
  • JOGL -- Java bindings for OpenGL: https://jogl.dev.java.net

• The GLUT Library:
  • HTML GLUT Documentation: http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/glut/spec3/spec3.html
  • PDF GLUT Documentation: http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/glut/glut-3.spec.pdf

• The GLUI Library:
  • OpenGL User Interface (GLUI) Documentation http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui/src/release/glui_manual_v2_beta.pdf
  • Original GLUI Information http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui
  • Latest GLUI Information http://glui.sourceforge.net