Well, seeing as this is my first post here I'd first like to congratulate Mr. Mike for writing an excellent and incredibly informative book. My copy appeared two days ago (quite out of the blue, Amazon UK told me they wouldn't be receiving any copies until the 25th) and I've already finished it (although I will certainly be going through the whole thing again to make some notes for my project design).
Having finished several small game projects (in order of completion: pong, tetris, and a 3D adventure demo similar in appearance to Grim Fandango and the last Monkey Island game) I'm now moving on to a larger project. I know it is important to restrain my game engine ambitions somewhat, lest the project become overwhelming and crush me under its immense weight However, I want to structure the project in such a way as to facilitate adding extra functionality over time without the need for huge rewrites. I'm a fan of OO and abstraction so scene graphs are very appealing to me, but there doesn't seem to be very much info out there on them. I've been trawling message boards and source code for the scene graph details, and I also have Eberly's migraine inducing 3D Game Engine Design, but Mike's book has the best and most accessable information on the subject that I've found so far. Anyway, I'm hoping that, like me, other people interested in this topic will be drawn to this site via the book and we'll be able to help each other.
If anyone knows of any other useful scene graph resources it'd be great if you could post them here
As Mike says at the end of chapter 10,
1. Multiple camera nodes and tracking active cameras
2. Frustum culling
3. How to integrate a terrain (quadtree/octree)
4. Minimizing render state changes, batching vertex data
5. Collision (bounding volumes)
As soon as anyone interested in this topic has info or wants to discuss anything related to scene graphs please start posting and I'll be watching for e-mail notifications.
Having finished several small game projects (in order of completion: pong, tetris, and a 3D adventure demo similar in appearance to Grim Fandango and the last Monkey Island game) I'm now moving on to a larger project. I know it is important to restrain my game engine ambitions somewhat, lest the project become overwhelming and crush me under its immense weight However, I want to structure the project in such a way as to facilitate adding extra functionality over time without the need for huge rewrites. I'm a fan of OO and abstraction so scene graphs are very appealing to me, but there doesn't seem to be very much info out there on them. I've been trawling message boards and source code for the scene graph details, and I also have Eberly's migraine inducing 3D Game Engine Design, but Mike's book has the best and most accessable information on the subject that I've found so far. Anyway, I'm hoping that, like me, other people interested in this topic will be drawn to this site via the book and we'll be able to help each other.
If anyone knows of any other useful scene graph resources it'd be great if you could post them here
As Mike says at the end of chapter 10,
Well, I'd like to discuss how we can make it ready, possible subjects include:The scene graph in this chapter is a fun toy. It's not nearly ready to install into a real game engine.
1. Multiple camera nodes and tracking active cameras
2. Frustum culling
3. How to integrate a terrain (quadtree/octree)
4. Minimizing render state changes, batching vertex data
5. Collision (bounding volumes)
As soon as anyone interested in this topic has info or wants to discuss anything related to scene graphs please start posting and I'll be watching for e-mail notifications.
pan narrans