Hugg's Gaming Links

These are some links that might help you with the trickier bits of game programming.


Quaternions

Matrix and Quaternion FAQ - A good place to learn or refresh your knowledge of these crazy mathematical freaks of nature.

Gamasutra Quaternion Article - This is a basic introduction to quaternions, but does not go very deep.

Ken Shoemake's Quaternion Paper - A classic treatment of quaternions, in PS format. Covers SLERP.

Orientation and Quaternions - Another overview of quaternions, pretty good.

Quaternion Interpolation Project - Among other things, this site contains the only code I've seen for computing logarithms and exponents of quaternions, and thus also the power of a quaternion to a scalar. You may not need these routines, but if you do, you really do.

Arcball Source - Contains the source for Ken Shoemake's ARCBALL implementation, which is a routine for rotating an object with the mouse, and uses quaternions.

Quaternions in Flight Simulation - A handy reference for converting between Euler, matrix, and quaternion representations.

Magic Software Papers - Lots of .PDF papers on game-related topics, but unindexed.

Cooperware's CwMtx Homepage - An LGPL'ed implementation of quaternions and matrices in C++. There are several of these out there, and this is one of them.


Dynamics

Chris Hecker's Dynamics Page - This should be your first stop. Chris has written a lot of great articles on rigid body dynamics, and has an extensive collection of references. Neat demos too.

Rigid Body Simulation Tutorial - A whirlwind tour of rigid body physics, useful as an overview or reference. Contains a section on quaternions, and an algorithm for computing the inertia tensor.

Lone Game Developer Battles Physics Simulator - A small article on Gamasutra concerning physics and Runge-Kutta integration.

Rigid 3D Body Physics Modelling page - A game developer chronicles his experience with modeling physics in his game.


OpenGL

OpenGL FAQ - Don't ask silly questions! Read the FAQ first! :)

NeHe OpenGL Tutorial - A large collection of tutorials (sort of a combination of code samples and tutorial) for fonts, particles, and basic OpenGL stuff. Good for beginners.

Chris Hecker's OpenGL Links - Some slightly outdated links regarding OpenGL vs Direct3D, including an article by Hecker from 1997.

Microsoft and 3D graphics - Another outdated article, good for historical purposes.

druid-'s GL Journal - More tutorials and demos, some basic, some advanced.

The History Of The Teapot - Ok, a sphere, a disk, a cylinder ... and a teapot?!? This page explains why. Win trivia contests next time you go to SIGGRAPH.


DirectX

An Incomplete Guide to Programming DirectDraw and Direct3D Immediate Mode - A quick intro to programming against DX3 (way outdated).

DrawPrimitive - An introduction to Microsoft's olive-branch API function, DrawPrimitive().


Misc

The 3D Game Compatibility List - A list of many games and the APIs they support.

Comparison of 3D chips - Shows that 3dfx and Matrox need to get better with their OpenGL support.




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Steven E. Hugg (hugg@pobox.com)