Week 17 assignment

All computer games needs the fundamental core software that is the game engine to run the game. Game engines are an important aspect of gaming and is essential piece of software needed to monitor and control the way a game looks and moves.

There are many different key technologies that are associated with game engines that range from model shaders to HDR. However as the game industry is an increasing competitive market, businesses must find ways of adding more to their game engine, espically now that we have next gen gaming.

for instance an upcoming game called project offset is designing its own game engine to implement more graphic technology into their game. Offset is leading the way for introducing their new mothod of capturing motion blur into their engine. this along with technology like voulmetic lighting, sub-surfacing scattering and physics proves that quite alot of programs are used in games of today. Then you have textures from specular and normal mapping which adds more detail to games.

as for subtractive and additive editing, the difference between the two is that subtractive takes away from a fill space, whereas additive introduces objects to an empty space.

the main advantage to game engines is that once they have been created, they can be used again by other game developers to create new games, which is an effiecient and low cost method of making a game. A great example of this is in the game half life as the engine was used to create various different mods like CS and Day of defeat. However the disadvantage to using a game engine is that once it has been created its more costly to change the engine and would be cheaper and more effiecient to start from scratch.

week 16 assignment

Gaming these days seems to be part of an everyday lifestyle. Even if at some stage of your life you may drift away from gaming, it seems that games is an essential part of life. The article on gambling helps to support this claim as this activity has been around for generations. Its also interesting to know that gaming isn't only used for entertainment purposes, but can be used to improve abilities like hand eye coordination.

I personally am more of an internet gamer, and enjoy online game play and the interaction with other online users. though i have occasionally been places where i can participate in a LAN match with local friends, i personally like the fact that i can play with people from around the world. Playing games online is so quick, easy and don't have to be played at length unlike a story based game. By this i mean that i can play games like counterstrike, that doesn't have a storyline and rounds last at a maximum of 5 mins, which can be useful when i want to blow off some steam. however games with storylines can sometimes make you inmmersed in the story and you end up playing long than you planned.

Another interesting part of online gaming is becoming part of clan. during my experiences on online gaming i have been apart of clans on different games. Clans are a great way of meeting new people and then getting to know them. For instance i have a friend in Sweden that i meet during my time in a clan for the game jedi knight jedi outcast, with which i am still in contact with today even though i haven't played the game in years.

Gaming has also been a medium used for other purposes, like for instance america's army is an online game used to recruit potential candidates for the army. Which shows that game culture is powerful enough to be used for purposes other than just entertainment.