Recently I was asked how to tile textures inside ShaderFX, so I figured I’d provide a little instruction today for everyone. It’s really very simple, but if you’re new to real time shaders and the tool, you may have no idea how to do it.
We have to consider that we can tile a texture in two directions – U and V – or horizontally and vertically. Just remember that V = vertical.
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One of the largest issues in game development is that of scope management, particularly in this day of MAG (multi-action genre) games such as Grand Theft Auto. Game designers have a tendency to think big; more and bigger levels, more features. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact thinking big is critical to the process of developing innovative gameplay and innovative gameplay is the key to being successful as a company.
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In Part I, we talked a little about the types of games and how to represent those games on paper, specifically the matrix game in which strategies are laid out for two players in a table. We discussed how a player’s strategies can dominate each other and that dominating strategies should always be chosen over the ones they dominate. And finally, we discussed the concept of the saddle point; the outcome of the most cautious move by both players and therefore the best move for both players to make.
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Game Theory is the mathematical theory of conflict and cooperation. It is a study of choices and outcomes, of strategies and payoffs. Mathematicians apply Game Theory to business strategies, wars, global politics and economics; any event that puts two or more ‘players’ into conflict. It is used to predict the payoffs of strategies that a player may take in these ‘games’.
As game designers in the entertainment industry, learning and applying the basic principals and techniques of Game Theory in our daily work will help us build better games.
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Greetings programs!
I hope you’re all having a great week and looking forward to the weekend. By popular demand, I’ve put together a video tutorial to explain how to build a basic shader with ShaderFX inside MayaLT.
Hey, I’m no math genius, nor did I go to school for programming, but if I can wrap my brain around shader programming, so can you guys. Of course, ShaderFX helps by doing most of the heavy lifting in that department.
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I had a chance to watch a great video tutorial series over my vacation on Unity game development. While my knowledge of Unity game development is already pretty substantial, I’m always on the lookout for new tricks and educational materials that I can share with my readers to help them get better at it. The tutorial, available at http://bit.ly/1dqzpEO from Packt Publishing, was created by Adam Maxwell, a developer with an extensive triple-A development background including work at Blizzard, Microsoft, Trion Worlds and several other major studios.
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