Computer Graphics

Establishing Art Direction Early On Setting clear visual style goals and benchmarks early in development is crucial for indie teams operating on tight budgets and schedules. Concept art and style guides created at the start of the project help align the team on the intended aesthetic and serve as a north star when making decisions…

The Problem of Erratic AI Ship Movement In many space simulation games, AI-controlled ships move from point to point in preset patterns. These ships often travel directly between destinations, turning at sharp 90-degree angles to reach the next waypoint. This predictable and robotic movement looks artificial when compared to the smooth, flowing paths taken by…

Centering the Camera on a Target Point A core problem in controlling a camera is keeping it centered on a designated target point in the scene as that point moves around. The camera needs to track the target’s position and orient itself accordingly so that the target remains centered in the camera’s view at all…

An arcball camera is a virtual camera that orbits around a target point, providing the ability to rotate smoothly around objects and models. The key mechanism behind an arcball camera is using quaternion rotations to track the camera’s orientation, allowing full 360 degree panning while avoiding gimbal lock issues. By converting mouse or touch input…

Defining the Gimbal Lock Problem Gimbal lock refers to the mathematical singularity that occurs when two out of three gimbal axes, typically used to represent 3D orientation, align. This leads to the loss of one degree of rotational freedom. In 3D computer graphics, gimbal lock causes erratic behavior in orientation control that must be avoided….

Getting Smooth Arcball Rotation Right A common problem with basic arcball camera implementations is jittery rotation. As the user drags the mouse to rotate the scene, the camera snaps to new orientations resulting in visual noise. The key to fixing this is mapping mouse movement to quaternions and combining them for smooth, incremental rotation. Set…

Handling Complex Geometry in Voxel Engines Voxel engines, which represent game worlds using volumetric pixels, must accurately handle complex geometry to render crisp, artifact-free images. However, intersecting planes, jagged edges along diagonals, and other geometric complexities can introduce rendering errors that manifest as visual artifacts. Culling Hidden Faces for Optimization To maximize performance, voxel engines…

Reducing Draw Calls for Voxel Terrain Voxel terrains consist of numerous individual voxel cubes that comprise the full terrain geometry. Rendering a high number of individual voxel cubes can result in a large number of separate draw calls, significantly reducing rendering performance. There are several techniques that can optimize voxel terrain rendering by reducing total…

Reducing Complexity of 2D Animation Code Managing hundreds or thousands of individual sprite image files significantly complicates game development. Each sprite must be loaded individually, tracked in code, and rendered separately. This convoluted workflow slows down development and runtime performance. Sprite sheets consolidate all related sprites into a single texture asset. This simplifies asset management…

The Core Problem: Balancing Detail and Performance Real-time 2D sprite rendering engines face inherent constraints in terms of the memory and maximum texture sizes available on target devices. Detailed 2D sprite graphics with rich textures consume substantial texture memory and runtime sprite object allocations. At the same time, maintaining high and consistent frame rates requires…