First Person Shooter Game

3D game development is an exciting activity for many students. But getting a handle on 3D game development for novices may be a daunting task. We take this opportunity to present a quick introduction to 3D game development through a few tutorials. For the next few columns a set of tutorials for a 3D first person shooter game developed by graduate and undergraduate students under the guidance of a faculty member from the University of West Florida will be presented. These tutorials were developed with 3D game Studio by Conitec. To follow along, download the software from www.conitec.com. These tutorials include all elements of game development such as modeling and animation, lighting, collision detection, sound and scripting. Each tutorial will focus on one or more of these aspects. This week we start out with creating a room and adding some objects to the room. The instructions for this are presented below. 1 CREATING WAD FILES Q: What is a WAD? A: WADs are basically a gallery of textures. However; these textures can be used to make many things – such as windows, doors, walls, ceilings, etc. Each WAD file can hold as many textures as you import. WAD files are really important when you are trying to customize your game. You can use the default WADs provided by 3D Game Studio, but doing so will only get you to a certain level of customizability. FIRST PERSON SHOOTER GAME 26 JOURNAL OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY VOL. 7, NO. 3 Step 1: Collecting Textures for your WAD file Textures can be made from any picture as long as you’re willing to modify them, so create a folder and save any pictures you want to use as a texture to that location Note: The name of the picture will appear inside the WAD file so try to make it descriptive as possible (Example: BlueRug01, CeilingTile01, WoodenDoor04, RedPaint02) Step 2: Converting Textures to the Proper Format Textures for WAD files have to meet a few requirements • The picture has to be a “.bmp” or “.pcx” • The picture shouldn’t be too detailed • If the texture is going to be used as a pattern (paint, brick, tile) the sizes we can use are powers of 2 (128x128, 256x256, or 512x512 are a few examples) • If the texture is going to be used for doors or windows, the dimensions will depend on your personal preferences, so it may take some experimenting to find the size you’re looking for Open up any paint program (preferably a paint program with advanced features – such as Photoshop or GIMP) Step‐By‐Step Procedure using Adobe Photoshop 1. Crop the image if necessary to make the image a square 2. Click Image ‐> Image Size to change the image size