GAMES 6320 · Course write-ups

Game Engineering II

C++ 引擎课程的每周作业记录。从一个 Direct3D / OpenGL 双平台的教学引擎出发，把硬编码的三角形一步步变成由资产管线构建、从 Maya 导出、经相机渲染的场景。每篇都附可下载的 Release 构建。

Course
GAMES 6320 · Game Engineering II
Term
Fall 2026 · University of Utah EAE
Stack
C++ · Direct3D · OpenGL · HLSL / GLSL · Lua · Maya
Essays
8 published · latest 2026.10.24
Latest Assignment 08 Binary mesh files built by MeshBuilder MeshBuilder now writes binary mesh files, and the game loads them with four extractions and no parsing. Read the write-up

All assignments

  1. 08 Binary mesh files built by MeshBuilder MeshBuilder now writes binary mesh files, and the game loads them with four extractions and no parsing. 14 min read
  2. 07 A Maya exporter, depth buffering, vertex colors A Maya mesh exporter plug-in, meshes made in Maya, depth buffering, and vertex colors. 8 min read
  3. 06 A human-readable mesh format and a MeshBuilder A human-readable mesh file format, a MeshBuilder tool, and loading meshes from disk. 7 min read
  4. 05 Cameras, game objects, platform-independent shaders Cameras, game objects, and platform-independent shaders. The engine gets an actual world — meshes are authored in local space and placed by a local-to-world transform, a camera supplies world-to-camera and camera-to-projected matrices, and the game tracks game objects with a position and velocity. Shaders are also rewritten so that almost everything in them is written once for both HLSL and GLSL. 9 min read
  5. 04 Reference-counted assets and render submission Assignment 03 introduced cMesh/cEffect abstractions and a platform-independent Graphics.cpp. Assignment 04 turns cMesh and cEffect into reference-counted assets, adds SubmitMeshWithEffect / SubmitClearColor submission interfaces, and moves mesh/effect ownership from the Graphics project to the MyGame project. 9 min read
  6. 03 Removing per-platform Graphics files; index buffers Assignment 02 introduced cMesh and cEffect but still had platform-specific Graphics.d3d.cpp and Graphics.gl.cpp files. Assignment 03 removes those two files completely by moving the remaining platform-specific frame work behind a small sContext abstraction. It also adds uint16_t index buffers to cMesh, makes both cMesh and cEffect initialize from caller-provided data, and renders two objects with two effects. 4 min read
  7. 02 Platform-independent mesh and effect interfaces Assignment 01 hard-coded all of the geometry and shading into the platform-specific Graphics.d3d.cpp and Graphics.gl.cpp files. Assignment 02 is about separating what from how: introduce a platform-independent cMesh (geometry) and cEffect (shading) interface, replace the hard-coded data in both renderers with instances of those abstractions, and add a second triangle so the two triangles together render a filled rectangle. 4 min read
  8. 01 Graphics library, a second game project, the asset build The assignment starts from a provided EAE6320-style engine and asks you to do a handful of things that sound small but expose a lot of how the engine is put together: introduce a new Graphics static library, split platform-specific rendering code correctly, create a second game project (MyGame) alongside the example game, hook up the asset build pipeline, and then make that game do something visible - an animated triangle - with a game-specific shader. 8 min read