A very generic term referring to visual part of a game. Thus try to avoid unrelevant usage and instead tag for specific grapics type (2D, 3D), API, framework or a library you are using if possible.
175
votes
25answers
62k views
Where can I find free sprites and images? [closed]
I need sprites and images, such as characters, landscapes and others. Where can I find them?
67
votes
8answers
86k views
How do I get started making Android games? [closed]
I am new to game development. I am interested in developing 2D games for the Android platform. What is the best place to start with (i.e) What are the basics and how to proceed? I already have ...
43
votes
7answers
2k views
Why no night sky with realistic star constellations?
As an amateur stargazer I noticed that many games which have night scenarios use textures for the night sky where the stars seem to be arranged entirely randomly. It seems like they were created by an ...
41
votes
6answers
4k views
Which image format is more memory-efficient: PNG, JPEG, or GIF?
Which image format is more efficient to save memory? PNG, JPEG, or GIF?
40
votes
13answers
2k views
How to make some monsters appear more dangerous than others?
My game is an open-world co-op MMO with retro graphics, permadeath and no leveling system.
The problem I'm facing, is the fact that I don't know how to make some monsters appear harder than others. ...
38
votes
12answers
2k views
Why can we recognize game engines?
About many games you can say "oh that's the Unreal engine for sure", "this was made by upgrading GTA 4", etc. We can often recognize the engine used for a game just by looking at its graphics ...
33
votes
8answers
5k views
Where to start with game development? [closed]
I asked this earlier in this thread at stackoverflow.com. One of the early comments redirected me here to gamedev.stackexchange.com, so I'm reposting here.
Searching for related questions I found a ...
30
votes
2answers
2k views
How to render realistic ice?
I am trying to write an ice shader in Unity that looks good and at least semi-realistic.
If the following shot (found on Google) was CG, what would its shader include? (the foreground cave). I might ...
28
votes
1answer
5k views
Rendering SVG art directly in XNA
Suppose I have a bunch of 2D art in some vectorized format such as SVG. Is there an easy-ish way to render that directly without having to implement a full SVG renderer myself?
Of course I could ...
28
votes
2answers
925 views
How do you author HDR content?
How do you make it easy for your artists to author content for an HDR renderer? What kinds of tools should you provide, and what workflows need to change, in going from LDR to HDR?
Note that I'm not ...
27
votes
6answers
3k views
How can I make a good-looking explosion particle effect?
I'm not much of an artist, but I'm trying to make decent particle effects in a 2.5D game. I'm making a replica of Wii Play's "Tanks" and I can't quite get the explosions to look good. I'm not going ...
24
votes
3answers
3k views
What is the purpose of the stencil buffer ? More precisely, what is a stencil in computer graphics?
I read the stencil word a lot, and I don't have a clue what is its real purpose in computer graphics.
Seeing the picture in black and white on wikipedia, I'm still having problem with it.
Why do we ...
24
votes
4answers
685 views
What viable way for an indie dev to test for epilepsy reactions on a game?
So I've been developing a game which is a bit.. blinky in terms of color and lightness contrasts. It's a game for the iPhone, so the screen's not gonna be so big..
But I've heard about wipeout XL ...
22
votes
10answers
2k views
What makes a game look “good”?
I am working on a 3D space game using OpenGL and C++ and I am planning to focus on giving the game modern, eye-catching graphics, but the more I think of it the more I realise I don't really know what ...
22
votes
7answers
4k views
About floating point precision and why do we still use it
Floating point was always troublesome for precision on large worlds.
This article explains behind-the-scenes and offers the obvious alternative - fixed point numbers. Some facts are really ...
21
votes
3answers
4k views
How can I make this style of 2D “glowing” graphics?
I'm comfortable with the basics of building a 2d sprite based game in XNA, where all my objects are simply .png images that I move around.
What things do I need to learn next to be able to develop a ...
20
votes
9answers
6k views
Tips and Tools for creating Spritesheet animations
I am looking for a tool that I can use to create sprite sheet easily.
Right now I am using Illustrator, but I can never get the center of the character in the exact position, so it looks like it is ...
18
votes
4answers
8k views
How can a programmer learn to draw 2D assets?
Are there any good tutorials for someone who wants to create 2D graphical game assets? Drawing classes for absolute beginners, preferably teaching skills that can be as relevant as possible to games - ...
17
votes
8answers
2k views
What all should be happening during the “Loading” screen?
Do I just need to be creating instances of all of my graphics into memory that are loaded from file? What is the best way to handle this? Do I just need some sort of assets manager that creates ...
16
votes
6answers
3k views
How can I improve or replace my programmer art?
Say I'm a programmer who has done his own sprites or 3d models which would fall into programmer-ish kind of art. What steps can I take in order to improve or replace my own art?
15
votes
2answers
796 views
What's the difference between mesh and a model?
Which one is created first? For example if a team worked on a graphical asset of a car, what would be a model and what would be a mesh of the car?
15
votes
3answers
3k views
Pleasing isometric hexagons
What angles and long-side:short-side ratios give the most aesthetically pleasing and graphically regular isometric (squashed, flat side up) hexes; that additionally resolve to whole pixel sizes for ...
15
votes
5answers
2k views
Where do I start if I want to independently learn game graphic design?
I want to learn how to create custom graphics, not use freely available resources. But I have been looking around for articles or tutorials on how to start with 2D game design in general, and I can't ...
14
votes
2answers
3k views
How are physics or graphics components typically built in a component-oriented system?
I have spent the last 48 hours reading up on Object Component systems, and feel I am ready enough to start implementing it. I got the base Object and Component classes created, but now that I need to ...
14
votes
4answers
916 views
What should every graphics programmer write
I've seen this question on SO, but here i want it to focus on GFX.
So in your opinion what applications/features should every aspiring GFX programmer write/change to get better?
Community wiki since ...
14
votes
1answer
2k views
The practical cost of swapping effects
I use XNA for my projects and on those forums I sometimes see references to the fact that swapping an effect for a mesh has a relatively high cost, which surprises me as I thought to swap an effect ...
14
votes
3answers
724 views
What does the graphics card do with the fourth element of a vector as the final position?
From this question it appears you would want a four-element position vector, as it is simpler to modify its position with matrix multiplication.
On its own this would imply the fourth element should ...
13
votes
7answers
7k views
What are some cool examples of procedural pixel shader effects? [closed]
What are some good examples of procedural or screen-space pixel shader effects? No code is necessary; I'm just looking for inspiration.
In particular, I'm looking for effects that are not dependent ...
13
votes
12answers
2k views
3D theory before graphics APIs?
I'm a software engineer and I'm hoping to move my career towards game development. I'm reading a book right now on 2D using C++/DirectX. When I get into 3D I know I want to do it correctly. For ...
13
votes
3answers
10k views
13
votes
5answers
2k views
boolean operations on meshes
given a set of vertices and triangles for each mesh. Does anyone know of an algorithm, or a place to start looking( I tried google first but haven't found a good place to get started) to perform ...
12
votes
3answers
783 views
What platform were old TV video games developed on?
I am very eager to know how TV video games (which we all used to play in our childhood) were developed and on which platform.
I know how games are developed for mobile devices, Windows PC's and Mac ...
12
votes
3answers
873 views
HLSL Translucent Plastic Shader
I'm trying to produce a shader to replicate a white plastic object with a colored light inside. Either by having a shader that will be translucent and if I put a light inside the object the light will ...
12
votes
2answers
379 views
Clear reference implementations of MLAA?
Does anyone know of a clearly written reference implementation of morphological antialiasing (MLAA)?
Intel provide a paper and reference implementation at the following address, but I find the code ...
11
votes
7answers
2k views
Fastest way to create a simple particle effect
I am looking to the fastest way to create really simple particle effect that will be spammed like hell on the game...
Basically, my game looks like a vectrex game, made mostly of lines... I want to ...
11
votes
1answer
355 views
Breathing for game/movie characters
Breathing (the movement of chest and face features): I'd like to ask if it is hard to model and whether it is computationaly expensive. I recently noticed the great effect it has in Madagascar 3 ...
11
votes
5answers
2k views
High Performance Vector Graphics Solutions
I'm looking for a high performance vector graphics library I can use in my games.
I'm thinking along the lines of vector graphics such as those that can be made with SVG.
I'll consider any language ...
11
votes
1answer
697 views
How do 2D art assets (eg. sprites) work?
I have an idea on a game and planning on developing a 2D game using XNA for Windows Phone 7.
I've started off today by free hand drawing some concept art of what I want some of the characters to ...
11
votes
2answers
2k views
How do I query available video memory using DirectX?
How do you query the amount of VRAM available when using DirectX?
10
votes
5answers
1k views
Quick 2D sight area calculation algorithm?
I have a matrix of tiles, on some of that tiles there are objects. I want to calculate which tiles are visible to player, and which are not, and I need to do it quite efficiently (so it would compute ...
10
votes
3answers
877 views
How do I scale down pixel art?
There are plenty of algorithms to scale up pixel art. (I prefer hqx, personally.) But are there any notable algorithms to scale it down? My game is designed to run at a resolution of 1280x720, but if ...
10
votes
2answers
1k views
How do I replicate the warp effect from Geometry Wars?
I'm trying to achieve the warp effect that you see in games like Geometry Wars.
Can someone help explain what is going on here? I feel like the grid's z axis is manipulated in some way, any way, by ...
10
votes
5answers
946 views
Cross platform low level graphic API
When creating a system abstraction is better to have the platform different APIs hidden by a common interface at the lowest level that makes sense.
Taking in account the different modern (with no ...
10
votes
2answers
1k views
Realistic metal shader
How do you create a good metal shader?
For different metals and say more or less eroded / rusty and so on.
I know that one difference from ordinary materials is that metal should 'colour' the ...
10
votes
3answers
386 views
Is showing a collision in slow motion computationally relaxing?
In a lot of racing games (Burnout Paradise, for example) when a collision is about to happen, the game play automatically switches to slow motion and carries on in slow sequence until after the ...
10
votes
4answers
2k views
How to deal with arbitrarily large images in 2D games?
Question
When you have a 2D game that uses really large images (larger than your hardware can support), what do you do? Maybe there's some interesting solution to this problem that never occured to ...
9
votes
6answers
2k views
Make pygame's frame rate faster
By profiling my game, I see that the vast majority of the execution time of my hobby game is between the blit and the flip calls. Currently, it's only running at around 13fps. My video card is fairly ...
9
votes
4answers
1k views
How did they make the screen move in Dangerous Dave?
I've made games in BASIC when I was a child, and I was curious about how the graphics were done in the 1988 version of Dangerous Dave made in C++; especially because they didn't have any worthwhile ...
9
votes
1answer
917 views
How can I easily create cloud texture maps?
I am making 3d planets in my game; these will be viewed as "globes". Some of them will need cloud layers. I looked at various Blender tutorials for creating "earth", and for their cloud layers they ...
9
votes
3answers
528 views
Is there any advantage in using DX10/11 for a 2D game?
I'm not entirely familiar with the feature set introduced by DX10/11 class hardware. I'm vaguely familiar with the new stages added to the programmable graphics pipeline, such as the geometry shader, ...
