Shahzad Malik's 95.402 Page



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Shahzad Malik's 95.402 Page

Welcome to my page! This page is dedicated to Computer Science 95.402A, Fall 1999, for which I am one of the TAs. On this page you'll be able to find links to most of the course related information, such as Professor Lalonde's notes, the course outline, etc. I will also try to update this page regularly with links and information which will help students with their final project. Since this is a project-oriented course, lots of cool and interesting effects in your final 3D engine can really boost your marks, and the Internet is full of excellent examples and demos from which you can get ideas! Check out the links page for some interesting sites.

Monday, December 6, 1999 Final Project Information Hang on, its almost over! Prof. LaLonde has set the demo date for the final project: Saturday, December 18, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the 5th floor NT lab, Herzberg. Students are expected to provide a brief demo of their engine, showing all the cool new features and/or gameplay that will get everyone the A+'s. Additionally, students are expected to hand in their source and executable on disk (or CD?), as well as the written report. The written report should briefly describe all the interesting features of your engine, such as any new special effects that were implemented, some crazy new collision detection algorithm that you discovered, some amazing way to represent your world, a 3D sound system, description of great gameplay, etc. Basically, anything that you've implemented that could possibly increase your mark should be described in the report! Friday, November 12, 1999 Fullscreen OpenGL If anyone is trying to get a fullscreen OpenGL application working, you can try some code I was working on to set fullscreen mode. I had some problems getting it working under Windows NT, but it works great under Windows 98. I even tested it with a 3Dfx Voodoo 1 card, and it actually worked! You can download the standard version (using standard Win32 system calls), or the DirectDraw version. Be sure to read the readme.txt file. Tuesday, November 9, 1999 Assignment #5 Available Assignment #5 (the last one!) has been handed out! It is due Monday, November 15, 1999, before class. Sunday, November 7, 1999 Some new links! Check out the links section, where some new page links have been put up. Many of these sites deal with higher-level topics such as radiosity, collision detection, special effects, etc. Special thanks goes to Dan DuFeu and KingJ for providing these links! Wednesday, October 27, 1999 Assignment #4 Available Assignment #4 has been handed out! It is due Monday, November 8, 1999, before class. OpenGL Tutorial Take a look at this OpenGL Tutorial, which nicely explains how to set up an OpenGL application in Windows (without using GLUT). It then goes into some more advanced things like texturing and handling input (although we all know how to do this stuff now, right?) Tuesday, October 5, 1999 Assignment #3 Available Assignment #3 has been handed out! It is due Monday, October 18, 1999, before class. Monday, October 4, 1999 More TA Hours TA: Chris Hecker Hours: Thursdays, 1:30pm to 5:30pm Room: 5th floor NT lab, Herzberg Look for the red TA badge, with "402" written on it! Saturday, September 25, 1999 OpenGL FAQ Check out the EFnet OpenGL FAQ for great information on using OpenGL! Its got a full range of answers to commonly asked questions, on topics such as using GLUT, drawing text, texture mapping, lighting, matrices, vertex arrays, etc. Thanks goes to Jon Harris for providing this link! Also, be sure to check out the #Opengl IRC channel on EFnet, where you can ask questions directly to knowledgable OpenGL programmers. Thursday, September 23, 1999 TA Hours TA: Shahzad Malik Hours: Tuesdays, 3pm to 6pm Room: 5th floor NT lab, Herzberg Look for the red TA badge, with "402" written on it! Tuesday, September 21, 1999 Assignment #2 Available Assignment #2 has been handed out! It is due Monday, October 4, 1999, before class. MSDN Help Files installed! The extra MSDN help files have been installed in the 5th floor NT labs! We should now have the documentation for DirectX available. Its probably a bit late now that assignment #1 is done, but its good to see that our complaints have resulted in something! If only they would give us more user disk space... Voodoo3 Lab Machines and OpenGL It seems as though the lab machines equipped with the Voodoo3 video cards aren't running accelerated OpenGL. So if you use one of these machines (which are the 2 inner rows in the 5th floor lab), you'll be running in OpenGL software mode, which is very slow. This is a problem with 3dfx's OpenGL drivers; they only work in 16-bit fullscreen mode. Since OpenGL doesn't support fullscreen mode in its standard implementation, its possible to hack it using a combination of Direct3D/DirectDraw to initialize fullscreen mode, then initialize OpenGL and use it from there. Anyone want to implement this? Saturday, September 18, 1999 Interesting Site: Developer's Corner Developer's Corner seems like an interesting site which is geared toward graphics and game programming. Its got a huge collection of discussion forums, many of which are frequented by professional game developers. Definitely worth checking out! Wednesday, September 15, 1999 LAB ISSUES Disk Space There have been numerous complaints about disk space in the 5th floor NT Labs. I'm going to see if the school will allow 402 students to have more reasonable disk space, but for some reason I doubt they will change anything... In the meantime, there are a couple of solutions that you can try: Solution 1: Use a 120 meg SuperDisk which can be used in all the 5th floor NT machines. You can then build and run your application directly from these disks. The bonus with this method is you can then just hand this disk in as part of your assignment, since its ready to go! (that is, if you're willing to give away your $20 SuperDisk for a week while your assignment is marked...) The catch: Access time with these disks is MUCH slower, so building your programs may take a while. Also, if you don't have a SuperDrive in your home machine, you won't be able to work on it there. Solution 2: Use the C drive to do your work, then back everything up onto a SuperDisk before logging off. All users have write access to the "C:\Temp" directory, and there is much more available space there. The catch: You have to keep backing up your code onto disk after each programming session. NOTE: If you don't have access to the floppy drive from within Windows NT (ie. no floppy drive icon), you should bug the SCS tech guys. This is a problem that they should've fixed a long long time ago... Help Files One other major issue is regarding the help files within Visual C++ 6.0. It seems as though only the base C++ help information is available, while the DirectX documentation and other MSDN help files are missing (it asks you to insert a CD...) I'm going to try to get someone to look into this within the next day or so... Monday, September 13, 1999 Assignment #1 Available Assignment #1 has been handed out! It is due Monday, September 20, 1999, before class.

If you have any comments or suggestions, email me at smalik@chat.carleton.ca