CS1566 Highlights
05/06
This is how it all begins. Warm-up assignment: students are
asked to implement a falling 2D ball controlled by mouse-clicks. The
ball should stop when reaching the bottom of the window.
The solution by Stephen Stasa (CS1566'08) shown in the video below -- and replicated by several
students in 2009 -- goes the
full-length and implements a simple physically-based simulation of the
ball. Enjoy!
This midterm project by Daniel Oliphant (CS1566'09) uses concepts learned in the
first half of CS1566. Around midterm, Daniel created an ever-evolving world, where a
walking character changes the shape of the planet as he walks. The
planet is a tesselated sphere, stored as a 2D matrix (see assignment 2), *but* the matrix
rows get updated with each timeout event. A sinus function animates
the waves, and a dot-product gives the time of the day. Cool --
make sure you have the audio on!
(or you can try the mp4
file; either file might take a minute to load, it's worth it)
This final project by Nat Wetzel (CS1566'08) builds a navigatable version of
Downtown Pittsburgh -- complete with bridges, animated funiculars, and
a "Go Pens!" flying blimp (way to go, Nat!). The animations here are
scripted and stored in an extension of the assignment 4 scene graph
format. The project is a neat extension
of the five programming assignments.
Brian Dicks (CS1566'09) wrote a very neat deferred
renderer (per-pixel lighting, multiple light sources)
-- check out the video below. The project is a challenging extension
of assignment 5.
For his final project, Lukas Hoffman (CS1566'09) wrote a
planetary-scale 3D gravity simulator with explosion
animation. Lukas is using RK4 for the simulation, and he has a keen
eye for roundoff error and simulation efficiency -- make sure you have the audio on.
(or you can try the higher quality avi file; the avi file might take a couple
minutes to load)
Jackie Kircher (CS1566'09) wrote an interactive domino simulator with awesome
collision detection -- called
Fall-E to honor Pixar. The user can
click on a domino piece to start the
reaction, and can also move the
dominoes around to generate
a new course. Jackie
has a few interesting observations
about scene complexity vs simulation
speed -- good job, Jackie! Don't miss the
audio track.
Ted DePietro (CS1566'09) put together a tongue-in-cheek Death Star
simulator, complete with a laser-shooting capability :-) Several Star Destroyers -- created in a manner similar
to the Robot example discussed in class -- orbit the Death Star at
varying trajectories. The user flies through in a way similar to
Assignment 4; in the 1st person view, the user appears to be looking
though the cockpit of a Tie Fighter; in the 3rd person view, the user
can both view and navigate the Tie Fighter.
Stephen Zieger (CS1566'09) created an interactive Wumpus World. A
Wumpus World is an artificial intelligence construct for demonstrating
informed decision making. The world itself is a square grid containing
a treasure, pits, and the Wumpus. Squares adjacent to the pit and the
Wumpus have warning marks, and the explorer has a single arrow that
she can fire in a straight line to kill the Wumpus. In Stephen's world
the user controls the explorer instead of the AI; only visited squares
are visible, so the explorer doesn't know what is in a square until she
enters it.
Dan Oliphant and Chris Henne (CS1566'09) combine in NetTown their
networking knowledge with what they've learned
in cs1566 about OpenGL. They've created an interactive 3D world where various
users are able to act and interact with each other over a network (a
la PlayStation Home). This final project gave Dan and Chris "an
opportunity to better understand the client-server characteristics of
the OpenGL state machine." :-) (Pester Dan and Chris for a live demo
when you catch them in the hallway.)
Sean Nagle and Nick Leonard (cs1566'08) play "Lost with a
Flashlight" -- an interactive labyrinth game featuring colission detection.
The user carries a flashlight and can navigate the labyrinth in either first or third person.
 .
(to be continued...more '09 project videos :-)
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