Several Questions on Game Design I am a beginner and always puzzled by several questions on game design. How scenes of a game are drawn? By a programmer using OpenGL or DX? Or by an art designer using drawing software such as 3D MAX and so on? If scenes are drawn by art designers, what a programmer do? Just mapping the drawn pictures on where they should be ? For example, when a character is moving, a programmer map different drawn pictures according to where he arrives. The same question is on special effects, videos in games.I can not believe that they are drawn frame by frame by an art designer and connected by a programmer. Perhaps they are silly questions,but I hope I can attain explanations on the questions?Thanks in advance.

Scenes are, ultimatly, drawn by the programmer. But what is in those scenes are usually created by an artist. For instance, Quake 3. Everything is drawn and rendered by the programmer and the code. But the textures, models, levels, etc are made by the artist. Artists create the raw art, and the programmer throws it at the screen in pretty ways.

Yup...In few words the programmers use the art provided by the artists to bring the game to life. And I think that''s good...cause I''m a programmer and personally my art suckx...

The above is about right. An example of how a programmer is involved in "making the graphics":

Imagine you have some construction paper, and various figures and objects cut-out like what you might see on a kid''s sticker book. Someone else has made the drawings already. Your job is to program a robot to take and then move around the cut-outs on the paper over time and according to user input.

The artist works with this metaphorical construction-paper game by producing cut-outs that the robot is capable of manipulating, while a level designer has some say in how the cut-outs are arranged.

The resulting environment, unless one can record every situation beforehand(either technically unfeasable or reached through limiting interactivity) is never going to be 100% predictable and will always be a pieced-together representation that only gives an illusion of reality; the artist''s programs save the artwork in data that the game can read and manipulate so as to appear as they were created, only with transformations to fit the game situation and gain certain effects.

When people talk about features in 3d engines, they are referring to the capacity of the engine to transform the data its given to be able to reproduce effects, or create completely new ones - so things like lighting and the number of polygons used become important features to consider as a developer aims for creating a realistic environment.

I have understood some of it. Firstly in a 2D game,imaging that a character is walking in a forest, and there are trees, stones even a river, in the sky there are the sun and clouds......So when I manipulate the character the programme shold read map files and according to the read data place all the drawn objects where they should be. Am I right? But after I have set up a game ,in its directory I can not find all the pictures appearing in the game,only parts of them can be seen as bmp file. What about other objects. If all the pictures used in the game are stored as bmp file, it must be a waste of disk room.
Secondly there is still something that I can not understand about magic effects and cartoon in games, are they drawn frame by frame and connected by programmers?
Finally in a 3D game, all of the objects even characters are 3D, so do an art designer have to draw many pictures from many angles of every object and when the visual angle changed, programmers map these pictures according to angles?
Thanks very much!

Most anime-type cutscenes aren''t frame-by-frame flipped. They''re put into an MPEG or something and played like in Windows Media Player. Some of the pictures in 2D games are stuck in the executable, some are just crammed into large bitmap files and have parts pulled out.

quote:
Finally in a 3D game, all of the objects even characters are 3D, so do an art designer have to draw many pictures from many angles of every object and when the visual angle changed, programmers map these pictures according to angles?

The artist just models and textures objects/scenes or whatever, now since the objects are 3d they can be viewed from any point of view so... no the artist doesn''t have to draw the object from different points of view. That''s more of a programmer''s job to change the point of view in the game. For example let''s say you want to have the camera rotate around the player, all you would have to do is change the camera position and the 3d engine would draw the scene from that point of view.

quote: Original post by Edward Ropple
Most anime-type cutscenes aren''t frame-by-frame flipped. They''re put into an MPEG or something and played like in Windows Media Player. Some of the pictures in 2D games are stuck in the executable, some are just crammed into large bitmap files and have parts pulled out.

So every frame of the cartoon must be drawn and put into a MPEG file,is it right? What a complicated job!

quote: Original post by Edward Ropple
Most anime-type cutscenes aren''t frame-by-frame flipped. They''re put into an MPEG or something and played like in Windows Media Player. Some of the pictures in 2D games are stuck in the executable, some are just crammed into large bitmap files and have parts pulled out.

So every frame of the cartoon must be drawn and put into a MPEG file,is it right? What a complicated job!

It''s not much different than a regular cartoon. They draw keyframes and interpolate between them.