New To Unity, New To Game Dev, Not a New C# Dev

Hello everyone:

I attended an intro to Unity session today and really enjoyed it.

I'm a long time gamer.

I also consider myself a very experienced C# developer.

However, I am not an experienced game developer.

I'm hoping someone can refer a good book or article that describes and explains typical game development terminology. For example:

What are keyframes?
What are the different kinds of textures? Mappings? Shader effects?

I'm starting with 2D (I am a shmup and platform junkie), so I understand that not everything is going to be germane at my level of experience (game dev experience = none).

I came across:
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/wiki/doku.php/jme3:terminology

Which looks promising. Can anyone suggest any other sites? Preferably books?

Thanks!
Tek

 

There are *a lot* of game dev books, but I'm not aware of any that really concisely answer terminology. If I were you I'd say just google the terms as you come across them. However, feel free to post here and I'll answer them as often as I can. If you want a game dev book in general, I'd go with whatever has really good reviews on amazon.

Keframes: The term comes from traditional animation. These are human authored poses that the computer interpolates between. The frames between keyframes are called tweens. Hand animation usually has keyframes every 3-6 frames. Mocap usually has keyframes every frame.

Kinds of Textures: Most commonly textures are 2D images. There are a lot of ways to compress and store them, but that's just detail. There are cube maps, which is a texture where each part represents the face of a cube. Usually these are used to represent captures of an environment like for reflections or certain lighting techniques. Much less common are volume textures, which are 3D textures where each pixel is voxel-like (think minecraft). People also talk about specular maps, diffuse maps, alpha maps, etc but these are just 2D images used to author different aspects of a material's surface variation.

Mappings: Not sure what you mean here.

Shader Effects: A shader is a program that runs on a GPU. They basically tell the GPU how to transform the vertices of a mesh and then how to generate the final color of each pixel of that mesh on the screen. In modern systems, shaders do everything from basic transformations to skinning to complex lighting. Shader effects can mean anything from basic shaders to shaders that are used to create a visual effect (like something burning up). Some people also use shader effects to mean post processing effects, i.e. a shader used on the final image to do things like bloom or depth of field.