Question : Designing a Graphic Environment

Hi, I'm new to game development (very new) and have a simple question. - How does one design what the player sees? In other words, lets say your game involves driving through a city; how does one design the roads, other vehicles, etc to simulate the movement forward?

Similarly, if my game involved a flight simulator, how does one design the aerial views to simulate moving forward, to the right / left, up /down, etc and maintain the illusion of moving forward, while not repeating the same frames over and over again. In other words, I don't want to fly over the same mountain 100 times, I want to fly over a landscape and see different size mountains, etc.

How does one do that?

Are there any tutorials that can get me started in that area?

Are there special software that I should look into if I wish to attempt to design a graphic environment like I'm describing?

Thank you,
Fulano

Answer : Designing a Graphic Environment

Hi Fulano,

Let me add some thoughts to mtgradwell's very good post.

Basically all you can see in a 3D game is made of triangles with an Image (Texture) mapped onto it.
We call those things models. It can be the road, the sky, a house, the big bad spider, the good-looking hero, everything is basically made of triangles and Textures.

So where do those models come from?

In a professional game-production there are a lot of artists, usually a lot more than programmers. They work with tools to create such little magic made of triangles. There are 2 major tools used in the industry:

  3D Studio Max  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max
  Maya  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Maya

Both are not cheap. A free modeling tool is:

  Blender http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)

which is used a lot in Open-Source-Projects, its free, but its a great tool.

You will find a lot of tutorials for each of them in the net as well as example models.


++++

However, regarding learning OpenGL, here are some good resources:

  - The Nehe-Tutorials at http://nehe.gamedev.net
    They cover the topic starting from the very basics, like "Lesson 2, Your first polygon" -> http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/lesson.asp?lesson=02

  - The Great OpenGL Book "The Red Book" here http://www.opengl.org/documentation/red_book


Feel free to ask more and I'm happy to see some OpenGL Questions from you here in the future :)


ike