Project 5

Some people get stressed out when faced with a very open assignment like this. For those people, I provide a sketch of a ray-tracing lab described here. If you always wanted to write a raytracer, this will be a nice jumping off place for you, too.

Many people want to write a game. The overview of OpenGL given in the previous four projects should get you going fairly easily on that. Note that you need to write the game graphics if you write a game—none of those game development tools that take care of all of the graphics for you. Note also that I have not put point breakdowns on this; you'll need to work that out with the TA, but expect 60 points or so for the basics and the rest from quirks and neat things, with eye candy being more valuable than game play.

There are many other topics in computer graphics. Fractal generation and rendering tools, dynamic content generation, visually appealing fluid-, rigid-body-, or soft-body-dynamics, data/algorithm/process visualization—any of them could work. The basic guidelines are:

• It needs to be visual.
• It needs to involve code you write.
• You need to talk to the TA in advance to make sure you neither do too little nor cut off more than you can chew.
• If you want to write a game, you are free to use your own rendering code, but OpenGL will be a lot faster in many respects. You can use it if you wish.