Museum Memoirs

My primary role in this project was developing the rendering features to be used for the framework. Some of the tasks under my responsibility were:

• Loading of 3D meshes and textures using both Open Asset Import Library and DirectX Tool Kit libraries and integrating them with the framework systems, most noticeably with the vertex structures and shader inputs used for rendering.
• In-game lighting, using a Blinn-Phon lighting model in shaders. The lighting model supported ambient, diffuse, and specular lighting and customisable light intensity and colour. The framework also supported multiple lights at once and different light types, including directional, point, and spotlights.
• Normal mapping increases the details of 3D models without increasing geometry complexity. Besides adjusting the shaders to sample the normal maps using the vertices normals, tangents, and binomials, this also included support for calculating the tangents of the 3D models at load time if these were exported without that information. This implemented MikktSpace to calculate the tangent space of the 3D models.
• Shadow mapping. The single directional light in the game can cast shadows on the game. This renders the depth from the directional light “point of view” to create the shadow map and determine where shadows should be cast. Different settings, like allowing only particular objects to cast shadows, provide flexibility to this system.
• Graphics debugging through the use of NVIDIA Nsight Graphics frame captures to analyse the game's rendering and identify bugs in rendering.
• Sound playback support for background music and sound effects through integration with the FMOD library.
• 2D UI and menu system. DirectXTK was used to render 2D sprites; support was implemented for a UI system that detects and processes mouse events, like mouse hovers and clicks. This also included the in-game HUD to track the player’s task and show his current score.