D Objects

KEY TOPICS

• Hidden Surface Removal
• 3D Animation
• Polygon Groups
• Loading Polygon Groups from an OBJ File
• Game Objects
• Managing Game Objects
• Putting It All Together
• Future Enhancements
• Summary

In a typical game, the player will find objects to bump into, grab, jump over, jump on, eat, catch, dodge, nudge, fight with, throw, shoot, or whatever else you can think of. In this chapter, you'll create a 3D object-animation system to move and rotate objects in the world. To draw the 3D objects, you'll use z-buffering to draw polygons in the correct z-order. You'll also create a parser to read 3D objects from OBJ files so you don't have to define lots of polygons in Java code. Finally, you'll put everything together by creating a few simple game objects and a game object manager. Using these techniques takes you a step closer to creating a real 3D game that gives the player some objects to interact with.