World Builder

By Kyle McCartney

CSC 471 Final Project Spring 2013

Description
World builder is a game that allows the user to embrace their inner three-year-old and build thing with blocks and other miscellaneous objects in a virutal world. The user gets to build their world by selected the different objects and dropping them into the world. Objects can be stacked, and with some patience you can create some complex things.

Controls

W Key: move forward
A Key: move to the left
S Key: move to the right
D Key: move backward
Click and drag mouse: position camera using pitch and yaw
Spacebar: toggle through the different objects
Enter: drop the current object
ESC: toggle to enable/disable building mode

Technical Info
Figuring out how to have the user place objects in a 3D world using 2D mouse coordinates proved to be the most challenging part. However, the solution was actually very simple. All I did was create a vector using the eye position and the look at point, which I normalized and scaled appropriately. This allowed me to have the object always be in the center of the screen and it allowed the user to position it using the WASD keys and pitch and yaw.

The other problem I had to figure out was how to keep objects in their place after the user placed the . For this I made an object structure that had data on every object such as its type, position, and size, and after each object was placed it was added to a vector of other placed objects, which I coulld render in a for loop in my Draw() function.

Concluding Remarks
This project gave me a chance to use all of the knowledge I have learned in this course and apply it in a way that increased my understanding of it conceptually and practically. It also gave me a program that I can show off to people and continue to build on as I learn more abouts computer graphics and C++.

Screenshots