Hello everyone! I am continuing my discussion on inde game dev and decided to give away some of my secrets! There are a few preferred recommendations before reading this...
1. get a good quality game like skyrim or new vegas.
2. have at least a week of programming experience and game testing.
3. basic understanding of graphic design and 3D modeling
OK lets start out with something easy like the sky! how do we make a sky in a game? well there are two main ways of doing it. First we can have a box like structure where you have 6 planes lined up to make a box and 6 textures that go with it and you (the camera) are placed inside it. The second method is very similar but it is a sphere, the sphere is harder to manage since you use on bit texture and most of the time that texture will not look good on the sphere. If you are wanting to make sky's like skyrim... well that can be a couple posts long, lol. I will try to go over the basics on how the elder scrolls make their games so beautiful. How about you want a dynamic sky? one that has a day time and night time? well you would either have a rotating sphere or dynamic textures. along with dynamic skys you also need a timing system to record and process what time it is in the game and also link the ambient light value to it too. With dynamic textures (not really my field yet) you would either need a couple hundred textures being applied to the object a lot of the time, or do a method that I don't know about.
OK! GET OUT SKYRIM AND START PLAYING WHILE YOU READ THIS! if possible. First off how do they do their menu? their loading screens? Well you start off by placing an imported object and place it right beside the camera, pick out pre-programmed sayings using a random generator and then place the text on the bottom right corner. Place a plane right in front of your camera that has a black texture and add particles for smoke. How do you make particles of smoke? well you have an initial spot x,y,z then you create a bunch of planes that move in random directions upwards from the initial spot and have a texture of the smoke on it with some alpha applied... see it isn't that easy?
Now in skyrim when you move around the populated areas you realize that the light reflect in a certain way off of the objects! this is called texture mapping and using shaders. there can be up to 7 textures for one object, but you many see the first one and the others give info to the shader on how stuff like light interact with it. I am not a professional with shaders nor do I know how to really create them, but I do know how to use them! here are the different types of shaders/mappings:
-normal mapping: like bump mapping but uses angles to appear 3D and how light bounces off the object.
-bump mapping: to make the texture appear 3D
-specular: tells how the light will glare on some parts of the object or appear dal.
-light mapping: pre-defined lighting for the object (for static objects in constant light).
-shadow mapping: pre-defined shadows to place on the object
-height map: made for giving shape to flat terrains
-shader types are:
-fx - for windows and directx
-GLSL - for OpenGL and more cross platform.
*well
the website logged me off while making this soooooo... this is all I got, maybe some other time I will finish it, hope this helps 
1. get a good quality game like skyrim or new vegas.
2. have at least a week of programming experience and game testing.
3. basic understanding of graphic design and 3D modeling
OK lets start out with something easy like the sky! how do we make a sky in a game? well there are two main ways of doing it. First we can have a box like structure where you have 6 planes lined up to make a box and 6 textures that go with it and you (the camera) are placed inside it. The second method is very similar but it is a sphere, the sphere is harder to manage since you use on bit texture and most of the time that texture will not look good on the sphere. If you are wanting to make sky's like skyrim... well that can be a couple posts long, lol. I will try to go over the basics on how the elder scrolls make their games so beautiful. How about you want a dynamic sky? one that has a day time and night time? well you would either have a rotating sphere or dynamic textures. along with dynamic skys you also need a timing system to record and process what time it is in the game and also link the ambient light value to it too. With dynamic textures (not really my field yet) you would either need a couple hundred textures being applied to the object a lot of the time, or do a method that I don't know about.
OK! GET OUT SKYRIM AND START PLAYING WHILE YOU READ THIS! if possible. First off how do they do their menu? their loading screens? Well you start off by placing an imported object and place it right beside the camera, pick out pre-programmed sayings using a random generator and then place the text on the bottom right corner. Place a plane right in front of your camera that has a black texture and add particles for smoke. How do you make particles of smoke? well you have an initial spot x,y,z then you create a bunch of planes that move in random directions upwards from the initial spot and have a texture of the smoke on it with some alpha applied... see it isn't that easy?
Now in skyrim when you move around the populated areas you realize that the light reflect in a certain way off of the objects! this is called texture mapping and using shaders. there can be up to 7 textures for one object, but you many see the first one and the others give info to the shader on how stuff like light interact with it. I am not a professional with shaders nor do I know how to really create them, but I do know how to use them! here are the different types of shaders/mappings:
-normal mapping: like bump mapping but uses angles to appear 3D and how light bounces off the object.
-bump mapping: to make the texture appear 3D
-specular: tells how the light will glare on some parts of the object or appear dal.
-light mapping: pre-defined lighting for the object (for static objects in constant light).
-shadow mapping: pre-defined shadows to place on the object
-height map: made for giving shape to flat terrains
-shader types are:
-fx - for windows and directx
-GLSL - for OpenGL and more cross platform.
*well
the website logged me off while making this soooooo... this is all I got, maybe some other time I will finish it, hope this helps 