My views on Assignment 8

Game Screenshot

Credits:

Geometry in the screenshot by my fellow classmate

Danny Diaz

Binary Geometry file

I chose the following order while writing them.

1) Vertex size (uint32_t)

2) Index size (uint32_t)

3) vertex array

4) Index array (uint32_t)

In the picture you can see the first four bytes with blue color, They represent vertex size. The next four green bytes represent the index size.
The yellow bits are the vertex array. next to that, the red-brownish bytes are index array.

Advantages of using Binary Geometry file over human-readable

First, as we will see next in the article and very obvious reason is that the size is smaller for binary files which are a plus point for us.
Second, I think it is a good way of storing them while shipping the product on different platforms as most of the platforms have a pretty easy way of reading binary files rather than installing other human-readable files external libraries.
We use human-readable files to store in source control because it is easy to change for a non-engineer guy, but we use binary format to read the file in order to optimize the performance and make the reading operation faster.

Also, both platforms (64 and 32) will have it's own different built binary files as we use different winding order for the geometry index data.

Extracting Geometry data from a Binary file

I use the LoadBinaryFile() to load the data as a chunk of memory and then traverse using the offset.

Comparing the sizes between Lua vs Binary file

At this point, I already converted my geometry to use uint32_t type, so the following comparison is based on that.

Total vertices in the Geometry: 116,336

Lua vs Binary

Size (MegaBytes)

7.42

2.10

Loading Time

(Seconds)

3.95914

0.04499

0.00018

0.000815

0.000132

0.000048

Clearly there's a significant amount of difference that can be decisive for sure in terms of larger-scale projects

Download Game

Instructions to install and play

Unzip and run the exe file
Arrows to move the object
W S A D for camera movement and G H for zoom
Control and shift to switch player controller and shape of an object