Client Programming Guide

Table of Contents

1. Overview

1.1. Client in context

1.2. Outline

1.3. Resource search paths

1.3.1. paths.xml

1.3.2. Command line switch

1.4. Configuration files

1.4.1. File resources.xml

1.4.2. File <engine_config>.xml

1.4.3. File <scripts_config>.xml

1.4.4. File <preferences>.xml

1.5. Coordinate System

2. User Input

2.1. Key events

2.1.1. Character events

2.1.2. Auto-repeat

2.1.3. Sequence of events

2.1.4. Sinking events

2.1.5. Mouse cursor position

2.2. Mouse

2.2.1. Movement

2.2.2. Buttons

2.3. Joystick

2.3.1. Axis events

2.3.2. Buttons

2.3.3. Controlling player direction

2.3.4. Avatar movement

3. Cameras

3.1. The Cursor Camera

3.2. The Free Camera

3.3. The FlexiCam

4. Terrain

4.1. Advanced Terrain

4.1.1. Overview

4.1.2. Key Features

4.1.3. Texturing

4.1.4. Lighting

4.1.5. Shadows

4.1.6. LOD

4.1.7. Memory footprint

4.1.8. terrain2 resources

4.1.9. terrain section in space.settings

4.2. Simple Terrain

4.2.1. Key features

4.2.2. Overview

4.2.3. Chunking

4.2.4. Disk footprint

4.2.5. Memory footprint

4.2.6. Texture spacing

4.3. Terrain specular lighting

5. Cloud shadows

5.1. Requirements

5.2. Implementation

5.3. Effect File Implementation

5.4. Tweaking

6. Chunks

6.1. Definitions

6.2. Implementation files

6.3. Details and notes

6.3.1. Includes

6.3.2. Models

6.3.3. Entities

6.3.4. Boundaries and portals

6.3.5. Transforms

6.3.6. Other items

6.4. Loading and ejecting

6.5. Focus grid

6.5.1. Hull tree

6.5.2. Quad tree

6.6. Collisions

6.7. Sway items

7. Entities

7.1. Entity Manager

7.2. Entity scripts

7.3. Entity resources

7.3.1. Preloads

7.3.2. Prerequisites

8. User Data Objects

8.1. .1. User Data Objects are Python script objects

8.2. .2. Accessing from the Client

9. Scripting

9.1. Functional components

9.1.1. Entity skeleton

9.1.2. Python script object

9.1.3. Model management

9.1.4. Filters

9.1.5. Navigation

9.1.6. Action Queue

9.1.7. Action Matcher

9.1.8. Trackers

9.1.9. Timers and Traps

9.2. Personality script

9.2.1. init

9.2.2. fini

9.2.3. handleKeyEvent

9.2.4. handleMouseEvent

9.2.5. handleAxisEvent

9.2.6. handleIMEEvent

9.2.7. handleLangChangeEvent

9.2.8. onChangeEnvironments

9.2.9. onGeometryMapped

9.2.10. onRecreateDevice

9.2.11. onTimeOfDayLocalChange

9.2.12. start

10. Models

10.1. Performance

10.2. Hard Points

10.2.1. Naming scheme

10.2.2. How it works

10.2.3. Syntax

10.2.4. Data

10.3. SuperModel

10.3.1. Design

10.3.2. SuperModel classes

11. Animation System

11.1. Basic keyframed animations

11.2. Animation layering and blending

11.3. Animation data files

11.4. Animation data streaming

11.5. Actions

12. Integrating With BigWorld Server

12.1. Overview

12.2. Generating Code With the ProcessDefs tool

12.2.1. ProcessDefs/GenerateCPlusPlus Operation

12.2.2. Generating C++ Code

12.3. Customising ProcessDefs Output

12.3.1. Modifying the Generated Code Templates

12.3.2. Implementing a New Processing Module

12.4. The connection_model Library

12.4.1. Dependencies

12.4.2. BWConnection

12.4.3. BWEntity

12.4.4. BWEntityFactory

12.4.5. BWEntitiesListener

12.4.6. Server Discovery

12.5. Example Clients

12.5.1. python/simple

12.5.2. c_plus_plus/sdl

12.5.3. c_plus_plus/ios

13. Server Communications

13.1. Login

13.2. Online

13.3. Firewalls

14. Particles

14.1. Particle Systems

14.2. Particle Actions

14.2.1. Source actions

14.2.2. Movement actions

14.2.3. Sink actions

14.2.4. Alteration actions

14.3. Particle types

14.4. Attaching particle systems to bones

15. Detail Objects

15.1. Flora

15.1.1. Placement

15.1.2. Implementation

15.1.3. Frame coherency

15.1.4. Animation

15.1.5. Lighting

15.1.6. File format

16. Water

16.1. Code overview

16.2. Scene generation

16.3. Render settings

16.3.1. Setting the quality

16.4. Simulation

16.5. Rain

16.6. Water depth

16.7. Watchers

17. Graphical User Interface (GUI)

17.1. C++ GUI support

17.1.1. SimpleGUIComponent

17.1.2. GUIShader

17.1.3. SimpleGUI

17.2. Python GUI support

17.3. XML

17.4. XML and Python

17.4.1. onLoad(self,section)

17.4.2. onBound(self)

17.4.3. onSave(self,section)

17.5. Input events

17.5.1. Keyboard Events

17.5.2. Axis Events

17.5.3. Mouse Events

17.5.4. Drag-and-drop events

17.5.5. Component PyGUI

17.6. Mouse cursor

18. Fonts

18.1. Creating and Using Fonts

18.1.1. Creating a Font Definition File

18.1.2. Preloading Glyphs

18.1.3. Specifying the widest character

18.1.4. Displaying Text

18.2. Artist modified Fonts

18.2.1. Generating a Snapshot of a Font's Glyph Cache

18.2.2. Modifying the Font Texture

18.2.3. Explaining the Font Grid .dds File

19. Input Method Editors (IME)

19.1. Components of an IME interface

19.1.1. Examples

19.1.2. Recommended Reading

19.2. IME Python API

19.2.1. Enabling IME

19.2.2. Receiving IME events

19.2.3. Displaying the IME

20. BigWorld Web Integration

20.1. Architecture

20.2. Using the Web Integration

20.2.1. In Game Web GUI Component

20.2.2. In Game Web Screen

20.2.3. Texture Mapping of Web Pages into a world object

21. Sounds

22. 3D Engine (Moo)

22.1. Features

22.1.1. D3DXEffects vertex and pixel shader support

22.1.2. Cubic environment maps

22.1.3. Render targets

22.1.4. Lighting

22.1.5. Normal mapping/bump mapping

22.1.6. Terrain

22.1.7. Animation

22.1.8. Vertex morphing

22.2. Supported video cards

22.3. Hardware requirements for special effects

22.4. Visual

22.5. EffectMaterial

22.5.1. Format

22.5.2. Automatic variables/Globals

22.5.3. Artist-editable/tweakable variables

22.5.4. Multiple-layered effects per material

22.5.5. Recording material states

22.5.6. Using BigWorld .fx files with 3ds Max

22.6. Visual channels

22.6.1. Sorted channel

22.6.2. Internal sorted channel

22.6.3. Shimmer channel

22.6.4. Sorted shimmer channel

22.6.5. Distortion channel

22.7. Textures

22.7.1. Texture detail levels/compression

22.7.2. Animated textures

22.7.3. Applying a code-generated texture to a character

22.8. Vertex declaration

22.8.1. File format

22.9. Graphics settings

22.9.1. Customising options

22.9.2. Using settings

22.10. Taking Screenshots

22.10.1. High Resolution Screenshots

22.11. Dynamic Entity Shadows

22.11.1. Splodges

22.11.2. Shadow maps

23. Post Processing

23.1. Pipeline Overview

23.2. Creating a Custom Post-Processing Effect

23.2.1. Creating the Custom Pixel Shader

23.2.2. Previewing the Results

23.2.3. Writing a Custom Pixel Shader for Previewing the Results

23.2.4. Authoring a Post-Processing Effect in Python

23.3. Render Targets

23.4. Performance

23.4.1. Measuring the Time Spent on the GPU

23.4.2. Background Loading

24. Job System

24.1. Overview

24.2. Under the Hood

24.3. Wrapper API

24.4. Job System API

24.5. An Example

24.6. Implementing it

25. Debugging

25.1. Build configuration — conditional feature inclusion

25.2. Watchers

25.2.1. Watcher types

25.2.2. Using watchers

25.2.3. Watcher Console

25.2.4. Remote watcher access

25.3. Memory tracking

25.3.1. ResourceCounters overview

25.3.2. Memory allocation taxonomy

25.3.3. Case studies

25.3.4. Displaying the memory tracking console

25.4. Scripts

25.4.1. Python Console

25.4.2. Remote Python Console

25.4.3. Script reloading

25.4.4. Common errors

25.5. Script interactive debugging

25.6. Client Access Tool (CAT)

25.6.1. Connecting to the client

25.6.2. CAT Scripts

25.6.3. Creating scripts for CAT

25.7. Timing

26. Releasing The Game

26.1. Configure the engine for limited user accounts

26.2. Prepare the assets

26.2.1. bin_convert

26.2.2. res_packer

26.2.3. Processing done in bin_convert and res_packer

26.2.4. Files and folders that do not need to be shipped to the end user

26.2.5. Font Licensing issues with bin_convert and res_packer

26.3. Zip assets and specify paths

26.4. Prepare the game executable

27. Shared Development Environments

27.1. Windows and Linux cross platform development

27.1.1. Sharing resources from Windows

27.1.2. Accessing Windows share from Linux

27.2. Using BigWorld with a Version Control System

27.2.1. Customers using the Commercial Edition

27.2.2. Customers using the Indie Edition

27.2.3. Files to exclude from version control

27.3. DBMgr database conflicts