Using Spectral Analysis to Match Players Voice to in Game Characters
By: Nimrod Barak

The goal of this project was to test whether significant voice transformations that the majority of users do not detect could be done in real-time. It also studied the nature and tradeoffs of voice transformations. The thesis employed Fast Fourier Transformation and spectral analysis techniques and combined them with current theories on the human voice.   more >

Physics-based Game Play
By: J.R. Briggs

This thesis project is a 2D physics game that that studies the time, effort, and skill required to develop a simple 2D physics game. Recent trends in 2D and casual games show an increasing interest in game physics. A growing number of PC, mobile, and console games are incorporating physics as a core game mechanic.  more >

Playstation 2 Terrain Rendering Utilizing the Vector Units
By: Arturo Caballero

This thesis introduces a process developed to enable the ability to develop for the Playstation 2 console without having access to a development kit. Through the use of a standard commercial PS2 and a Sony Linux kit, three approaches are explored in order to adequately understand the most efficient way of utilizing the hardware. more >

The Gameplay Value of Learning AI in RTS Games
By: Craig Chanslor

In recent years, technological advances in hardware have provided more raw-processing power available for gaming applications in the home. With the introduction of the next generation of consoles, graphics hardware and shader models, more graphics processing is being done on the graphics hardware, freeing processing power on the CPU for other uses. more >

Pseudo Inverse Kinematics via Skeletal Animation Blending
By: Michael Guerrero

Real-time inverse kinematics solutions typically suffer from both poor performance and poor aesthetic results.  They are mathematically based approaches that use iterative numerical methods to converge to a solution.  The end result is a new set of joint angles that move a particular point of interest on the skeleton closer to a desired goal position and orientation. more >

Terrain Streaming on the Nintendo GameCube
By: Christopher Jones

The goal of this project is to answer the question “What are the best practices for streaming level of detail based terrain on the Nintendo GameCube?” There are three key problems when wanting to display a portion of a much larger piece of terrain. The first is the streaming of data. more >

Arbitrary Object Destruction in Real-Time
By: Sven Knutson

This thesis explores implementing Finite Element Analysis to simulate different materials in real time as they react to forces and fracture. The model is represented volumetrically by tetrahedrons. Each tetrahedron describes its own functions of stress and strain, the nodes shared across tetrahedrons then make those functions describe the entire object. more >

Large-Scale Particle Systems on PlayStation 3
By: Dave Loyd

This thesis investigates the use of the Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 (PS3) to properly depth-sort particles in large-scale particle systems. Using PS3 Linux for the development platform, multiple sorting methods are explored to test efficiency for up to 500,000 particles in existence simultaneously. more >

Practical Development of Goal-Oriented Action Planning AI
By: David Pittman

As real-time graphics continue to approach realism and gameplay systems become increasingly complex, game AI must progress in parallel to maintain the illusion of believable characters. The decision-making architecture known as Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) offers dynamic problem solving, which is a key ingredient in crafting AIs which appear to understand their environment and react in a logical manner. more >

Gaia: Designed Procedural Content Generation
By: Jonathan Kyle Pittman

As game worlds increase in scale and scope, the task of creating art and level assets by hand becomes ever more time consuming. The goal of this project is to provide intuitive tools for procedurally generating natural-looking terrain for game scenes in order to achieve faster results without significantly impacting the degree of control that an artist or designer may have over the output. more >

Pathfinding Over Streaming Terrain: Intrinsic Detail In Navigation Mesh Generation
By: James Stewart

Game developers working with next-generation hardware face two technica challenges: leveraging the power of multicore architectures and shoehorning the massive content demands of AAA titles into the limited RAM available on modern consoles. How developers address these challenges has implications for all subsystems within an application, especially the control logic of the game itself. more >

Thread-Safe Spatial Grid
By: Erik Sunderland

The current generation of console hardware contains very powerful processor architectures. However, to utilize this to its maximum potential, the game development industry needs to be familiar with concurrency and threading concepts. This new paradigm of programming requires that engineers understand more about what the hardware is doing and how they can design systems that use multiple threads to process work simultaneously. more >

A Method for Editing Procedural Game Content
By: Justin Marcus

The focus of this thesis is to create an editor and programming environment that allow the user to easily edit procedural game content through a user interface that is built with a minimum of programmer intervention. Procedural game content could refer to many things (including gameplay), although this project has specifically focused on procedural geometry. more >

An Artist Centric Particle Editor for Real-Time FX Visualization
By: William Reynard Jr.

Particle systems are used extensively in video games to provide user feedback and for general visual enhancement. The effects are commonly used to represent volumetric effects such as smoke or fire as well as effects with no real-world counterpart, such as spell effects. The application developed for this project is a tool designed to promote the rapid development of particle effects. more >

Terrain Streaming on the Playstation® 3
By: Tyler Robertson

This project explorers issues that come along with streaming heightmap data from the DVD on the Playstation 3. By maximizing streaming on a console, games can minimize load-times and avoid lengthy pre-installs. This project looks at two different ways terrain data can be laid out on the disc, two methods for reading level-of-detail data and three algorithms to schedule read requests. more >

Deformable Geometry Using Volumetric Data
By: Daniel C. Talaber

Deformable geometry in games is expensive and appears infrequently. Using a volume representation of geometry along with a spatial hierarchy is one method of making it feasible. I extend an existing surface extraction method by Stan Melax, which uses a variation of the Marching Cubes algorithm, by using an octree to store the volumetric data. more >

Procedural Forest Generation
By: Marek Vojtko

Forest generation has always been one of the more mundane and tiresome tasks of a level designer. A good-looking and natural-feeling forest requires many trees, densely packed together, and positioned in a non-repeating, random manner.  more >

Procedural City Generation Tool
By: Kevin Wu

There is no argument that a designer can create a level that is more interesting than a level created by an algorithm. There is also no argument that algorithms can perform certain tasks much more efficiently than people can. As game scope expands, the asset creation becomes ever more time consuming.  more >