Game Design

Cities are popular settings for computer game
levels and flight simulators. The creation of a
virtual city model poses a distinct set of challenges
to the designers. The design of a virtual
city often starts with the creation of a road network.
The road network subdivides the virtual
space into smaller areas that are surrounded by
streets. These areas can be further subdivided
to create areas for buildings, parklands etc. We
present a procedural approach to generate urban
street networks for virtual cities in real-time on
desktop computers with graphic accelerators. A
street grid layout for the viewing area is generated
based on local information and a small
set of parameters. As users travel through the
world the street grid is incrementally extended
as needed. From the street grid, road geometry
and lot shapes can be generated. The lot
shapes can be used in a subsequent step to generate
the content of the lot such as buildings. This
approach facilitates the generation of extremely
large cities consisting of lot shapes varying in
size and shape.

The Sequenced Convex Subtraction (SCS) algorithm is a hardware based multi-pass image-space algorithm for general purpose Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) Rendering. Convex objects combined by volu- metric intersection, difference and union are rendered in real-time without b-rep pre-processing. OpenGL stencil and depth testing is used to determine the visible surface for each pixel on the screen. This paper introduces a

Two Australian computer science departments have worked together to introduce the world's first degrees in "eScience". In both universities, the eScience programs have had a positive, lasting impact on the computer science curricula. In the case of the Australian National University, the eScience programs have become self-funding and have helped to position the university well for future strategic initiatives in eScience and "e-Research". At RMIT although the eScience program itself did not prove to be viable enough to continue in its own right, courses introduced as part of the eScience graduate diploma program have seen strong enrolments and continue to be offered to students undertaking other programs.

We present an improved uniform subdivision based discrete and continuous collision detection approach for deformable objects consisting of triangle meshes without any assumption about triangle size. A previously proposed technique using control bits can effectively eliminate redundant object pairs appearing in multiple cells, but this scheme requires the grid cell size adapted to the largest object, and efficiency tends to be severely impaired when object size varies strongly. In this paper, we discuss an approach that virtually subdivides large triangles into a number of child triangles to enable the use of a smaller, better suited cell size, resulting in a considerable decrease in the number of collision tests in the broad phase, with a corresponding reduced memory requirement. The virtual subdivision is used only for the purpose of collision detection and is recomputed each frame, with the original mesh retained for collision response and physical simulation. Our method exploits the benefits of GPU architecture to accelerate the computationally intensive task for improved performance. The results show that the method provides speedups by comparing performance with existing methods.