This is a report that describes the implementation of a computer technical examination project at Örebro University. More specifically it is about how two students have developed a computer game as an entry for Swedish Game Awards, a competition for games developed without interaction from commercial companies. The game, titled “Winds of Kahlara”, is written for PC and lets the participants compete against each other over a network in a 3D environment. The graphical theme is fantasy and the players utilize among other things magical attacks to kill their opponents. The development itself has taken more than a year since the complexity of the game has required extensive technical research and graphical designing. / Detta är en rapport som beskriver utförandet av ett datortekniskt examensarbete på Örebro universitet. Mer specifikt handlar den om hur två studenter utvecklat ett datorspel som ett bidrag till Swedish Game Awards, en tävling för spel utvecklade utan inblandning av kommersiella företag. Spelet, titulerat ”Winds of Kahlara”, är skrivet för PC och låter deltagarna spela mot varandra över nätverk i en 3D-värld. Det grafiska temat är fantasy och spelarna använder sig av bland annat magiska attacker för att döda sina motståndare. Själva utvecklingen har tagit mer än ett år då spelets komplexitet har krävt omfattande teknisk efterforskning och grafisk formgivning.

Visualization of volumetric data has always been useful in big va- riety of ways, for example computer tomography (CT) and magnet resonance tomography (MRT) are two major applications of this sorts of algorithms. Since volumetric data has no limitation regarding the shape of the object that ordinary mesh algorithms has we can fully reconstruct anything using the Marching cubes algorithm. New tech- niques allow us to implement this algorithm by new and exible means. Here we will use the latest of DirectX technology to run marching cubes in realtime using compute shaders. / kristoffer.swe@gmail.com

It is a great challenge to develop a computer game. Today many games are developed in large game studios where lots of skilled people are working together. Everyone has to know what the final game should look like. Game designers are responsible for how the game should feel and look like. This also means that they decide if a programmer has to develop new techniques or not. Sometimes the game designers require lots of new techniques to be developed. Such a new technique may be rendering particle systems with a lot of particles in it. This is where this report will focus. To render particle systems it is necessary to know about the limitations there are in both hardware and software. Until today particle systems have been updated and calculated using the Central Processing Unit of the computer. With Microsoft Direct3D 10 there are new ways to render particles using Geometry Shaders. Geometry Shaders runs on the graphics card. This thesis focuses on testing rendering performance between using Geometry Shaders and not using Geometry Shaders. A questionnaire was sent to Swedish game developers to get more information about relevant topics for investigation. A general answer was that Geometry Shaders always increase particle rendering performance. This thesis investigates if and when the statement is true or not. The hypothesis was obtained from the answers to the questionnaire. Two test applications were used to investigate if the hypothesis was true or false. One test application has particle calculations on the CPU of the computer. The other test application has particle calculations on the GPU of the graphics card. Six different tests were done and the Geometry Shader approach went out to be the fastest in five of the tests. Since not all tests were faster than the CPU approach the hypothesis is not always true.

The game industry have always looked for rendering techniques that makes the games as good looking and realistic as possible. The common approach is to use triangles built up by vertices and apply many different techniques to make it look as good as possible. When triangles are used to draw objects, there is always edges and those edges often make the objects look less realistic than desired. To reduce these visible edges the amount of triangles for an object have to be increased, but with more triangles more processing power from the graphics cards is needed. Another way to approach rendering is ray tracing which can render an extremely photo realistic image but to the cost of unbearable low performance if you would use it in a realtime application. The reason raytracing is so slow is the massive amount of calculations that needs to be made. In DirectX 11 a few new shaders where announced and one of them were the compute shader, the compute shader allows you to calculate data on the graphics card which is not bound to the pipeline. The compute shader allows you to use the hundreds of cores that the graphic card has and is therefore well suited for a raytracing algorithm. One application is used to see if the hypothesis is correct. A flag is used to define if the application runs on the CPU and the GPU. The same algorithm is used in both versions. Three test where done on each processing unit to confirm the hypothesis. Three more tests where done on the GPU to see how the performance scaled on the GPU depending on the number of rendered objects. The tests proved throughout that the compute shader performs considerably better than the CPU when running our ray tracing algorithm.

This thesis deals about design and realization software application "Mobile robot studio" for planning path mobile robot in pseudo 3D world. It contains several tools, witch most important are: simulation control, path planning, world editor and commands editor for CAN. Application was made by technology .NET 2.0 and for 3D design was used Microsoft DirectX 9 API. This thesis has been supported by the Czech Ministry of Education in the frame of MSM 0021630529 Research Intention Inteligent Systems in Automation.

Title: Multi-platform Multiplayer RPG Game A multi-platform game, which would be able to run on various devices with Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 systems, was created in this work. It was supposed to be a universal game client executable on desktop PCs, notebooks, tablets or mobile phones. The game was supposed to be role-playing game (RPG) with focus on turn-based action combat. In this work, a 3D scene renderer was written which supports rendering simple scenes with objects and animated characters. A cross-device communication library based on bluetooth technology was implemented in this project as well. This communication library allows two game clients running on two different types of devices to communicate with each other. Then a server-client communication library was created. This library was then used to implement a game server which offers online gaming feature.

Spel idag kräver en enorm mängd arbetstimmar för att skapas, därför behövs alltid sätt att spara tid och automatisera processer. Algoritmer för polygoniseringen av skalärfält, som Marching Cubes, har under de senaste åren blivit ett allt vanligare tillvägagångssätt för att automatiskt generera terräng. Scenkomplexiteten och kraven för visuell kvalitet i dagens spel ökar ständigt. Därmed kommer också kravet för prestandaeffektiva renderingsmetoder. Deferred rendering är en renderingsmetod som kan hantera scener med stora mängder ljuskällor och hög scenkomplexitet samtidigt. För att undersöka integreringen mellan procedurellt skapad terräng och en deferred rendering pipeline, skapades en applikation i DirectX 11 för att undersöka implementeringen och potentiella optimeringar av denna integration. / Detta projekt handlar om slumpmässig procedurell skapning av digital terräng för bruk inom datorspel, och hur man i denna kontext kan ta nytta av en grafikmotor som använder renderingstekniken deferred rendering. / Carl Engström can be reached at: Phone: 076-102 86 00 Mail: Lemmibl@gmail.com Felix Nawrin Oxing can be reached at: Mail: felix@nawrin-oxing.se

Title: Multi-platform Multiplayer RPG Game A multi-platform game, which would be able to run on various devices with Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 systems, was created in this work. It was supposed to be a universal game client executable on desktop PCs, notebooks, tablets or mobile phones. The game was supposed to be role-playing game (RPG) with focus on turn-based action combat. In this work, a 3D game engine was written which supports rendering simple scenes with objects and animated characters. The engine was developed using DirectX. The engine was written in .NET C# using SharpDX library. A cross-device communication framework based on bluetooth technology was implemented in this project as well. This communication framework allows two game clients running on two different devices to communicate with each other.

Thesis describes programming of 3D applications, mainly games, on Windows Phone 7 platform and lightly compares this approach with Silverlight platform. It also describes XNA framework in detail and programming plane simulators problems. In the second part of this thesis, reader can find complete description of implementation of a simple airplane simulation for Windows Phone 7 platform, which is based on the XNA framework. The game consists of implementation of terrain, sky, plane, scene and also of physics and the principle of the game.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are used today in a wide range of applications, mainly because they can dramatically accelerate parallel computing, are affordable and energy efficient. In the field of medical imaging, GPUs are in some cases crucial for enabling practical use of computationally demanding algorithms. This review presents the past and present work on GPU accelerated medical image processing, and is meant to serve as an overview and introduction to existing GPU implementations. The review covers GPU acceleration of basic image processing operations (filtering, interpolation, histogram estimation and distance transforms), the most commonly used algorithms in medical imaging (image registration, image segmentation and image denoising) and algorithms that are specific to individual modalities (CT, PET, SPECT, MRI, fMRI, DTI, ultrasound, optical imaging and microscopy). The review ends by highlighting some future possibilities and challenges.