A algorithm for searching through data using heuristics, most usually used for path finding.

(Amit's Game Programming Information)

A game with an AAA rating is one that is considered 'best of breed'. These titles have excellent production values, large budgets and often come from well-known developers. Examples of AAA title games would include: Doom III, Final Fantasy VII, and Starcraft.

What does AAA stand for' We have found one definition saying: "What does a Triple A rating mean' The ILFs are rated independently by the rating agency Moody's Investor Services. AAA (Triple A) is the highest rating that can be assigned by the rating agency to ILFs of this type. The rating is independent of JP Morgan Fleming and is only given after a thorough examination by the rating agency of a number of elements. These include an examination of the portfolio management team and its investment process, internal control procedures, the quality of securities held by the portfolio and the consistency of performance by the ILFs. A full technical definition on an AAA rating can be obtained from Moody's Investor Services. " From: http://www.efs-online.com/efs/faqs/jpmorganfaqs.asp, Q11

AABB is an acronym for Axis-Alligned Bounding Box. Effectively it is a cuboid which is not rotated. All of its edges are parallel to the axes it is alligned to. AABBs can be defined using just two points, a maxium point and a minimum point. The rest of the box can be worked out from these two points. AABBs can be used for collision detection and scene culling (among other things).

The term ¡°abandonware¡± was coined in 1997 to refer to any game that has been discontinued by its publishers. Even through a game isn't being commercially sold, it doesn¡¯t make it legal to download from sites not permitted by the publisher. Even if a company stops distributing a product, does not mean the copyright lapses.
See Also:Warez

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Michael Abrash was one of the programmers of Quake, he is an expert in Artificial Intelligence. He has been one of the people who has dedicated more time in teach the tricks of programming, with his books, "The Zen Of Assembly", "Graphics Programming Black Book". He is currently employed at Microsoft.

A coordinate system where all objects must be shown from the position of your viewpoint. Coordinates are all static and the Viewpoint (camera) moves through the preset coordinates.

A mathematically specified collection of data-storing entities with operations to create, access, change, etc. instances.

As defined by GOF: Creational Pattern Provide an interface for creating families of related or depenedent objects without specifying their concrete classes.
See Also:GOF

A side scroller that used a combination of the keyboard (to move) and mouse (direction to shoot) which became a cult hit. Made by the now defunct Crack dot com. (WWW)

A surface where multiple scenes can be added to before the surface is displayed.

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ACM is the Association of Computing Machinery. It is one of the oldest computing societies in the world. ACM organizes various special intrest groups, including SIGGRAPH. Visit the ACM website for more information.

.ACT files are the actor files for Genesis3D - also referred to as models.

ActionScript: A ECMAScript-based programming language used for controlling Macromedia Flash movies and applications. More

Not to be confused with the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, Scott Adams was one of the pioneers of the text adventure genre. The first text adventure he wrote was titled "Adventureland." He still is a creator of text adventures to this day.

An artificial intelligence system that can re-program itself based on environmental factors and influences.

A form of digital audio tape with 8 tracks.

The process of creating complex waveforms by combining simpler ones. Also known as Fourier synthesis.

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. As opposed to SDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line), an ADSL connection runs through an ordinary phone line and receives data over the internet at high speeds, comparable to those of cable modems, though it transmits data at only a fraction of the speed at which it receives data -- but still faster than a conventional 56Kbps modem.
See Also:SDSL

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A complex envelope, probably the most common. Allows for fairly accurate recreation of real instruments' dynamics. The evelope has four parts, attack, decay, sustain, and release.

Advance on royalties. Money given from a publisher to a developer to create a game that will be recouped from the developers royalties on sales. For instance, if a developer is given '25,000 as an advance to create a game. When the developer is finished with the game and it is sold, the developer will not recieve any money from the sales royalties until the advance has been paid back. So if the product is retailed for '30, and the net proceeds for the publisher to sell the game is '15 and the developer has a 10% royalty, the developer will recieve '1.50 for every game sold. Before the developer recieves any money after the advance the game will have to sell 16,667 units ('25,000 / '1.50).

A genre of games that typically are graphics, character and story based. The player usually has to solve a series of puzzles while being given a deep story. Examples of this genre would be many of the LucasArts such as Grim Fandango, the Monkey Island series, and many of the Quest series from Sierra Online.

A group of retail stores who take advantage of large-scale purchasing or co-op advertising buying efficiency by associating with each other.

The simplest form of texture mapping. The texture coordinates of a polygon are linearly interpolated across the polygon surface. This technique does not account for perspective and therefore produces swimming texture effects.

A combination of a set of linear transformations, usually stored in a single matrix. Affine transformations include rotation, scaling, translation and shear.

A feature on keyboards that allows you to alter the sound produced by pressing the key after a note has been released.

Agents will normally be a buffer in between a publisher and a developer, working for the developer. The standard agent's pay is 10% of what the developer is given on the advance.

Accelerated Graphics Port. A specialized graphics port which gives a dedicated port between the display system and system memory, surpassing the Expansion Bus, for greater speed.

A fairly common audio standard, an acronym for Audio Interchange File Format.

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A series of instructions for performing a task. This is the backbone of all programming.

The effect produced when a complex image is put onto a display with a limited resolution. This effect is a product of downsampling. Examples include jagged looking lines in lower resolutions.

With digital sampling, to measure a particular frequency, the sampling rate must be at least twice that of the measured frequency. If an insufficient sampling rate is used, phantom frequencies will be created.

A game programming library which has been ported to a number of operating systems. (WWW)

Assigning varying levels of translucency to graphical objects, allowing the creation of things such as glass, fog, and ghosts. This can be accomplished by using alpha channels, or other means.
See Also:Alpha Channel, Alpha Testing

A linked list of depth-sorted colors, typically representing each pixel in a z-buffer. The colors may either be added to the list in a pre-sorted order or the list may be able to sort them by itself. After all colors are added the list is used to create on resulting color by blending the containing colors from the back and forward using their alpha channel.

In 32-bit color, 24-bits are used for the color, and the extra 8-bits represent an alpha value, or alpha channel. This value is used to determine the pixel's translucency level.

A method for creating transparency by checking the alpha value of a given pixel.
See Also:Alpha Blending

The first phase of testing, where the software is tested in-house. The code is normally mostly functional, but some minor design decisions may still be tested.

The Amiga OS (Workbench 1.0) was the first pre-emptive multitasking operating system released for a home computer. The OS was built on top of the Motorola 7.14 MHz MC 68000 processor. It gained an early foothold in television and movie video editing thanks to the custom A/V chips inside the Amiga, as well as the "Video Toaster" expansion card and software. The operating system uses Amiga-specific hardware extensively to increase performance. To this day, (AmigaOS4) the operating system is still pre-emptively multitasked and lacks memory protection, and the customized hardware has been mostly replaced by standard G3/G4 motherboards (similar to those used in Power Macintoshes). It retains a die-hard fan base, mostly due to the fact that it provided gaming and multimedia environments far outshining the IBM/PC (and console) software of the early 90s. Amiga is also the Spanish word for girlfriend. It is thus a (very) positive name.

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A device used to increase the volume or amplitude of a source signal.

Amplitude Modulation Changing the amplitude (volume) of a signal. For instance, amplitude modulation with a sine wave as the modulator gives you tremolo.

Very fast amplitude modulation is called ring modulation. Ring modulation produces the sum and difference of all the frequencies of both the modulator and the signal being modulated.

A type of synthesizer that creates sounds through the modification of electrical signals.

The process of creating simulated motion or activity.

The level past trilinear filtering, this uses samples from multiple Mip Maps to get the best approximation for a texture. Very heavy performance cost.

Artificial Neural Net: A structure based on several weighted nodes used to process inputs. Particularly useful to Artificial Intelligence, because they aren't perfectly precise, and can be "trained" in a more realistic fashion.

American National Standards Institute.

Antialiasing refers to the process of adding additional pixels around the border of an object in order to blend it into it's background more smoothly, and to reduce the appearance of jagged edges. Typically, the colour used is the average of the surrounding background pixels and that of the object being antialiased, or an approximation of the average. This technique was invented by MIT's Media Lab.

This is the process that gets rid of the aliasing effect. A filtering process is normally used in the process that removes "jaggedness effect" produced by pixels.

Application Program Interface. A set of routines which acts as a go-between for the operating system and a program. For instance, DirectX is a Windows API.

A very simple envelope type, with only attack and release.

A section of a circle that is measured in degrees or radians.

The science, art, or profession of designing and constructing buildings, bridges, etc.

An Archtype is a commonly followed pattern in design. It can apply to any design aspect.

For instance the "Quest" archtype is a common adventure game plot archtype. As part of the "Quest" archtype, character X must save the world from evil by retrieving/ destroying/ the magical object/person/ thing Y. X starts off as an inexperienced person but his quest will bring an new maturity to him.

Character Archtypes are often followed. The "Princess" the "Rogue Warrior", the "kind old wizard" are some examples that can be easily recognised. By using archtypes as part of a story design, a user can instantly gain a feel for the story, and can gain an instant insight into the interactions between characters.

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A device that, when you play a chord on a keyboard, cycles through the depressed keys in a programmed pattern.

A set of characters and/or numbers defined within a variable. Used in programming to store data, create matrices, and other. C++ Example: char array[11]="Hello world"; | contents | number of characters | variable name type

In graphics, persistent portions of images resulting from improper blitting operations.

Simulation of moods and personalities in software.

Intelligence that mimics human intelligence. The main types of Artificial Intelligence used in games currently are State Machines, Expert Systems, Fuzzy Logic, Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks.

AL is basically the antithesis of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI seeks to simulate real world by following a complex series of rules, AL starts with very simple rules for a system and enables complex behavior to emerge from them.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

This is a standard for representing characters. In addition to text characters, other control characters are used. (Control characters include CARRIAGE RETURN, BACKSPACE, DELETE, etc.

The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. Aspect_Ratio = Width / Height See Pixel Ratio

An assembler is basically a low level compiler which translates assembly instructions into object code, which can be read by the processor. See also: Assembly language.

A low level programming language that uses hexadecimal values in the form of mnemonics. Each mnemonic corresponds to one or a set of instructions which is specific to the processor that the code is being written for. This means that assembly language is not very portable but is extremely powerful for optimizations. In fact many C/C++ compilers today come with inline assemblers for optimization. However unlike C/C++ and other higher level languages, which shields the programmer from a lot of what's going on, in assembly language the programmer must enter every instruction that the computer is to do. That also means that to write anything useful takes many more lines of code.

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A generic term for graphics, sounds, maps, levels, models, and any other resources. Generally assets are compiled into large files. The file formats may be designed for fast loading by matching in-memory formats, or tight compressions for handheld games, or designed to otherwise help in-game use. It is often useful to have an asset tool chain. The original models may be high-density models with R8G8B8A8 images. You may have a model striper and image compresser that reduces the model for LOD, and compresses the texture to a DXT compressed image. These assets may then go through further transformations, and end up in the large resource file.

The first part of an ADSR envelope. The amount of time, immediately after a key is struck, that it takes for the resulting note to reach the velocity (volume level) at which the key was struck.

The opposite of amplification -- when a signal's amplitude is reduced.

The reduction in signal strength during transmission over a network. Too much attenuation can render a signal incomprehensible. To solve this networks implement repeaters, and follow the maximum length standards for the medium (cabling) in use.

In Role-Playing Games, attributes are numbers that represents specific aspects in a character's stats. EX: Agility, Intelligence, Luck, Power, etc. are all attributes.

A buzzword used by the Virtual Reality community to mean a "representation of the user".

A form of a bounding box where the box is aligned to the axis therefore only two points in space are needed to define it. AABB's are much faster to use, and take up less memory, but are very limited in the sense that they can only be aligned to the axis.

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