A secondary surface where the current frame?s graphics are stored before they are transferred to the primary display surface.

Because the polygons facing away from the viewer are not seen, and the extra time spent drawing them would have no effect on the visual quality of the scene, these backfaces are almost always removed in some manner.

See Backface Culling.

An enthralling game by BioWare as a sequel to their original Baldur?s Gate Game. This RPG captures a great deal of imagination in its Isometric simplicity as you travel with up to 5 party members on your journey. One of the little perks in this well written storyline is the way your character interacts with party members of the opposite sex, especially if there are more than one that take an interest. There is a whole lot of gameplay to be had in this masterpiece. There is also an expansion pack to this game titled "The Throne of Bhaal" where you continue your quest towards the ultimate goal of godlike power.

Refers to a measurement of how many bits can be transfered over a path at once. For instance a pipe may be able to send 16 bits at once which would be called 16 bits of bandwidth.

A 64K segment of video memory commonly found in older video cards which were made during the times of 16-bit compilers which had a maximum word size of 2 bytes, allowing a programmer to linearly address only 65K of screen space at any time.

Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Originally created to teach the basics of programming, it uses a loose type casting system and has been brought back into the mainstream by Microsoft?s Visual Basic.

High-intensity platform for digital media. Based on an entirely new idea in computing, BeOS was designed to satisfy the higher processing and memory requirements of today?s digital media on standard PC hardware, without slowing down or freezing up. Work with audio, video, image, and Internet-based applications, and edit files of millions of gigabytes in size, simultaneously, in real-time.

Other Features include:
Native TCP/IP
Native Media Formats
Microsecond resolution
Native OpenGL
Direct-Access Graphics
64 Bit filesystem
symmetric multiprocessing
pervasive multithreading
Dynamic Drivers
Low-Latency kernel services

The second stage of testing where software is given to a group of users to test it in a real world environment. Software is usually functionally complete by this point and the goal is to work out the glitches.

A best-selling and award-winning title, Betrayal at Krondor was the first first-person role-playing game to use a true 3D engine, developed at Dynamix in Eugene, Oregon in 1993. Directed by John Cutter and Neal Hallford, it was inducted into the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame in 1996.

A curve that is generated from the creation of several control points.

See Bezier Surface.

A curved surface created from a mesh of control points.

A theoretical measure of the execution of an algorithm, usually the time or memory needed, given the problem size n, which is usually the number of items.

Informally saying some equation f(n) = O(g(n)) means it is less than some constant multiple of g(n). More formally it means there are positive constants c and k, such that 0 f(n) cg(n) for all n k. The values of c and k must be fixed for the function f and must not depend on n.

Uses the four adjacent corners to interpolate the value of a pixel in a texture map. This decreases the jaggedness of a texture when it gets larger, but also takes more memory and gives it a blurred look.

When viewing a texture up close the texture becomes very aliased and ugly (for an example, in Doom get as close to a wall as possible). Bilinear Interpolation is the process of smoothing out the texture so that it is blurred and looks more smoothed when viewed up close.

A 2D image rotated in 3D so that its normal follows the normal of the viewing direction. Another definition would be: A 2D image that is rendered on the same plane as the viewing camera in a 3D world.

The binary number system is a base 2 number system. This system uses combination of 1?s and 0?s to represent data.

An operator(like +, -, *, or /) that take two operands.

Basic Input/Output System The part of a PC that manages communications between CPU and peripherals. The BIOS is, in most cases, embedded in a EEPROM (rewritable memory ROM). The BIOS manage the first reads on the disk drive, to boot, for instance.

Short for binary digit. the smallest unit of data a computer can represent -either ON or OFF

See Also:Byte, Gigabyte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Terabyte

Usually a rectangular block of information where data is stored by the picture to make an image. For instance, if you capture the screen the data you would have is a bitmap of the screen.

An open-sourced 3D modeller released under the GPL. Blender was originally a commercial product, but was open-sourced when the parent company, Not a Number, folded. The Blender Foundation was formed by one of NaN?s founders, with the intention of raising enough money to purchase the rights to make Blender open source, and met their goal within a matter of weeks. Blender is a powerful modeller, featuring built-in ray-trace renderer, NURBS curves and surfaces, Beziers curves and surfaces, powerful mesh modelling tools, meta-balls, skeletal animation and inverse kinematics, non-linear animation, sub-division surfaces, particle systems, etc... A Python interface allows for the creation of custom scripts for import/export, special effects, and so on. http://www.blender.org

When an image is drawn so that images drawn before it can still be seen. This is done through blending the source colors with the destination colors at different percentages.

Also called Transparency.

The mastermind behind the Unreal Games. Started the company Epic Megagames. Created the Jazz Jackrabit series before starting on Unreal. Shortly after, he created Unreal Tournament, which revolved around the concept of multiplayer.

Bit Block Transfer (properly abbreviate BLT). The process of transferring a bitmap to or from a display surface via the blitter.

A highly specialized processor which is designed solely for working on graphics. * Usually adept at copying rectangular chunks of graphic data around from place to place. Since Operating Systems such as Windows, MacOS often deal with large rectangular chunks of stuff on a screen - such as, er, windows - a blitter has become a standard feature in today?s graphics cards.

A method of outputting sprites by only showing non-transparent colors, without any checking during run time. This is done by precompiling a bmp into a piece of code that contains a set of screen memory writes that only include non-trasparent colors.

Renowned game designing company who created the smash hit games Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft, as well as their sequels.Praised by pc gaming columnists worldwide, Blizzard Entertainment has earned itself a reputation for releasing only high-quality games.

Software that is needlessly large in size, that is, requiring a noticable amount of hard drive space (for installation) and RAM (while running). Bloatware is created by the inclusion of more than the necessary features for a particular program.

An early FPS from Monolith based on a raycasting engine and themed with a variety of non-standard weapons, such as dynamite and a voodoo doll. (WWW)

.BMP, a bitmap file format. Used as the standard file format for Windows, BMP files can display data through a number of different color depths, and is usually uncompressed. BMP format does include a Run-Length Encoding version for 8-bit files and does not support a 16-bit format.

Bitmap: A set of bits that represents a graphic image, with each bit or group of bits corresponding to a pixel in the image.

A level or stage in a game where the character can obtain special items or additional points that otherwise can not be achieved in regular gameplay. Being aply to play the bonus level usually requires some trick or cheat that can not be easily found in normal gameplay.

An expression resulting in a value of either true or false. In general, zero is considered false while any other value is true. Also used as a variable type in some languages for storing boolean results.

Named after mathematician George Boole Boolean geometry refers to combining multiple objects. Common operations include "unions" which combine two shapes and "difference" operations. Difference operations can be used to cut one shape out of another. 3d Studio Max and the game Red Faction for the Playstation II are good examples of how Boolean geometry can be used in practical applications.

Usually an enemy character that will be found at the end of a level which is harder to kill. Originally bosses were given specific patterns you would have to learn to beat them.

The process of creating something by first designing the base elements and then creating the big picture out of them. Opposite of Top-Down.

A box approximation of an object used for collision detection. An axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) is defined by the minimum and maximum ?x?, ?y?, and ?z? values. An oriented bounding box (OBB), however, generally gives a closer fit, because it is always aligned with the object.

Bits Per Second. A measurement of speed for transfering information.

An algorithm to compute which cells in a grid should be drawn in order to display a line between any two cells in the grid. Used to draw arbitrary lines to the screen.

Acronym short for "Blue Screen Of Death", commonly displayed after a major system error under numerous versions of Microsoft Windows. Seeing a BSOD generally means a reboot is soon to follow.

Binary Space Partition Tree. This is a sorting method for sorting nonmoving polygons where polygons are either in front or behind the currently polygon. The resulting linked list gives you the proper sorting for all polygons on the screen.

An error in a game or computer program. The word originated with mainframes; Insects would crawl inside the machines seeking warmth and destroy delicate wiring. "Bug" now means any error or undesired effect in a game or program.

As defined by GOF: Creational Pattern "Separate the construction of a complex object from its representation so that the same construction process can create different representations."

See Also:GOF

A process of rendering polygons that gives them an illusion of depth.

A feature on a mixer where a number of channels can have their settings modified together.

The simplest form of interface the button either provides pressed or non-pressed information to the game. Buttons are usually used for action commands, such as punching, kicking, pressing the gas/break, or shooting.

BVH file - Biovision Hierarchical motion capture data (.bvh) A .bvh file is nothing more than a text file that has data that was captured from a moving skeletal system. Another name for this type of data capture is "Motion Capture" which has been abbreviated as mocap. A .bvh file can be made by software or by hardware. Most studio houses that do their own commercial animation have their own type of motion capture technique.

A byte is 8 bits, which is the equivalent of 256 different possible combinations (0 to 255). A single letter (character) on a computer is normally stored as a byte in ASCII format.