Tranformantion and Lighting Recent 3D accelerators now have special features for hardware based transformations, which were traditionally control by the software, as well as hardware.

The abbreviation TANSTAAFL stands for "there ain?t no such thing as a free lunch" and is quite often used by Michael Abrash when he talks about optimization. It means that whatever you do, there?s always a trade-off, be it size, speed, or the developer?s nerves.

Transmission Control Protocol, is used for reliable packet transfer. Packets are slower in nature as they are always checked and will arrive to the applications in the proper order.

A suite of protocols that is the standard on the Internet. There are 13 protocols overall, including telnet, FTP, TCP, UDP and RDP. See TCP and UDP.

A specification for all of the programming algorithms, data, and the interfaces between the data and the algorithms.

Telnet is a protocol that allows you to connect to remote computers (called hosts) over a TCP/IP network (such as the Internet). You use software called a telnet client on your computer to make a connection; there is a telnet server on the remote host, which the telnet client negotiates with to establish a connection. Once connected, the client becomes a virtual terminal, and allows you to communicate with the host computer from your computer. In most cases, you?ll be asked to log into the remote system. This usually requires an account on that system. Occasionally you can log in as guest or public without having an account. Telnet clients are available for all major operating systems.

Can be shortened to TB. 1 TB Approx.: 1 Trillion bytes

An set of operators that take three operands. In C, the ternary operators are ? and :, and the syntax for their use is ? : .

To divide an object into geometric primtives, such as triangles, for the purpose of simplification. Used either to make rendering or to reduce the complexity of the object.

A wonderfully innovative Puzzle game, designed by Alexy Pajitnov. Tetris was the original "falling blocks" game.

Tetris was a 2D puzzle game. The play area was an empty box. A number of different shaped, randomly selected pieces would fall one at a time from the top of the screen. The player would be able to rotate these blocks, and move then toward the left or right as they fell. Once the current block came to rest at the bottom of the screen or on another block, its place would be fixed, and another block would enter the playing field.

The blocks would continue to fall until they were piled to the top of the screen, at which point the game would end. But a player would put this off as long as possible by carefully stacking the blocks in a compact manner.

Whenever the blocks were stacked in such a way that an entire horizontal row of the play area was completely filled with blocks, that row would disappear, and the blocks above would fall down to take their place. Every time the player completed a row, he would be awarded points.

Through careful planning, is was also possible to complete several rows at once. When this happened. the player would be awarded more points in proportion to the number of rows completed simultaneously.

The game mechanics of Tetris were uncomplicated, and it was easy for people to learn to play in just a few moments. Yet the gameplay was addictive, and Tetris became very popular.

A whole host of Tetris clones have been created. And because this type of Puzzle game is relatively easy to program, it is common for new programmers to learn by creating their own versions of Tetris.

Short for texture element, a texel is an individual pixel that is part of a texture.

A subjective perception of a sound?s fundamental qualities. Usually expressed in terms of ?harshness?, ?smoothness?, ?breadth? and so forth. Eg: A sawtooth waveform would be perceived as having a harsh texture, whereas a square or simple sine wave would have a smoother texture. A similar usage is often seen in discussions of music and compositions in general.

A 2D image which is is used as a kind of wallpaper for the basic polygons used in 3D graphics. Textures are usually images of real-world objects and are often repeated over an entire object in a tiled fashion. Eg: a retouched photograph of a brick wall may used to provide the basic texture for a house?s walls.

Using a filtering method, such as point sampling, bilinear, trilinear, or anisotrophic filtering, to resolve problems caused by applying a 2D texture to a 3D object.

A small program that generate textures, mainly for use in 64k demos. The generators often have generate, filter and distortion functions.

The process of mapping a 2D image to a polygon. Often the polygon is rotated and a different size so that the texture must be rotated and scaled.

The process of applying a texture to something.

TGA is a graphical format for saving files.

An innovative simulation of suburban life. This game was designed by Will Wright, and published by Electronic Arts.

The gameplay in The Sims is open ended. The player is not given a definite set of goals, and so there is no distinct set of win or loss conditions. The player makes use of the game mechanics in whatever way he chooses.

The Sims was very popular, and a number of sequels have been made. A new MMORPG version is currently in development.

A developer which is not owned or run by the maker of a platform or operating system. For instance all developers besides Microsoft are third party developers for Windows. Developers for consoles need to be licensed by their console manufacturer before they are allowed to develop for the platform.

Thrashing can occur in any type of search environment, such as reading/writing to RAM or a hard-drive. It is when searches have to jump to different locations to reading instead of being able to proceed sequentially.

TIFF is an acronym for Tag(ged) Image File Format. It is one of the most popular and flexible of the current public domain raster file formats.

A bitmap that can be placed to create a picture, usually used for background maps.

The character of a sound. More formally, an instrument?s unique set of overtones. It is timbre that causes a piano to sound different from, say, a guitar, and also what makes sine waves sound different from a pulse wave.

The process of creating something by looking at the big picture first, then working your way down to the details. Opposite of Bottom-Up.

A modification (mod) to a game that changes all of the graphics, levels and often adds in new elements of gameplay. For example, the Quake 1 was converted into a car racing game. See Mod.

A music sequencing program, in which the interface is primarily numeric. The interface of a tracker allows the user to arrange sound-samples on a timeline across several monophonic channels. Trackers generally save songs to disk incorporating both sequencing data and samples. This can give a relatively small file size, while still providing a generally better quality of sound that MIDI often produces.

Advertising not meant for the consumer, but instead intended to reach retailers, wholesalers, reps and salespeople.

A trade exchange system whereby employees of two different developers or publishers trade retail copies of one game for another. Popular at the close of E3 and ECTS shows.

Any kind of matrix that is used to alter the position and/or orientation of an object.

The act of linearly altering the location of a point.

A matrix that moves a point linearly.

Having the property of admitting and diffusing light so that the objects beyond cannot be clearly distinguished : partly transparent. (ie. Alpha-blending two polys together).

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 Blending.

Having the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that the bodies lying beyond are entirely visible. (ie. Color keying or transparent sprites - not drawing the mask color).

The term used for an overabundance of branching pathways in game design. When the number of possible outcomes governed by player choice becomes unmanagable, it is said you have planted "The Tree of Death".

An effect where the amplitude of a signal is modulated by a sine wave. In the guitar world, the "whammy bar" is mistakenly called a tremolo -- it is used, in fact, to produce vibrato (modulation of frequency).

Released in 1998 by DreamWorks, Trespasser was very much overhyped to contain realistic physics, highly intelligent dinosaur AI, and hyper-realistic environments. Unfortunately, it didn?t meet its expectations and was immediately shunned by the industry as a flop. Regardless, it was years ahead of most games in terms of physics, shadows, and simply realism.

The term given to a pixel in a monitor based on the red, green and blue components that make up each one. In other viewing devices, such as Head Mounted Displays, resolution is often given in triads instead of pixels.

A fundamental waveform that has very weak, odd harmonics (approximately 8/9 of the energy is devoted to the fundamental). Often found in oscillators instead of sine waves because a low-pass filtered triangle wave is effectively a sine wave.

Converting a polygon into a number of triangles.

From the Greek root "Tribos" which means ?to rub?. Tribology is the science or study of rubbing. Used in physical simulations to determine friction of two objects, such as tires on a road for a driving game.

This discipline includes the study of two interacting (sliding)surfaces, the materials that make-up the surfaces, the space between the surfaces and lubricants used to reduce friction between the surfaces. Tribology is used in many industries including Automotive, Research, Manufacturing, and High Tech.

Combines bilinear filtering from 2 Mip levels (See Mip Mapping) to create a smoother version of the textures current size. Doubles the memory useage and can cause bandwidth problems.

A video buffer consists of a memory allocation for the information that is drawn to the screen. The first buffer is what is actually drawn to the screen, a second and third buffer are used to create a workspace to draw to that doesn?t require synchronization to the vertical retrace of the monitor.

Tripple buffering allows the advantages of a double buffer, where the program has a buffer to draw on that is not dependent on the retrace, but adds the additional advantage of being able to draw to the third buffer while the second buffer is waiting to flip to the front of the screen.

When color information is stored in the form of its red, green and blue components it is said to be stored in true color. Opposite is Indexed Color.

An animation technique used to create the illusion that the characters are engaging in various forms of locomotion.

Terminate but Stay Resident: TSR is when a program terminates, but remains resident in memory.

Often a war game that the player will be given as much time as is necessary to move or perform the actions they wish. Actions will then usually performed one at a time and the sides trade of. For instance, Chess is a turn based strategy game.

A game which progresses in stages where time is only applied after the player has finished making their decisions for their next actions.

For game programming turoials of all type go to the: GameDev.net Programming Reference section.

A plain unformatted ASCII text file.

A graphical roguelike/RPG game written in Java and released as open source GPL software.