Assignment - Digital Graphics For Computer Games

Student Name: Noel Pells

Qualification: BTEC Level 3 Games Design

Unit Number and Title: Unit 78 – Digital Graphics for Computer Games

Start Date: 29/09/2015 (Group B)

Assignment Introduction

As preparation for this assignment, I researched the different elements of computer game graphics, which were things like artistic style, raster and vector images, compression etc. In this assignment I am going to compare a 2D game with a 3D game, my 2D game being Terraria, and my 3D game being Minecraft.

What is Terraria?

Terraria is a 2D sandbox game where each world is procedurally generated (randomly generated). The player has to explore, gather resources, craft, build, and defeat enemies and bosses.

What is Minecraft?

Minecraft is a 3D sandbox game that also has procedurally generated worlds. The game is open world and unlike Terraria the world has no end. The player has to explore, craft and build.

Artistic Style

Terraria is a 2D game with a pixel art style, that uses sprites similar to the 16-bit ones used on the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System.) The pixels used to make up the sprites are quite prominent, however the games backgrounds are made to look more realistic. They use smaller/less noticeable pixels and show big landscapes.

An example of a Terraria background.

Minecraft is 3D and the art style is quite similar to Terraria’s in some ways. The game also uses pixels however they are more prominent because the game is played from a first person perspective, and the blocks use less/bigger pixels in general. Minecraft looks more realistic than Terraria, and you can tell that the landscapes and animals have been based on realism, but obviously have been altered and made to look blocky. It’s like the developers literally took real life landscapes and turned them into blocks.

A cow, wolf, and the default player model "Steve."

A sword, diamond and a compass. As you can see Minecraft has
much bigger items and uses less/bigger pixels so they are very prominent.

Image/Graphic Types: Raster or Vector?
Both Minecraft and Terraria use what are known as raster graphics. Raster images (or graphics) (bmp, gif, tiff, jpeg) are images that are made up of pixels or point samples. Each pixel has a certain percentage of red, green and blue (the primary colours) which makes up the final colour. 
The image on the right is an example of a raster image. The original image is quite small and clear, but when we zoom in the picture becomes very pixelated, and each individual pixel is shown. 

Compression
The images in both games would have been compressed using lossless compression. Lossless compression reduces the size of the image file but keeps the image quality. If the images were compressed with lossy compression, the games would like a like a blurry mess.

Optimization
Since the world(s) in Minecraft is so huge, the game needs to be optimized efficiently so it doesn't use up loads of PC power. Minecraft worlds render in chunks, which are giant squares that render in as the player moves around (only what the player see's is rendered in.) Chunks are 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks long, and 256 blocks deep. In Minecraft you will sometimes stumble upon chunk errors where there is a giant hole in the floor that leads to nothing. This mainly happens on servers with bad connection.

A chuck error (the world hasn't rendered in correctly)

Terraria is optimized in a similar way, however you don't really see chunks load in like you can in Minecraft, and you rarely come across broken chunks. Terraria uses less PC power than Minecraft anyway and the worlds are much smaller, so loads of optimization isn't really needed as much.