An open source tool for teaching concepts for building distributed isometric 3D games
Ralph M. Butler, Chrisila C. Pettey · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2008
For some time now, our department has recognized that incorporating media and gaming into the classroom helps to enhance the learning experience for the student. We also have a subculture that is involved in researching and teaching distributed computing. It was a natural step for us to combine the two areas of focus. To that end, we built a tool that is a small, powerful, and highly portable game engine (di3d) that can be used either to develop 2D or isometric 3D games or to understand the intricacies of game engines. The engine supports a client/server model for interaction among distributed players including movement among scenes via portals. The size of the engine is modest enough that we were able to cover the internals in approximately three class periods.