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Principia Tutorial Demos and User Guide
The Principia Tutorial Demos and User Guide are an important part of the Principia platform. They comprise hundreds of self-contained mini-applications that teach you how to use the vast library of Principia components in a wide range of realistic production tasks. The demos start with the simple - how to display a basic GUI - and branch into a variety of multimedia production topics.
Each mini-application contains source code, scripts, media content and documentation. The entire collection of mini-applications is encapsulated in three Microsoft Visual Studio projects to enable easy exploration and templating use.
- Demos Parts I-III,
Principia components and procedures
- Demos Parts IV-VII,
Physics/AI components, publishing, scenes, characters, and utility application
examples
- Demos Part VIII, complete commercial game example produced and published using Principia
Skill Sets
Principia is meant to do the job of a team of college graduates in computer science/game development, aided by specialized programmers with post-graduate degrees in computational methods, physics, and procedural algorithms. If you master Principia, you will have the production power of such a team.
You will still need a certain starting skill set to get there. For instance:
- To build your application engine using Principia, you need to have a working understanding of how computers render graphics, and of the data
entities involved in rendering, such as vertex streams, textures, shaders, materials ...etc. The Principia Tutorial Demos early chapters are
designed to impart/refresh this knowledge to a person with reasonable general skills in computer science but minimal game development experience.
- To implement your gameplay, you need to have a decent plan for describing, organizing and managing your application data.
Principia can do the rest for you, but will not substitute for good planning and design. The advanced chapters of the Principia Demos can show you how
this has been already done in commercial-grade situations.
- To generate art and keep the content pipeline running, your people need to be reasonably conversant with rendering, and with the qualitative nature of different procedural methods. Principia does the heavy lifting by enabling less-technical but more creative people to do the job.
The rendering and procedural chapters of the Principia Demos provide your content people with the grounding and tools needed to focus on creativity and content production.
Demos Organization and Documentation
The individual demos documentation is organized in several parts and chapters, the first one of which is available for public download.
- Part I: Foundation core components
- Ch.00 Introduction to Principia (70 pages, 39 Mb, right-click to save-as)
- Ch.01 The Basics (114 pages, 6 Mb, right-click to save-as)
- Ch.02 Core Controls
- Ch.03 Basic Rendering (182 pages, 24 Mb, right-click to save-as)
- Ch.04 Basic Shaders
- Ch.05 Basic Animation
- Ch.06 Structural Components
- Ch.07 Core Objects
- Ch.08 Core Worlds (340 pages, 120 Mb, right-click to save-as)
- Ch.09 Core Viewers
- Ch.10 Audio and Video
- Part II: Specialized core components
- Ch.01 Advanced controls
- Ch.02 Advanced rendering
- Ch.03 Advanced animation
- Ch.04 Effects, CPU-driven
- Ch.05 Effects, GPU-driven
- Ch.06 Operations
- Ch.07 Specialized objects
- Ch.08 Specialized viewers
- Ch.09 Specialized worlds
- Ch.10 Internal components
- Ch.11 Analysis components
- Part III: Procedural components
- Ch.01 Field element procedures
- Ch.02 Structure element procedures
- Ch.03 Procedural textures
- Ch.04 Procedural geometry
- Ch.05 Procedural objects
- Ch.06 Procedural animation
- Ch.07 Procedural particle systems
- Ch.08 Procedural behaviors
- Ch.09 Procedural worlds
- Ch.10 Procedural audio
- Ch.11 Data management procedures
- Part IV: Play and physics components
- Ch.01 Behaviors I
- Ch.02 Behaviors II
- Ch.03 Play data components
- Ch.04 AI support components
- Ch.05 Rigid body dynamics
- Ch.06 Rigid skeletal system dynamics
- Ch.07 Soft body dynamics
- Ch.08 Soft skeletal system dynamics
- Ch.09 Particle system dynamics
- Ch.10 Diffusion processes
- Ch.11 Fluid motion
- Ch.12 Geologic system simulation
- Ch.13 Ecosystem simulation
- Part V: Infrastructure and publishing components
- Ch.01 Interfaces
- Ch.02 Devices
- Ch.03 Users and actors
- Ch.04 Networking and connectivity
- Ch.05 Scenes and workflows
- Ch.06 Data exchange and persistence
- Ch.07 Configuration and requirements
- Ch.08 Performance optimization
- Ch.09 Production packaging
- Ch.10 Encryption and DRM
- Ch.11 Platform selection
- Ch.12 Installation
- Ch.13 Distribution
- Part VI: Production gallery
- Ch.01 Scenes
- Ch.02 Characters
- Ch.03 Creatures
- Ch.04 Things
- Ch.05 Terrains and landscapes
- Ch.06 Worlds
- Ch.07 Production VFX
- Ch.08 Production AFX
- Ch.09 Short movies
- Part VII: Developer utility applications build with Principia
- Ch.01 Component editors
- Ch.02 World editors
- Ch.03 Data editors and converters
- Ch.04 Platform testers
- Ch.05 Script generators
- Part VIII: Producing a full-featured game with Principia
- Ch.01 BubbleBathII design
- Ch.02 BubbleBathII content generation and packaging
- Ch.03 BubbleBathII script, code and workflow
- Ch.04 BubbleBathII installation
Please contact us if you are interested in learning more.