15-493 Administrative Information for Spring 2005

Place and Time: Monday and Wednesday from 6:30 to 7:50
5409 WeH

Instructor:

Jessica Hodgins

• Email: jkh@cs.cmu.edu
• Office: NSH 4103
• Phone: x8-6795
• Office Hours: following class or by appointment

Josh Yelon

• Email: jyelon@andrew.cmu.edu
• Office: PTC 5204
• Phone: 8-9791
• Office Hours: 6pm on MW in WeH 5336 or by appointment

Teaching Assistant:

Online Resources

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jkh/video_games

Prerequisite

• 15-462: Computer Graphics

Software

• Panda3d
• Maya Unlimited 6.0 in Wean 5336 running on 24 Linux boxes donated by Intel. Maya Unlimited includes fluid effects, cloth, fur, and match moving software.

Texts and other resources

• No textbook for this class. We will provide occasional handouts.
• Gamasutra has many interesting articles about the games industry and technology.
• Tips for working in teams from Randy Pausch (bottom of the page)

Grading Information

• Class Participation 6%
• Three Individual Assignments 12% each (36% total)
• Mid-term 20%
• Project Webpage 4%
• Final project 34%
  • Project proposal 5%
  • Three checkpoints 3%
  • Final presentations 20%

Assignments and Projects

There will be two kinds of assignments: individual assignments at the start of the semester and a final project. The individual assignments will be completed by each student, the final project will be completed either by individuals or by small teams (2-3 students max).

All assignments will be turned in as code. Your assignments must run in the WeH 5336 cluster and must be written in Panda3D. We will grade your assignment by running your code so when we need instructions on how to do that, you should provide them in a README file.

Grading on programming assignments is based the ambitiousness of what you attempted and the quality of the result.

Late policy

Assignments should be turned in on the day they are due by midnight. We will look at the time stamp on your files to verify that they were turned in on time.