guff
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Introduction

The Guff (games-uff) project was initially developed for a Master's Thesis entitled "Guff: A System for Game Development" (In Portuguese).

The goal of this project is to foster game development research at the Computer Science department of Universidade Federal Fluminense. It will serve as a testbed for new algorithms and models for game development.

This work has generated the following publications, so far:

• Luis Valente, Aura Conci, and Bruno Feij�, "An Architecture for Game State Management based on State Hierarchies", Simp�sio Brasileiro de Jogos para Computador e Entretenimento Digital, SBGames, 2006;
• Luis Valente, Aura Conci, and Bruno Feij�, "Real Time Game Loop Models for Single-Player Computer Games", Simp�sio Brasileiro de Jogos para Computador e Entretenimento Digital, SBGames, 2005;
• Luis Valente and Aura Conci, "Guff: A Game Development Tool", IV Workshop de Teses e Disserta��es em Computa��o Gr�fica e Processamento de Imagens, SIBGRAPI, 2005;
• Luis Valente and Aura Conci, "Um padr�o de projetos em C++ para a automatiza��o da gest�o de recursos", 5th Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming, SugarLoafPlop, 2005 (in Portuguese);
• Luis Valente and Aura Conci, "Automatic resource management as a C++ design pattern", Simp�sio Brasileiro de Jogos para Computador e Entretenimento Digital, SBGames, 2004.

What is the scope of this project ?

The Guff framework was designed for Windows and Linux applications and was written using C++. One of its goals is to apply open source libraries whenever possible in order to avoid implementing already available funcionality. For example, this project uses OpenGL, SDL, and DevIL, among other libraries.

The following features are already present:

• Automatic resource management on behalf of the developer
• Texture loading and management (bmp, jpg, tga, etc)
• 3D model loading and management (3ds)
• True type fonts
• Audio loading and management (mp3, ogg, wav)
• Quake 3 map rendering (scene geometry, meshes, and models)
• Several types of camera abstractions
• Definition of game levels through a state machine
• Fixed frequency game loop model
• Lua language support
• Application configuration defined though Lua scripts

This is an open-ended project, so for the future, we plan to add new funcionaties derived from research at UFF. However, as this is an open source project, everyone is welcome to participate.

Links

Author's web site: http://www.icad.puc-rio.br/~lvalente