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Learn3D
Contents
IntroductionDownload
Introduction
To teach some basic video game design concepts to middle school and high school aged students I use three free and open source applications:
- Learn3D: an application that I wrote in Java to combine game elements with game logic to create a simple video game.
- Wings3D
: a free 3D modeler that can be used to design in-game objects such as characters, buildings, etc. - Gimp : a free image manipulation program (like photoshop) used to create textures and to create grayscale
images that will be used to generate topographic height data for landscapes in a game.
Below is a screenshot of the game "editing" mode of the Learn3D application:
Rather than going into an in-depth explanation of how Learn3D works on this page, I will instead refer you to the documentation
that comes with Learn3D:
HowTo
The HowTo pages are designed to be used by middle school and high school aged students so the language tends to be informal. The documentation is incomplete and a few of the HowTo's are not up to date with the latest version of Learn3D. This has not been a major problem to this point because I've primarily used the documentation as a supplement to in-the-lab instruction - to help students remember what I've gone over, to allow students to work ahead, and to cover information that I couldn't get worked into the in-class instruction (the course lasts a week).
Download
Save the following zip file to your desktop:learn3D.zip (40MB)
Now unzip the contents to your desktop, or some other location on your hard-drive that you can remember. To run learn3D in Windows (2K/XP/Vista), open the folder labeled "myName". Inside of this folder, you should find another folder labeled "videoGameDev"; open it. In the "videoGameDev" folder there are two programs of interest:
- editor
- run
Note: depending on how your file browser is set up, you may or may not see a ".bat" extension on the file names.
Learn3D also runs on Linux and recent versions of Mac OS X, but I have not yet written a script to run the application automatically
on Mac OS X, and on Linux you will need to install Java and Java 3D:
-
Java download site
(most computers come with Java already installed - if the QMWave applet runs in your browser,
then you already have Java)
- Java 3D download site
Note that you should download and install Java and Java 3D in the order listed above to ensure proper installation.
For Linux there are scripts called: editor_linux.sh and run_linux.sh which work the same as run and editor listed above.
The source code is included under the GPL . The root source folder is the "learn3D" folder, and the driver (the
program entry-point) is found in the "main" sub-folder. My IDE of choice is the
Eclipse IDE for Java Developers .
To figure out how to use the editor, just refer to the HowTo documentation
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