Learning With E S

Get Started Fast with Modern OpenGL ES Graphics Programming for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad OpenGL ES technology underlies the user interface and graphical capabilities of Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad–as well as devices ranging from video-game consoles and aircraft-cockpit displays to non-Apple smartphones. In this friendly, thorough introduction, Erik M. Buck shows how to make the most of Open GL ES in Apple’s iOS environment. This highly anticipated title focuses on modern, efficient approaches that use the newest versions of OpenGL ES, helping you avoid the irrelevant, obsolete, and misleading techniques that litter the Internet. Buck embraces Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, showing how to leverage Apple’s powerful, elegant GLKit framework to maximize your productivity, achieve tight platform integration, and deliver exceptionally polished apps. If you’ve written C or C++ code and know object-oriented programming basics, this title brings together everything you need to fully master OpenGL ES graphics for iOS–including downloadable examples specifically designed to jumpstart your own projects. Coverage includes • Understanding core OpenGL ES computer graphics concepts and iOS graphics architecture • Integrating Cocoa Touch with OpenGL ES to leverage the power of Apple’s platform • Creating textures from start to finish: opacity, blending, multi-texturing, and compression • Simulating ambient, diffuse, and specular light • Using transformations to render 3D geometric objects from any point of view • Animating scenes by controlling time through application logic • Partitioning data to draw expansive outdoor scenes with rolling terrain • Detecting and handling user interaction with 3D geometry • Implementing special effects ranging from skyboxes to particles and billboards • Systematically optimizing graphics performance • Understanding the essential linear algebra concepts used in computer graphics • Designing and constructing a complete simulation that incorporates everything you’ve learned

Want to create sophisticated games and graphics-intensive apps? Learn OpenGL ES gets you started immediately with OpenGL ES. After mastering the basics of OpenGL ES itself, you will quickly find yourself writing and building game apps, without having to learn about object oriented programming techniques. This book demonstrates the use of a powerful open-source modeling tool, Blender. You will be guided, step by step, through the development of Tank Fence, a dynamic, interactive 3D game. Along the way you'll gain skills in building apps with Eclipse and the Android SDK or NDK, rendering graphics using hardware acceleration, and multithreading for performance and responsiveness. iOS developers will also find this book's information invaluable when writing their apps. You'll learn everything you need to know about: Creating simple, efficient game UIs Designing the basic building blocks of an exciting, interactive 3D game Pulling all the elements together with Blender, a powerful open-source tool for modeling, animation, rendering, compositing, video editing, and game creation Taking the next big step using custom and inbuilt functions, texturing, shading, light sources, and more Refining your mobile game app through collision detection, player-room-obstacle classes, and storage classes Doing all this efficiently on mobile devices with limited resources and processing

Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500 explores the fundamental insight that all new ideas are developed in the context of a community, whether academic, religious, or simply as a network of friends. The essays in this volume consider this notion in a variety of contexts and locations within Europe, from the pioneering age of translation activity in twelfth-century Toledo, when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars came together to discuss Aristotle, to the origins of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, and up to the period of great cultural renewal in France, Germany, and Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The collected essays bring together disciplinary approaches that are often discussed quite separately, namely that of the history of ideas, and the sociologies of both intellectual and religious life, with a view to exploring the multiplicity of communities in which ideas are pursued. Underpinning these various essays is an awareness of the delicate relationship between education and the diversity of religious practice and expression within Europe from 1100 to 1500. The collection emphasizes the fundamental continuity of intellectual concerns, which were shaped by both classical thought and monotheist religious tradition, but interpreted in a variety of ways.

Create compelling 2D games with Learn cocos2d Game Development with iOS 5. This book shows you how to use the powerful cocos2d game engine to develop games for iPhone and iPad with tilemaps, virtual joypads, Game Center, and more. It teaches you: The process and best practices of mobile game development, including sprite batching, texture atlases, parallax scrolling, touch and accelerometer input. How to enhance your games using the Box2D and Chipmunk physics engines and other cocos2d-related tools and libraries. How to add UIKit views to cocos2d and how to add cocos2d to UIKit apps. The ins and outs of the Kobold2D development environment for cocos2d and its preconfigured libraries, including cocos3d and Lua. Best of all, Learn cocos2d Game Development with iOS 5 will have you making games right from the very start. It guides you step-by-step through the creation of sample games. These fun examples are modeled after popular App Store games and teach you key concepts of the cocos2d game engine and relevant tools like TexturePacker (texture atlas), PhysicsEditor (physics collision shapes), Particle Designer (particle effects), Glyph Designer (bitmap fonts), and others. This book offers a rock-solid introduction to creating games made entirely with cocos2d and little or no iOS 5 SDK and OpenGL code. It also details alternative implementations, identifies the best free and commercial tools for cocos2d game development, features coverage of the author's improved cocos2d game engine (Kobold2D), and even helps you enhance your game's marketability on the App Store.

The school of thought surrounding the urban ecosystem has increasingly become in vogue among researchers worldwide. Since half of the world’s population lives in cities, urban ecosystem services have become essential to human health and wellbeing. Rapid urban growth has forced sustainable urban developers to rethink important steps by updating and, to some degree, recreating the human–ecosystem service linkage. Assessing, as well as estimating the losses of ecosystem services can denote the essential effects of urbanization and increasingly indicate where cities fall short. This book contains 13 thoroughly refereed contributions published within the Special Issue “Urban Ecosystem Services”. The book addresses topics such as nature-based solutions, green space planning, green infrastructure, rain gardens, climate change, and more. The contributions highlight new findings for landscape architects, urban planners, and policymakers. Important future cities research is considered by looking at the system connectivity between the social and ecological sphere—via varying forms of urban planning, management, and governance. The book is supported by methods and models that utilize an urban sustainability and ecosystem service-centric focus by adding knowledge-base and real-world solutions into the urbanization phenomenon.

El espacio, ya sea físico o virtual, puede tener un impacto significativo en el aprendizaje. Learning Spaces se centra en la forma en que las expectativas de los alumnos influyen en dichos espacios, en los principios y actividades que facilitan el aprendizaje y en el papel de la tecnología desde la perspectiva de quienes crean los entornos de aprendizaje: profesores, tecnólogos del aprendizaje, bibliotecarios y administradores. La tecnología de la información ha aportado capacidades únicas a los espacios de aprendizaje, ya sea estimulando una mayor interacción mediante el uso de herramientas de colaboración, videoconferencias con expertos internacionales o abriendo mundos virtuales para la exploración. Este libro representa una exploración continua a medida que unimos el espacio, la tecnología y la pedagogía para asegurar el éxito de los estudiantes.