-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Design and Architecture of a Portable and Extensible Multiplayer 3D Game Engine
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This distribution contains my master's thesis. It describes the design and
architecture of the Parsec engine and will be the core document of the
forthcoming Parsec SDK. However, since the material presented is a bit
heavy on theory and missing a lot of practice-oriented information, the SDK
itself will contain additional documentation on how to actually install and
use the SDK in order to develop Parsec mods and extensions.


The major chapters are:

 01: Introduction

Part I: Foundations and Related Work

 02: Algorithms
 03: High-performance Low-level Graphics APIs
 04: Game Technology Evolution

Part II: Design and Architecture of Parsec

 05: Overview
 06: Architecture Overview
 07: Architecture Details
 08: Low-level Subsystem Specifications
 09: Managing Objects
 10: The ITER Interface
 11: Shaders
 12: The Particle System
 13: Networking
 14: The Command Console

Part III: Conclusion

 15: Concluding Remarks
 16: Bibliography


There are separate pdf and postscript files for each chapter.
contents.pdf also contains clickable links to the respective chapters.

I finished work on this thesis in September 2000; this release basically
contains the original version with a few typos fixed. If you find additional
errors or gross omissions, I'd be glad if you dropped me a line. I'll correct
it and drink a glass of beer in your honor :)

On a personal note, I'd like to conclude with the statement that this thesis
and Parsec have been an awful lot of work (the latter still ongoing), with
the usual ups and downs, but in the end always extremely rewarding. I truly
hope that some of the fun we are having in creating Parsec will transfer to
you, the Parsec community.

Thanks, and enjoy!

-- Markus Hadwiger.
   <msh@parsec.org>
   January 14, 2001