Gamedev Pronunciation Guide

Introduction

If you are working in the field of Computer Science, chances are you might have encountered quite a lot of technical terms and foreign names, such as Dijkstra and Nyquist. And chances are that you have learnt a good part of them solely from books. And there is nothing more embarrassing than being in an interview and mispronouncing some key term in your field of expertise! Learning the correct pronunciation is also an act of respect towards the many men and women which dedication has become the foundation of our daily work.

This page is a collection of some of the most used—and tricky to pronounce—terms and names from Computer Science, with a focus on Game Development and Computer Graphics. For each term, you can find the “most correct” pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet. For many others, you will also find the respective phonetic respelling used by Wikipedia.

Before you keep reading, there are a few points to keep in mind. Many of the names in this list are in foreign languages, and they cannot be pronounced “the correct way” in English. They have, however, an Anglicised version that makes use of the closest sounds found in the English language. Fourier, for instance, is pronounced [fuʁje] in French, but is often approximated in English as /ˈfʊrieɪ,/ (FOOR-ee-ey). Yet, another commonly accepted variations is /ˈfʊriər/ (FOOR-ee-er). Many names and technical terms also variations between British English (🇬🇧) and American English (🇺🇸); effort was made to include both variants.

If you are interested to learn the pronunciation of technical terms, Computational Graphics Pronunciation Guide is another good resource. I hope you will find this collection useful, and feel free to get in touch to suggest a change or a new term to add.

Continue reading

Atmospheric Scattering Shader

This tutorial finally concludes our journey to simulate Rayleigh Scattering for a planet’s atmosphere.

The next (and final) part will show how to change the shader to also include an additional type of scattering, known as Mie Scattering.

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading

A Shader for the Atmospheric Sphere

 

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading

A Journey Through the Atmosphere

This post describes how to model the density of the atmosphere at different altitude. This is a critical step, since the atmospheric density is one of the parameters necessary to correctly calculate the Rayleigh scattering.

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading

The Mathematics of Rayleigh Scattering

This post introduces the Mathematics of Rayleigh Scattering, which is the optical phenomenon that causes the sky to appear blue. The equations derived in this tutorial will be translated into shader code in the next tutorial.

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading

The Theory Behind Atmospheric Scattering

This is the second part of the tutorial on volumetric atmospheric scattering. In this post we will start deriving the equations that govern this complex, yet beautiful optical phenomenon.

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading

Intersecting The Atmosphere

 

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading

Volumetric Atmospheric Scattering

If you have lived long enough on planet Earth, you might have wondered why the sky is usually blue, yet red at sunset. The optical phenomenon which is (mostly) responsible for that is called Rayleigh scattering. This tutorial will explain how to model atmospheric scattering to reproduce many of the visual effects that planets exhibit. And if you want to render physically accurate visuals for alien planets, this is definitely the tutorial you’ve been looking for.

You can find all the post in this series here:

You can download the Unity package for this tutorial at the bottom of the page.

Continue reading