This thesis deals with the development of an interactive Android card game. As an example, the Hebrew game Yaniv was implemented. Focus is the elaboration of required background components and the corresponding implementation in that application. Required game processes will be screened and a possible solution will be identified.

A special challenge of the basic musical education of children is to give them an understanding of reading and writing musical scores. During the training of young choristers it is furthermore important to educate them in directly transforming the written scores into sounds. Therefore it is an interesting idea to play the sounds to the children via piano or keyboard and simultaneously present them on a screen in musical notation. The aim of this bachelor thesis is the implementation of such a system that allows to enter scores using a MIDI-compatible keyboard and then depicting these as musical notation. The prototype of the application operates in three steps. It receives the musical scores via keyboard in form of MIDIdatasets. These MIDI-information are converted to the MusicXML-format. Based on this MusicXML-notation the software finally generates and displays the visual output.

This thesis presents an approach to optimizing the computation of soft shadows from area lights. The light source is sampled uniformly by traversing shadow rays as packets through an N-tree. This data structure stores an additional line space for every node. A line space stores precomputed information about geometry inside of shafts from one to another side of the node. This visibility information is used to terminate a ray. Additionally the graphics processing unit (short GPU) is used to speed up the computations through parallelism. The scene is rendered with OpenGL and the shadow value is computed on the GPU for each pixel. Evaluating the implementation shows a performance gain of 86% by comparison to the CPU, if using the GPU implementation. Using the line space instead of triangle intersections also increases the performance. The implementation provides good scaling with an increasing amount of triangles and has no visual disadvantages for many rays.

This thesis presents the use of a local linespace data structure, which is designed and implemented on the basis of an existing GPU-based raytra- cer with a global linespace data structure. For each scene object, an N-tree is generated whose nodes each have a linespace. This saves informations about existing geometry in its shafts. A shaft represents a volume between two faces on the outside of the node. This allows a faster skipping of em- pty spaces during raytracing. Identical objects can access already calcula- ted linespaces, which can reduce the memory requirement by up to 94.13% and the initialization time of the datastructure by up to 97.15%. Due to the local access possibilities dynamic scenes can be visualized. An increase in quality can also be observed.

The development of a game engine is considered a non-trivial problem. [3] The architecture of such simulation software must be able to manage large amounts of simulation objects in real-time while dealing with “crosscutting concerns” [3,p. 36] between subsystems. The use of object oriented paradigms to model simulation objects in class hierarchies has been reported as incompatible with constantly changing demands during game development [2, p. 9], resulting in anti-patterns and eventual, messy refactoring.[13] Alternative architectures using data oriented paradigms revolving around object composition and aggregation have been proposed as a result. [13, 9, 1, 11] This thesis describes the development of such an architecture with the explicit goals to be simple, inherently compatible with data oriented design, and to make reasoning about performance characteristics possible. Concepts are formally defined to help analyze the problem and evaluate results. A functional implementation of the architecture is presented together with use cases common to simulation software.