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MASTERS of DATA

Welcome to MASTERS of DATA. A course oriented to Technical Designers, Technical Artists and any game developer that wants to understand and control game data to the last bit.

In this course you will learn to:

• Understand your data: How game data is organized, what is contained in every data file of your game.
• Process your data: Read multiple data files, extract the data you need and edit that data programatically.
• Optimize your data: Reduce size, improve quality, get the best results for every situation and for platform.
• Visualize your data: Create custom tools to display your data: images, audio, text, models... any kind of data.
• Protect your data: Design a custom file format and export your data to it, compress and codify your data.
• Automatize processes: Create custom tools to read/write big bulks of data in batch, define a command-line interface.

UNDERSTANDING GAME DATA

• Introduction to file formats [3h]

• Data packing: from Header to EOF [3h]

• Basic data compression and protection [3h]

• Image data: from colors to pixels [3h]

• Image data: optimization techniques [3h]

  • Ex. Reading BMP file (no external libs) [3h]
  • Ex. Reading PNG file (no external libs) [3h]

• Audio data: from waves to samples [3h]

• Audio data: optimization techniques [3h]

  • Ex. Reading WAV file (no external libs) [3h]

• Text data: from codes to encoding [3h]

• Text data: optimization techniques [3h]

  • Ex. Reading and writting UTF-8 text [3h]
  • Ex. Rendering glyphs from font [3h]
  • Ex. Font atlas generation [3h]

• Models data: from vertex to bones [3h]

• Models data: optimization techniques [3h]

  • Ex. Reading OBJ file (no external libs) [3h]
  • Ex. Reading IQM skeletal animation data [3h]
  • Ex. Writing custom model format [3h]

• Packing models data for Data Oriented Design: SoA vs AoS [3h]

VIEWING & PROCESSING GAME DATA

• Define a custom file format (Ref. RIFF, PNG and ZIP file formats) [3h]

  • Ex. Writting a custom file format writer [3h]
  • Ex. Reading a custom file format [3h]

• Visualizing data 101: IMGUI introduction [3h]

• Visualizing data: tools development basis [3h]

  • Ex. Viewing custom data: Image [3h]
  • Ex. Viewing custom data: Audio [3h]
  • Ex. Viewing custom data: Text [3h]
  • Ex. Viewing custom data: Model [3h]
  • Ex. Viewing generic data: HexViewer [3h]

• Processing data and optimization [3h]

  • Ex. Process image data (pixel-formats, filters, combine channels...) [3h]
  • Ex. Process audio data (sample rate, sample size, normalize...) [3h]
  • Ex. Process model data (optimize vertex attributes) [3h]
  • Ex. Process text data (convert text to image) [3h]
  • Ex. Process image and text data (steganography) [3h]

AUTOMATIZING PROCESSES

• File system theory and access [3h]

• Command line file processing [3h]

• GUI and CLI tools development [3h]

• Scripting and Automatization [3h]

  • Ex. Image directory batch processing [3h]
  • Ex. Data packer: Compression and protection [3h]
  • Ex. Data unpacker and viewer [3h]