Game Dev Glossary
As with any industry there is a specialized vocabulary with game development. This section will go over some of the most common terms used within games and Mona development.
WebGL - WebGL is what Mona uses to get your 3D Space working in a web browser. Everything that you create in Unity needs to be WebGL compatible.
Polygon - A polygon is a four sided shape that makes up 3D assets.
Triangle / Tri - A polygon is made up of two triangles, commonly called Tris.
Edge - An edge is the line between two triangles/tris.
Edge Loop - An edge loop is a line of edges within a 3D Asset. Good Edge loops allow for easier, and faster editing of an asset.
Vertex / Vertices - A vertex is the point at the corner of a polygon. Assets are made of vertices that are connected by edges and polygons.
Material - A material as a game asset that allows you to combine a lot of visual parameters to add different aspects to your 3D model such as color, metallic, smoothness, normal (bump), and emissive (light).
Texture - A texture is basically an image (.png is best for Unity) that has information you can apply to a material. Some are based on color (Diffuse or Albedo), and some are based on numbers between 0-1 such as 0/black for non-smooth, and 1/white for smooth. And some are quite complex such as normal maps (complex bump maps).
Extrude - Extrude is similar to a Sweep in that your a extending a 2D shape along a path. There are slight differences in the two depending on the tool you use to create them, but the basic idea is the same.
Realtime - Realtime refers to the fact that whatever the game/application is doing, it is doing so right now. There is no pre-processing the information. This is usually more expensive on the CPU and graphics card. Realtime lighting is a prime example of something that is very expensive to process, and there are a number of ways to improve this.
Baking - There are two main uses of the word baking.
One use is with 'projecting' high polygon information (eg. sculpted detail or photogrammetry) onto a low polygon asset (eg. a game ready asset) which allows you to have high quality assets work in real time. This baked information is created in different textures, or maps, that you can use in your materials.
Another is baking lighting information into textures rather using real time lighting. This is used in Lightmapping.
Lightmapping - Lightmapping is the process of baking much of the light information (light color, shadows, ambient light, bounced light etc.) into a texture. This approach to lighting is significantly faster than realtime lighting.
Retopology / Retopologizing - This is one technique of creating/improving a low polygon asset to better suit being used in a game environment. It takes longer than other methods but can produce excellent results.
Decimation / Remeshing - These are different techniques for reducing the polygon count of high polygon assets to game ready assets. They are much faster than retopology, but are not as optimised.