Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming

Appendix C. Direct3D

	“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
	--Stage direction in Shakespeare's “The Winter's Tale”

This appendix provides a brief introduction to the Microsoft DirectX technology for rendering 3D graphics. A full-blown tutorial of the API would require hundreds of pages and is by no means the goal of this book. However, I felt it was important to offer some preliminary information, so you can get coding soon. Thus, this appendix only attempts to cover the essentials of Direct3D: its main components, how to work with them, and so on. Other chapters in the book provide more involved examples for specific applications.

History

Since the advent of PC computers and before the release of Windows 95, PC games were coded under DOS. Developers had direct ...