Graphics
Programming computer graphics can be a very hard task. You don't know where to start, how to make the computer display the simplest thing, say a line segment. But if you can get a good book that can guide you in step by step by step path things get clearer and the job does not look that hard any more.
The articles in this series were created to do just that. We took what was give to us by those that went before, then added what we found on the way, addapted all that in more contemporary game needs and here we present them.
In the Graphics section we have included some articles about keyboards and joysticks. These are user interaction devices and we thought they belong here.
The joy of flight
Here is how to use a joystick to fly our airplane.
Using vertex buffers to speed up drawing
Let the GPU handle geometry data.
Heightmap
Learn how to encode 3D geometry information in an image.
Create a moving camera
A really cool feature in video games is a camera that follows the action. Something like a movie camera following the actors around in the film, looking at the car from a short distance.
Moving around in a virtual city
So far we have developed several techniques that we can use to make our games look interesting. Move around in a virtual city using quaternions to handle view.
Stencil Buffer
Clip drawing using an arbitrary shape, not a rectangle. It is not very hard to do using stencil buffers.
Skybox
Have you ever wanted to draw the horizon in your game? Here is how.
Fog, transparency and scissors
Some simple effects that can make our games impressive.
GLSL shaders, an introduction
Using shaders to enhance visual realism in your games.
Text display
Learn the basics on how to display 3D and 2D text in 3D environments.
Casting shadows
Have you ever wondered what shadows are? Well we all know that shadows are the indication that the light from a source has hit an obstacle...
Accelerate with Draw Lists
It is time now to speed up our drawing a little bit. Improving the drawing speed is crucial for applications that draw complicated scenes, especially games...
Adding textures
Realistic 3D environments, especially in games, are based on illusions. Illusions generated by images. These are the textures applied on surfaces...
Lights please
In real world we see because there is light. Let's add some light to our virtual world to make it look real...
Into the 3rd dimension
What is happening when we draw in three dimensions? How can we control the perspective and view of 3D environments? Read this introduction and stay tuned...
Simple OpenGL program
Create a simple application to use a basis for the rest of the tutorials.
Reading the Keyboard
Getting input from the keyboard under Windows is easy. The system notifies the application via the WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP messages. All we have to do is respond to these messages. We will insert some code in the window procedure and get the key that was pressed or released.
