[...]... Series Editor The first edition of Beginning Direct 3D Game Programming was such a great success that we thought we would follow it up with a new edition that covers slightly more advanced material, such as shader and vertex programming, and at the same time update the text for DirectX 9.0 This second edition still starts off slowly and explains the key elements of Direct3D programming, but it takes... pixel shader programming, which were published at http://www.gamedev.net, and I edited and coauthored a book called ShaderX—Vertex and Pixel Shader Tips and Tricks, Introduction xxi which features advanced shader programming material by 27 authors The tremendous success of Beginning Direct3D Game Programming and ShaderX led to a number of new challenges One of them was speaking at the 2003 Game Developers... running under OS/2 I wrote a few articles on OpenGL and OS/2 game programming for German journals, coauthored a German book, and started on Windows game programming In 1997, I wrote my first online tutorials on DirectX programming and published them on my own Web site After communicating with John Munsch and the other administrators of http://www.gamedev.net, I decided to make my tutorials accessible through... head, I decided to start computer game programming My goal was to program a terrain engine like Comanche My then-girlfriend—now my wife—looked a little bit confused when a young, recently-graduated lawyer told her that he was going to be a game programmer About two years later, after becoming a member of the Gamedev Forum on CompuServe and reading a few books on game programming by André La Mothe and... a Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP or short Windows-based Direct3D/DirectX Graphics game for the PC, including: • 3D graphics and algorithms • Game programming techniques and data structures • Using 3D files to construct game worlds • Programming your own character engine with a character animation system • DirectX Graphics programming • And more! xxii Introduction What You Need to Know This book assumes... http://www.direct3d.info), with the sole purpose of providing understandable and instructive tutorials on Direct3D programming This was also my goal in writing the first edition of the book—to help readers understand and learn DirectX Graphics programming Now it’s been more than two years since I wrote the first edition of the book Two years is a long time in the real-time graphics industry, and also in my private... effects based on shader programming with the new shader programming languages, such as Microsoft’s High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) Additionally, we thought we would throw in some new material on Quake 2 and Quake 3 file formats for animated meshes If you’re looking for a beginner book on Direct3D and you don’t want to wade through a lot of general DirectX coverage or Windows programming, then this... game, and therefore they are an integral part of the game development process This fact and a huge number of e-mails led me to rethink the didactical structure of the second edition of this book First of all, many e-mails suggested that the explanation on how to install the development environment and the DirectX SDK wasn’t detailed enough in the first edition Furthermore, the new must-have features of... program Therefore, this edition of the book has an extended introduction to the preparation of a development system, and the first chapters stick to the fixed-function pipeline to reduce the level of detail I explain vertex and pixel shader programming later, in Part Three Unfortunately, Amir Geva was not able to contribute his chapters on physics and collision detection to this edition If you are interested... Summary 298 Part Four Appendixes 299 Appendix A Windows Game Programming Foundation 301 How to Look through a Window 302 How Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP Interacts with Your Game 302 The Components of a Window 303 A Window Skeleton .