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The 32Bits Management.
...to the second tutorial series in the "D3D Basics" set. Not a lot to say at this point! If you're new to D3D, and you skipped series 1 of this tutorial I really suggest you go back and re-read it! Meanwhile, if you've come here the "legit" way, glad you stuck around! This is where we start doing some neat graphic stuff.
So what can you expect? In this series we'll be looking mainly at 2D graphics. That means blitting bitmaps to screen, manipulating surfaces and displaying graphics using the 2D functions of D3D. We'll create a pretty advanced sprite engine, talk about texturemapping and create a font rasteriser to draw custom text to screen. We'll also start grouping all our code into a class based system to keep things nice and OO modular for the future. This means we will create the basis of a scene management system, and add some debugging in with it. And if there's time, we might even manage to talk about timers and frame counters for our code!
Well, for a start I'm assuming you read and understood the material in series 1. That means we won't be going back over the rendering process, surfaces, the back buffer, COM etc. I'm just going to assume you understand what all that code was for! I also won't be going into detail on the more obvious code - we're just going to concentrate on the D3D side of things. One point, if you're re-typing the code for yourself (to learn, etc), make sure that all the code in part 1 compiles and runs perfectly. We're going to start making minor changes and improvements to it as we go, so we want to avoid building errors where we can. Be aware that tutorial 5 requires some solid knowledge of C++ classes, inheritance, pointers and references, so if you're not 100% confident on these topics and find yourself getting lost please make sure you understand the C++ principles before you continue. Finally, enjoy it! These are your first major steps into D3D.
DirectX 8 Edition
1. Displaying a bitmap - Creating a bitmap handler class, and drawing it to screen
- Building a flexible and advanced sprite engine
3. Kewl Fonts! - Using our sprite engine to create a bitmap font rasteriser 4. Accurate Timers - Adding an accurate timer class to our code 5. Bringing it together - Creating a base class with object management, debugging and more
DirectX 9 Edition
1. Displaying a bitmap - Creating a bitmap handler class, and drawing it to screen
- Building a flexible and advanced sprite engine
3. Kewl Fonts! - Using our sprite engine to create a bitmap font rasteriser 4. Accurate Timers - Adding an accurate timer class to our code 5. Bringing it together - Creating a base class with object management, debugging and more
