If you have already skipped ahead to Chapter 1, you probably noticed that I get right into the subject at hand immediately, rather than taking a couple of hundred pages to wade slowly into the topic by first going over basic Windows programming and basic DirectX information.

The Focus On... series isn t like that, for a reason. The biggest complaints I got about my last book, Isometric Game Programming with DirectX 7.0 were that it was (a) too expensive and that (b) the WIN32/DirectX tutorial sucked up a full third of the book. The reasons for the complaints are related. Because of the 250-page WIN32/DirectX section, Isometric swelled to over 700 pages. More pages make the cost of printing the book higher, and that cost gets passed along to you, the consumer (that s just how business works).

So no more basics. Nowadays there are dozens of books out there that have the basic WIN32/DirectX information in them (and chances are that you already own one), so no further beating of the (very) dead horse in this book.

However, because I don t cover the basics, to get the most out of this book you should already be at a certain level of knowledge in your game programming (for exactly what that level is, see the "Who You Are" section below).

What s in this Book?

This book is about Direct3D, a component of DirectX used primarily to render three dimensional scenes (or at least a rough approximation of them). However, unlike all the other Direct3D books, I don t actually cover 3D rendering in the traditional sense. I cover 2D rendering, which is a very different approach to the topic of Direct3D. I will concentrate on showing you what the API actually does rather than telling you how to do what it was originally designed for. The difference is subtle, but important.

For the most part, I have made this book into something of a bridge. While there is currently a place for 2D games (and indeed there always will be... not all games need 3D), it is shrinking steadily. Where does this bridge lead? Well, after reading this book, you ll have a much better grasp of what is really going on in Direct3D, and so going back to those Direct3D books that befuddled you before should be easy.

Who You Are

You are a 2D programmer. You should be familiar with some sort of 2D API, be it GDI, DirectDraw, SDL, or something else. Above all else, you should have a good command of the techniques used for 2D game programming. Naturally, this means that you should be a game programmer, and somewhere above the rank of total newbie; but you don t have to know a whole lot.

The ideal scenario is that you are a 2D game programmer who has looked at/purchased/tried to read one or more books on Direct3D without success. For whatever reason, Direct3D lies just beyond your grasp. All of the books on the topic and/or all of the tutorials on the Web have frustrated you, as, even if they are on the topic of 2D with Direct3D, they are still written from the 3D programmer perspective, not your perspective as a 2D programmer.

The programming language of this book is C++, and I do use some C++-specific features, but a good knowledge of C should get you by, for the most part.