Further Reading

MSDN: The first port of call for almost all DirectX and Visual Studio related enquiries. Microsoft’s online MSDN reference contains a massive collection of information on DirectX and many other things. There is also an extensive set of samples called Windows 8 app samples that are well worth downloading and studying. The entire website is gigantic, but you might like to start by visiting: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh452744.aspx

Beginning DirectX11: This book by Allen Sherrod and Wendy Jones presents similar information to what we have been through in this book. It is only the basics of DirectX11, but it is very well written and informative. It is available online from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-DirectX-11-Game-Programming/dp/1435458958

RasterTek DirectX Tutorials: The website http://www.rastertek.com/ has incredibly useful tutorials on many generations of DirectX, including DirectX 11. It has tutorials organized by topic, for things such as bump mapping, reflection, etc. The code and text is clear and well written. Many online tutorial series do not closely conform to Microsoft’s coding practices, which can quickly lead to horrid debugging episodes. The RasterTek tutorial’s code, on the other hand, is very robust.

 Graphics Gems series: This is a series of four free eBooks available online as PDF documents. The Graphics Gems series covers a large collection of algorithms and short papers on programming graphics. Much of the information is quite old and rather low level, but these algorithms and ideas still constitute the foundations of modern graphics. This stuff is what DirectX is built from. I have yet to find a stable site with downloads for the Graphics Gems series, so I suggest searching for “graphics gems filetype:pdf” using your favorite search engine to find the PDFs.

GPU Gems: This is a series of books from Nvidia. It is similar to the Graphics Gems series, but it is based on more modern hardware and DirectX. The series is available to read online as HTML or you can purchase a printed copy from Nvidia:

https://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems

https://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems-2

https://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems-3

Graphics Programming Black Book: Long before DirectX, 3-D games were being created for hardware that was barely capable of rendering smooth 2-D graphics. Michael Abrash worked with John Carmack on DooM II and the original Quake engine. He also wrote this book that he called Graphics Programming Black Book. The information it contains is very low level, but this book is easily one of the most interesting and informative books ever written on the topic of graphics programming and optimization. It is available for free from many sites including:

 http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-book/184404919

Game Design Secrets of the Sages: Compiled by Marc Saltzman. This is a book on game design more so than programming. The author interviewed hundreds of people in the field of game developers, including some of the biggest names in the industry. The book is the result of these interviews; it contains an incredible amount of rare and useful information. The latest edition is available from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Secrets-Sages-Guide/dp/1566869048

Multimedia Fusion: This is not a book; it is a game making application by a company called the ClickTeam. I have included it as a reference because I think that it is the best way to illustrate the structure of an object-oriented game engine. It requires no programming skills and it can be used to create a variety of different game types. It is not traditionally 3-D. The friendly user interface, the way objects interact, and the event handling system is exactly how an object-oriented game engine should be. There is a free demo and a registered version available from the ClickTeam website:

http://www.clickteam.com/website/world/