Advanced 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10.0

Chapter 9

Advanced Direct3D

While I covered a lot of ground in Chapter 8, I really only scratched the surface of Direct3D's total set of functionality. By the end of this chapter, I'll have discussed everything you could ever want to know about texture mapping, along with alpha blending, multitexture effects, and the stencil buffer.

With Direct3D, there eventually comes a crest in the learning curve. At some point you know enough about the API that figuring out the rest is easy. For example, there comes a point when you've been bitten enough by setting the vertex shader parameters and zeroing out structures that you automatically do it. Hopefully, after learning the material in this chapter, you'll be over the hump. When you get there, learning ...