(The term 'pixel' is often used interchangeably between the physical pixels that comprise the display and the addressable memory elements used to hold the color and alpha values of the pixels before they are sent to the display.) The raster is treated by APIs as a rectangular grid of pixel elements, which often has a 1:1 correspondence with the physical pixel grid of a display. A pixel is a single point on a raster display, and has its own (x, y) coordinate pair indicating its location on the display. Here are a few of the basic concepts you should be familiar with when starting 2D graphics development. There is a much greater variety of screen resolutions and graphics hardware available, and your 2D graphics engine must be able to support them without a significant change in fidelity. In DirectX, 2D graphics are part of the 3D pipeline. Concepts at a glanceīefore the advent of modern 3D graphics and the hardware that supports it, games were primarily 2D, and many of their graphics techniques involved moving blocks of memory around - usually arrays of color data that would be translated or transformed to pixels on the screen in a 1:1 fashion. The most effective approach when creating 2D games, though, is to use elements from both libraries, and that's the way we will approach 2D graphics development in this topic. With that in mind, it still provides a powerful and performant set of classes and methods for creating game graphics as well, especially when creating game overlays, interfaces, and heads-up displays (HUDs) - or for creating a variety of 2D games, from simple to reasonably detailed. Direct2D is a set of APIs that primarily target user interfaces and apps that require support for drawing primitives (such as circles, lines, and flat polygon shapes). Many of the more useful classes for 2D game development are in Direct3D, such as the Sprite class.

You can develop 2D gaming graphics in DirectX using either Direct2D or Direct3D, or some combination. If you are new to gaming, a 2D game is a great place to start, and 2D graphics development can be a good place for you to get a handle on DirectX. They sometimes use 3D graphics techniques to create their visual components, and they are generally simpler to develop. More generally, they don't use a z-coordinate in the way a 3D game might, since the game play is usually confined to the x-y plane. We discuss the use of 2D bitmap graphics and effects, and how to use them in your game.ĢD graphics are a subset of 3D graphics that deal with 2D primitives or bitmaps.

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