Computer graphics programming is considered to be one of the hardest subjects to cover, as it involves complex mathematics, programming, and graphics concepts that are intimidating to the average developer. Also, with alternative game engines available, such as Unity and Unreal, it is important to understand graphics programming, as it is a lot easier to make 2D or 3D games using these more sophisticated game engines. These engines also use some rendering APIs, such as OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D, and Metal, to draw objects in a scene, and the graphics engine in a game engine constitutes more than 50% of it. Therefore, it is imperative to have some knowledge about graphics programming and graphics APIs.
The objective of this book is to break down this complex subject into bite-sized chunks to make it easy to understand. So, we will start with the basic concepts that are required to understand the math, programming, and graphics basics.
In the next section of the book, we will create a 2D game, initially with Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML), which covers the basics that are required to create any game, and with which you can make any game with the utmost ease, without worrying about how a game object is drawn. We will be using SFML just to draw our game objects.
In the next part of the book, we will see how game objects get presented onscreen using OpenGL. OpenGL is a high-level Graphics API that enables us to get something rendered to a scene quickly. A simple sprite created in SFML goes through a lot of steps before actually getting drawn on the screen. We will see how a simple image gets loaded and gets displayed on the screen and what steps are required to do so. But that is just the start. We will see how to add 3D physics to the game and develop a physics-based game from the ground up. Finally, we will add some lighting to make the scene a little more interesting.
With that knowledge of OpenGL, we will dive further into graphics programming and see how Vulkan works. Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL and is a low-level, verbose graphics API. OpenGL is a high-level graphics API that hides a lot of inner workings. With Vulkan, you have complete access to the GPU, and with the Vulkan graphics API, we will learn how to render our game objects.