Book Image

Learning Windows 8 Game Development

By : Michael Quandt
Book Image

Learning Windows 8 Game Development

By: Michael Quandt

Overview of this book

With the recent success of a lot of smaller games, game development is quickly becoming a great field to get in to. Mobile and PC games are on the rise, and having a way to create a game for all types of devices without rewriting everything is a huge benefit for the new Windows 8 operating system. In this book, you will learn how to use cutting-edge technologies like DirectX and tools that will make creating a game easy. This book also allows you to make money by selling your games to the world. Learning Windows 8 Game Development teaches you how to create exciting games for tablets and PC on the Windows 8 platform. Make a game, learn the techniques, and use them to make the games you want to play. Learn about graphics, multiplayer options, how to use the Proximity + Socket APIs to add local multiplayer, how to sell the game outright, and In-App Purchases. Learning Windows 8 Game Development guides you from the start of your journey all the way to developing games for Windows by showing you how to develop a game from scratch and sell it in the store.With Learning Windows 8 Game Development, you will learn how to write the code required to set everything up, get some graphics on screen, and then jump into the fun part of adding gameplay to turn a graphics sample into a proper game. From there, you'll look at how to add awesome features to your game like networking, motion controls, and even take advantage of new Windows 8 features like live tiles and sharing to make your players want to challenge their friends and keep playing. This book wraps up by covering the only way a good game can finish development: by shipping the game on the Windows Store. You'll look at the things to remember to make certification painless and some great tips on how to market and sell your game to the public.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Windows 8 Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Textures


Textures store the image data we need to display on the screen. They represent a 2D array of pixels in memory that can be used for many different purposes, as you will see in this book.

Note

The pixels inside a texture are referred to as texels. We use this distinction because through filtering, scaling, and other transformations, we may lose the 1:1 mapping between a texel in the image and a pixel in the output frame buffer.

Textures also take up much of the memory available to a game, making it important that you apply techniques to reduce their size as much as possible when working on memory limited devices such as tablets or phones. Textures are generally stored on the GPU in special memory designed for quick access; however, on some platforms that memory is shared with the system memory, reducing the amount of space you have even further.

Note

GPU refers to Graphics Processing Unit. This is a piece of acceleration hardware that is designed to handle the mathematics required to...