Rendering Basics

I understand your double-take upon reading this chapter title. After all, this is supposed to be a book that teaches advanced 2D graphics programming, right? Yes, indeed it is. But today it’s a given that even a retro-style 2D game may have some 3D features. For instance, you can do some really nice special effects with shaders in a pseudo-2D game—that is, an essentially 3D game played in a 2D orientation with only width and height represented (and lacking the third dimension of depth). A good example of this sort of game is Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, which is an advanced 3D game with a flat board-game style orientation. The simple fact is that we can’t do any advanced 2D rendering (the goal of the book) without at least touching upon the subject of 3D rendering first. After all, the 2D output goes through the 3D system with a fixed camera angle.