Before you begin your adventure into the amazing world of game programming, you will have to have a good understanding of the basics, including the language you program in.  You will have to be very familiar with Win32, the foundation on which Windows programming rests.  This tutorial will get you started from basic C++ programming into creating a window for your game.

Direct3D is among the most complex SDKs around.  But never fear!  It is actually very easy to learn!  In this section we're going to break through the biggest obstacles to learning Direct3D.  We'll start with the concepts underlying Direct3D, and then we'll apply them by creating a simple window running Direct3D.

In the last lesson of Getting Started where we rendered a single triangle, we worked with this mysterious shader file.  You may have wondered how it was written (actually, you most likely wondered).  You may have dreamed of one day being so uber that you could write them on your own.  Well I have a secret.  Aside from the fact that, well, C++ programmers are already uber by just knowing C++, writing shaders isn't actually that difficult.  A few quick lessons and you'll be writing your very own special effects.

Once you've fiddled with the most fundamental Direct3D code, it's time to get into the real fun.  In here we'll discuss the basics of how 3D rendering works, and you'll learn to render objects in a 3D world.  You'll also learn how to build simple models from vertices, and how to make things look distant using a virtual camera.

So we know a little bit about shaders now.  We can write them, we can make them do things, we can create lights with them, we can render textures with them.  These shaders do a very good job of controlling the programmable steps of the pipeline.  But what of the fixed steps?  What of the hardware-only portions of the pipeline?  These are controlled by device states, and this tutorial will cover them in detail.