Summary

This chapter has taken forever, huh? There's simply too much material to cover, so I've tried to give you just the most important data on a wide variety of topics. However, don't despair—you're going to hit all this polygon stuff again when you get to 3D in Volume II, so you'll be expert when that's said and done.

Think of this chapter as a primer on a number of topics: rasterization, clipping, line drawing, matrices, collision detection, timing, scrolling, isometric engines, and more. Sometimes you have to take a top-down approach and then follow it up with a bottom-up approach later. Game programming is like that. Anyway, enough philosophy. Now that you have a full bitmap and polygon library, you can do some real damage with the demos during the remaining chapters. And make sure to check out all 16-bit versions of each demo to get familiar with using the 16-bit code. Now, let's have some fun…