OTHER BITS AND PIECES

There are tons of other bits and pieces to coding games, many of which you’ll discover throughout this book. These things defy classification, but they are every bit as important to games as a good random number generator.

Beyond that, you’ll find some things important to game coding such as how to convince Microsoft Windows to become a good platform for your game—a more difficult task than you’d think. Microsoft makes almost all of its income from the sales of business software like Microsoft Office, and the operating system reflects that. Sure, DirectX is supposed to be the hard-core interface for game coders, but you’ll find that it’s something of a black sheep even within Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, it works and works surprisingly well, but you can’t ever forget that you are forcing a primarily business software platform to become a game platform, and sometimes you’ll run into dead-ends.