To say that the graphical imagery in video games is very important to the games industry is a bit of an understatement. The graphics in games are so important that they often can make or break a game's success. It is true that all other aspects of a game are important, but the visuals are at times the main selling point along with game play, brand recognition, and so forth. This has been true for a long time in the games industry, where 3D games have been known for their visuals.

In this book, we will examine many graphical techniques that are used in the games industry to create cutting-edge, modern applications. The graphics used in games are real-time computer graphics. This means a lot of the information discussed in this book also applies to other graphical-related industries that use either real-time or non-real-time graphics, but our focus will be primarily on video games. Since this book focuses on game graphics, we will examine many different real-time techniques as well as some non-real-time techniques that can be preprocessed and used in games, which is very common in video games today.

By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have a firm understanding of many of the more popular effects and techniques used in  modern video games and how to implement them. This book discusses alot of theory and makes heavy use of both pseudo code and illustrations to help make it easier for you to learn the information regardless of what programming language, graphical tools, and so on you choose to use. There will also be С++ code samples throughout this book, but the information provided is generally not specific to any one language or tool.