Geometry & Shader Basics - Preface

So, I think it was just as we went into the first COVID lockdown here in the UK that I decided I would have a go at wring a book; a technical book about the basics of graphics programming. 

Now, I know I am no authority on the subject, I am just a hobby game developer with very few released titles under my belt, but I have over the years contributed to a few independent games. Also during my time as a Microsoft XNA/DirectX MVP I was involved in the community and even have my name in the credits of a few indie game titles. I have also published a few assets on the Unity store too that are shader (GPU) based. So I have my own working knowledge of the subject and when I was an MVP I had been asked, a few times, to write books by publishers, I just (regretfully) never had the time to dedicate to it.

At this time I was working as a contractor using Unity by day and playing with MonoGame in the evenings. So, I went with MonoGame as the framework for the code base, although, you could just as easily apply the methods and maths to other frameworks or game engines, but MonoGame allows us to dig a little deeper.

My intention was to publish on Amazon Kindel Direct Pubishing. Not sure if I would just do a digital version of the book, or also have a physical print (costs more). I think I got up to just short of one hundred pages just covering the basics of what I know about the topic. As you probably also experienced, life got a bit gnarly during the pandemic and I just got less and less time to work on it and, like a lot of other projects of mine, it slipped into the background, where it has sat until today.

I am going to re produce them again here in the blog, and I hope to then continue on producing a final piece of work giving the reader my knowledge of geometry and shaders, for what that's worth. I am naturally not going to be putting all I have written so far in one post. This will be the preface bit, then I will do a post for each chapter I have. I am going to label the posts accordingly, for example "Geometry & Shader Basics", you can see this post has the label "Geometry & Shader Basics"

In my draft I have a few pages dedicated to why I wrote the book, a bit about me and my background, and my assumptions about the audience. I am not going to include those here, well, just the last bit. The first few chapters cover Visual Studio setup, MonoGame instalation and solutin/project creation. Again, I won't include those bits here in the blog. I have also set up a public git repo that will store all the source, chapter by chapter. At the time of writing this, I am using MonoGame 3.8.1.303. The reop is called GeometryAndShaderBasicsWithMonoGame

So, here we go, starting with the now very short Preface. I hope you find it useful and I don't bore you to tears...

My assumptions about you the reader…

You have some programming experience, with any luck using C#. You have either used MonoGame before or you are just getting into MonoGame and want to understand a bit more about how rendering works. You may have some experience using SpriteBatch to draw textures, but you want to know a bit more about rendering things to the screen, maybe some 3D objects.

This book is not intended to teach you C# or the MonoGame framework, the aim is to cover the basics of creating geometry using MonoGame and then creating and applying custom shaders/effects to it. 

Next Chapter: Geometry, what is it?

As ever, thanks for spending the time here reading my post and I hope my spelling and grammar are not too bad. I know there is not much here content wise, but I hope you find the coming content of some use. Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

I would also like to apologise to my long suffering friend Loz. All he wants is for me to get my miniature painting back log done, and I am terribly slow, and he will just see this blog as another distraction from it, sorry Loz, I love you dude, don't hate me for this...