5Game Graphics

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A modern video game is like a modern movie—a big production that requires expertise in many different technical areas. Teams of programmers develop code for audio, artificial intelligence, network connectivity, and so on. Still, the first thing you notice about a video game is the graphics.

Early video game systems like the Atari 2600 and Sega Genesis relied on premade bitmap graphics; that is, there was no rendering, not even the 2D rendering described in the previous chapter. Instead, if a video game needed to show the game’s hero walking, an artist would draw several bitmaps to be shown in a repeating sequence. Backgrounds, too, ...

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