Finally, the appendices offer you some useful resources, and the glossary will help you demystify some of the common game developer jargon. A game engine is the reusable, underlying code for a game, along with the collection of tools and utilities used to create the game. Beneath the game engine, there is an even lower level of code. This code is the graphics library . All game programmers use graphics libraries, but not all of them use a commercial graphics library.
Some game programmers prefer to write their own low-level graphics routines.
Writing a graphics library from scratch would definitely be beyond the scope of this book, plus it would not be nearly as interesting as the topics we'll discuss. Therefore, we'll use a commercial graphics library upon which to base our game engine. The library we'll use is called Fastgraph . It was written by my husband, Ted Gruber. This is a fully functional, fully documented version of Fastgraph.