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I've been studying 3D graphics on my own for a while now and I want to get a greater understanding of just how everything works. What I would like to do is to create a simple game without using DirectX or OpenGL. I understand most of the math I believe, but the problem I am running up against is I do not know how to get control of the pixels being displayed in a window.

How do I specify what color I want each pixel in my window to be?

I understand I will probably run into issues with buffers and image shearing and probably terrible efficiency problems, but I want to create my own program so that I could see from the very lowest level, of the high level language, how the rendering process works. I really have no idea where to start though. I've figured out how to output BMPs, but I would like to have a running program spitting out 20+ frames per second. How do I accomplish this?

SoggyPancakes
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You say you want to create some kind of a rendering engine, meaning desinging you own Pipeline and matrice classes. Which you are to use to transform 3D coordinates to 2D points.

When you have got the 2D points you've been looking for. You can use say for instance on windows, you can select a brush and draw you triangle values while coloring them at the same time.

I do not know why you would need Bitmaps, but if you want to practice say Texturing you can also do that yourself although off course on a weak computer this might take your frames per second significantly.

If you aim is to understand how rendering works on the lowest level. This is with no doubt a good practice.

Jt Schwinschwiga

Jt Schwinschwiga
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I'm reading between the lines that you're more interested in having full control over the rendering process from a low level, rather than having a specific interest in how to achieve that on one specific platform.

If that's the case then you will probably get a good bang for your buck looking at a library like SDL which provides you with a frame buffer that you can render to directly but abstracts away a lot of the platform specifics issues. It has been around for quite a while and there are some good tutorials to give you an idea of whether it's the kind of thing you're looking for - see this tutorial and the subsequent one in the same series, which should be enough to get you up and running.

russw_uk
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You could pick a environment that allows you to fill an array with values for pixels and display it as a bitmap. This way you come closest to poking RGB values in video memory. WPF, Silverlight, HTML5/Javascript can do this. If you do not make it full screen these technologies should suffice for now.

In WPF and Silverlight, use the WriteableBitmap.

In HTML5, use the canvas

Then it is up to you to implement the logic to draw lines, circles, bezier curves, 3D projections.

This is a lot of fun and you will learn a lot.

Emond
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