Introducing OpenGL - C# Game Programming: For Serious Game Creation - page 30

Lua is probably the most popular scripting language for game development. It's a
small, easily embedded language that's very expressive. Tao.Lua lets functions
and data pass between the script and C# program. Tao.FreeType is a basic font
package that will convert a free type font to a bitmap. It has a very simple, usable
interface.
The final library Tao provides is FFmpeg. The name comes from MPEG, a video
standard, and FF, which means Fast Forward. It provides a way to play video. If
you wanted to have a cutscene in your game, then this would be a good first stop.
Everything in Tao is totally open source. Most libraries are free to use in a
commercial project, but it's worth checking the license for the specifics. Tao is an
excellent package for the budding game creator to get started with. It's not in the
scope of this topic to investigate all these libraries; instead, we'll just concentrate
on the most important ones. The OpenGL and Tao.Platform.Windows li-
braries are used fromChapter 5 onwards. DevIL is covered in Chapter 6. Chapter 9
covers playing sound with OpenAL and handling gamepad input with SDL. All
the libraries are useful so it's worth taking the time to investigate any of the ones
that sound interesting.
Summary
OpenGL and DirectX3D are the two major industrial graphics libraries in use
today. These graphics libraries are a standardized way to talk to the underlying
graphics hardware. Graphics hardware is usually made from several standard
pieces and is extremely efficient at transforming 3D vertex information to a
2D frame on the screen. This transformation from 3D vertices to a 2D frame is
known as the graphics pipeline. There are two types of graphics pipeline; the
fixed pipeline, which cannot be programmed, and the programmable pipeline,
which allows certain stages of the pipeline to be programmed using shaders.
The Tao Framework is a collection of useful libraries including OpenGL. C# can
make use of the Tao Framework to write games using OpenGL. The Tao Fra-
mework also includes several other libraries useful for game development.
OpenAL, DevIL, and SDL will all be used in this topic to develop a simple side-
scrolling shooter game.