Hey again! While I have programmed graphics before using OpenGL, I'm a complete beginner when it comes to Direct3D. After finding myself some basecode from Andypike and Drunkenhyena, I pretty much blundered my way though the code and ended up adding 32 bit color support (is it normal to have a garphics card support only XRGB and not ARGB?), 32 bit z-buffer, and lost device trapping. Because I have a bad habit of looking forward and getting ahead of myself, after drawing my first triangle I looked on down towards the texturing and multitexturing code examples. To my suprise, I found only tutorials on static texturing: no texture matrix code, no multitexture/multipass code, and no bump-mapping code. After wandering around the internet for a while, I found that most of the online tutorial sites around (with the notable exception of UltimateGameProgramming) mainly deal with the low-level, "This is a polygon", "This is a light" kind of tutorials. The few that do deviate from this format usually - like the MSDN examples - go straight into Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders. My point is that I'm feeling like I'm missing something in the middle, somewhere between texturing and Pixel Shaders. Of course, it's possible that could be because I'm somewhat intimidated by the power and complexity of Shader code and fail to understand them correctly. Can anyone point me to some mid-level tutorials, or if not, to a good Direct3D (preferably DirectX9) book that would make the Direct3D Pipeline make more sense to me?

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Axiverse: Yes and no. I downloaded and installed the DX9 Summer Update 2004 SDK, but upon opening and looking around inside the distribution all I found were articles on Vertex Shaders - I couldn't find any of the old DX8 "this is a polygon" kind of examples/projects. Are they just hidden somewhere in there where I can't find 'em?

AP: Thanks for the support! I'll check out codesampler tonight