The view
A view is a concept that allows us to select the part of our world we want to see. You can imagine a view to work like an image recording device. Essentially, every game programmer needs to understand views in depth, simply because every graphical game will require that knowledge to be applied directly. Sometimes it is called view, camera, or differently. Be it a two-dimensional or three-dimensional simulation, this concept will always be present.
Talking about graphics in two dimensions, we can describe a view as a rectangle that represents the subset of our world that we want to see at a particular time.
Such a simple and yet powerful concept gives us the possibility to perform many interesting tasks, such as an animated camera following the player around, a spy camera that allows us to take a peek at a remote location, a combination of two views to create a split-screen multiplayer experience, as well as many other applications.
It is not hard to grasp the power of the view; you...
