There are several benefits to premium membership, the most noteworthy of which are
the two additional tutorials. Another benefit is that it is always growing
with more and more content, so that what you pay for now, will soon be more than what you
see below.
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The Game Development Tutorial gives a brief overview of using C++ to organize the
code for your game. Games can be very complex, and an unexperienced programmer
can easily become overwhelmed with his code. The tutorial provides a means
out of all that mess.
How to organize your code across multiple files.
How to handle that annoying alt-tab bug! (if you don't know what this is, alt-tab
out of a DirectX program from this tutorial and back in again)
How to establish a "logic" engine.
How to build a simple 2D game engine.
How to upgrade that game engine to 3D.
In this tutorial you will build three game engines, two of which will be built into
actual games, Pong and Tetris 3D.
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The Advanced Effects Tutorial will be getting into the very best special effects
seen in games today. So far, only some of the lessons have been written, so
it does not live up to this yet. However, they will all be written in a few
months time.
So far, it introduces the language HLSL (High-Level Shader Language) and a few basic
things you can do with it. There is also a lesson on how to put the basics
into actual special effects, such as shiny surfaces and fog.
In the coming weeks, lessons will appear on Pixel Shaders, a powerful system in
DirectX capable of rendering very realistic graphics.
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Even more advanced than the High Level Shader Language is the concept of a particle
engine. Particle engines have been in use since very early games to create
effects such as fire and explosions.
The Particle Engines Tutorial takes you through the basic concept of how particle
engines work, to how to make such things as glowing balls and actual fire in a live
3D environment.
This tutorial teaches you how to make your own particle engines, and how
to play with them and tweak them to fit your own game.
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Once you have created a wonderful graphics engine, written a beautiful design document,
and made plenty of gorgeous models, there is still one more matter to attend to.
You are in a world where single-player games are no longer considered mainstream.
Sure, there are single-player titles, but none of them do as well as some of the
better online games.
This tutorial will give you a whirlwind tour of building multiplayer games.
It will ground you in the basics of the Winsock API and how to use it with enough
efficiency and accuracy to build a game.
This tutorial is still under construction, but already takes you through the building
of a simple chat program and sending game data from one location to another. The others are coming soon.
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As mentioned before, Premium membership is always growing, and more lessons get
posted every once in a while. Currently, I am expanding the DirectX 10 tutorial
with an extention to the basics tutorial, and at the same time and working to revise
the Multiplayer tutorial.
The upcoming DirectX 10 tutorials will feature meshes, advanced lighting, special
effects, and more.
The upcoming DirectX 9 tutorials will feature how to write games for the Xbox platform.
