Well, I've decided that the next project won't have anything to do with DirectXTutorial.  For a while now, a group of us have been working on our own PC multiplayer game, and I've decided I'm going to finish it before I pick up another tutorial.

The game is called Etherwar (ether refering to space) and is a sort of combination between a multiplayer first-person shooter and a flight simulator.  It has all the properties of your typical flight simulator, with the additional feature of high-action combat.  So far playing it has been fun and addicting, even though the game is only half-constructed.  Unfortunately, the artwork is practically non-existant at this point, so I can't place any real screenshots.  They would only make you yawn.

Anyhow, I thought I would let you know about this and invite you to sign up for the beta test.  Before I can set up the servers for the game, I want to get an idea of how may people will play in the beta.  If you're interested, or merely curious, go ahead and sign up here.

I don't want to give an estimate of when the beta will be available, because I could be horribly wrong, so for now, it's definitely not coming this month.  It might come the next month.  It might take longer.  We'll see.  I promise if it takes too long I'll take a break from it and write more tutorials.

The Particle Engines Tutorial is now online!  This one is cool.  At the end you get to make 3D fire.  I'm going to throw on a few extra lessons which teach some of the effects you can make, such as explosions, waterfalls, smoke trails, etc.  It'll be cool.

I'm going to stop writing for a while and catch up on some of the emails I haven't read.  I can't possibly reply to all of them, but I promise you I will read all of them.

Next project to be announced soon.

So yes, I said the Particle Engine Tutorial would be online in May, and here it is, June 1st, with no promise kept.  But don't worry, I was only slightly delayed.  It should be online in the next couple of days.  I'm going for Tuesday.

Some people started asking me what tutorial was coming next, so I thought I would issue the answer broadly.  Particle engines won the vote, and multiplayer programming came in a close second.  I guess both are popular, so I'll have to get those out.

Recently I've been writing the Particle Engine tutorial, and I think it's coming along nicely.  I'm done with most of the lessons, and it should be ready sometime in May.

Okay, I'm up for another writing spree.  What do you want to read about?  Here's what I'm interested in writing about:

Pixel Shaders
Multiplayer Programming
Particle Engines
DirectX Audio

Email me your thoughts.

Let's just say that January is not my favorite month of the year.  It's sort of like Garfield and Mondays.  I don't know what it is exactly, but January just seems to go bad for me.  This one was particularly frustrating.  I had a few work and family emergecies happen all at once and my schedule quickly became overloaded.

But now it's February, which has been a sort of month of relief in the past few years.  Hopefully I won't have to worry about any of the above for a while.  My schedule is slightly more under control these days and I can focus back on the tutorial.  Call me superstitious, but I'll take what reassurance I can get. :P

I see I never replaced the message I put up over a month ago about how lesson 5 of the Advanced Effects Tutorial would be up "any day now".  Now it really should be up any day now.  I apologize for not getting it up as promised.

Also, while I didn't get a chance to answer very many of the emails you guys wrote me, I did read them all.  As soon as I get the over-delayed lesson online I'll start answering them.

Here's to a decent February!

Welcome Advanced Effects!  I've created the first three lessons of this tutorial and I've already got the next few in the making.  If you are a Premium member, go check these out.

I realize that I said I was going to put up the first four.  I decided last night that I didn't like how the fourth lesson turned out, so I'm rewriting that one from scratch.  Hopefully it will turn out better than it did on its first draft.

Because of the Advanced Effects Tutorial, I've raised the price of Premium membership to $25.00.  This is not only for Advanced Effects, but for additional things coming to members in the near future!

On December 1st, I'm going to put the first four of the Advanced Effects lessons online for premium members.  When that happens, the price of premium membership will also go up.  I want to give you a chance before then to buy your membership at its current price.

The Advanced Effects Tutorial will start with just basic HLSL lessons, and will soon go through advanced graphics such as per-pixel lighting, various reflective materials, and also shadows.

Due to several requests, I'm now allowing anyone who has bought one of the CDs previously on sale to sign up for DirectXTutorial Premium for free.  All you will need is your Update Key which was issued with the CD.

If you already signed up for DirectXTutorial Premium, and you bought a CD earlier, drop me an email.

If you have tried to purchase the DirectXTutorial CD from Amazon recently, you may have noticed that it has been out of stock.  I'm not going to be making any more of them, but instead I am going to place all of its contents online.

I'm doing this for two reasons.  First, so that you don't have to pay for printing and shipping costs.  Second, so that you aren't inconvenienced by a CD (which is really rather unacceptable in this Web 2.0 age).

If you haven't guessed, I'm going to call this new service DirectXTutorial Premium.  Currently, only the Game Development Tutorial is online, but I am already creating new tutorials for it.  There is a tutorial on HLSL in the works and possibly a couple others on game engine programming, covering topics such as advanced physics and artificial intelligence.  DirectX 10 is just around the corner as well.

So if you're interested in these topics, feel free to sign up.  Signing up costs $15, rather than what the CD used to cost ($39 plus shipping).  If not, the rest of the website is still available as is.

Enjoy!

Took me long enough, but the DirectX Glossary is now online.  I guess you could say it is in "beta", as I'm still collecting words to put in. Anytime you search for a word and it isn't found, I'll get notified, and will add it as soon as possible.

Check it out if you're interested.

Today is the first day the Game Development Tutorial is officially available!  You can now buy it online at Amazon.com.  The CD-ROM you will get contains the entire website, plus additional articles and, of course, the Game Development Tutorial.  Go through this tutorial, and you will be making games in no time!

You may also notice a new change to the website.  All the tutorials now contain Next/Previous links for easier browsing in between the lessons.

As another major addition, the Game Display Tutorial has been upgraded.  It now has five full lessons, including the drawing of text and how to build a good-looking game display.  If you've been doing any of the Game Display lessons, you'll enjoy these two as well.

More trinkets to come soon!

There was a slight and unexpected delay in the CD's production, so shipping will begin on the 15th, instead of the 10th.

• How to use multiple source files and create your own header files.
• 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 and back in again)
• How to catch errors that can crash your game 
• How to establish a "logic" engine.
• How to build a simple 2D game engine.
• How to upgrade that game engine to 3D.

So anyhow, that's what I've been working on for the last month and a half, and that's why you still don't see the DirectX 10 tutorial available.  DirectX 10 could be my next project.  However, I've also recieved requests for advanced gaming techniques (which this CD does not quite cover).  It seems to be about fifty-fifty between DirectX 10 and Advanced Engine Techniques for DirectX 9, so I'm undecided as to what you all want.  Only you can decide that now.  E-mail me and set your vote!

Just added another lesson to the Game Display Tutorial. This one is on animation, and how to do it with sprites.

I started working on this tutorial clear back in August last year.  I've finally put the finishing touches on it, and I will be releasing it lesson by lesson over the next week or two.

For now, there are two.  They cover how to draw basic 2D graphics, and a few effects that can be done with them.  Have a look through them.

It is expected that you understand textures, or at least, texture loading functions.  These can be studied in the Direct3D Basics tutorial.

Anyhow, enjoy, and check back soon for the others.

Based entirely on a whim, I decided to try my hand at blogging.  I've just created a new blog I've dubbed Codename Ramblog.  In it I plan to discuss game programming and matters arising from it.  I've got one initial post so far, but more is to come.

I've just relocated the website to DirectXTutorial.com.  This is the first in a series of major upgrades I'm planning for the whole tutorial.

At first glance, you won't see much change.  However, I've made a large number of small changes and corrections to the site, as well as a few major ones here and there.

In addition to the routine updates, I've got some new features coming up very soon (not necessarily in the given order):

1.  A tutorial on 2D graphics and game displays.
2.  A glossary of DirectX and game programming.
3.  New Mesh lessons.
4.  New Win32 lessons.
5.  A feature to switch between languages (starting with C#).
6.  A printer-friendly version of each page.
7.  DirectX 10!

Still more will be coming, but I'll let you in on that later.  For now, look around and see all the changes.

WWWWWOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!

I believe I just encountered the worst customer service in existence!

Now, after all this time, I am FINALLY going to relocate the website!  Look for it any day now.... >:(

I'll soon be relocating the website to a new hosting service and perhaps a new domain name...

However, don't worry. Everything will work as it used to. But if you see a few changes to the site, realize that there isn't actually anything wrong.

It has definitely been a while since I've worked on this site! As you can see below, it seems to have ground to a halt almost five months ago.

Well, it's time to get it going again! More tutorials! More features! DirectX 10! A Q&A forum perhaps? Yes, these are all coming. You'll start hearing more from me on these topics in the following weeks, and, in a short while, the tutorials and features themselves will start appearing.

It'll be soon now. Very soon now.

New lesson on color-keys.  Check it out in the Direct3D Basics tutorial.

This is the last lesson in the Direct3D Basics tutorial that I am going to make in a while.  I'm going to be working more on creating new tutorials as features as mentioned in the About DirectTutorial section.  The first one will be the Game Display tutorial, and I will build four or so lessons before moving on to the next one, the Game Development tutorial!

I'm personally very excited about this one.  I've been looking over the Internet and I haven't found any tutorials that cover all of what I want to put in here.  I think you'll like it a lot.

Keep on checking back!  The best is yet to come!

For those of you at the end of the tutorial now, there is another one waiting.  Textured meshes!  The other meshes made so far are boring, I must say.  (Although, I have seen a modern game that uses no textures at all!)

I think I've got my pace figured out.  Under normal circumstances I can create a good tutorial in about a week and a half (including time to catch up on e-mails).  If I put out a tutorial every other week, I will still have time for other things.  Perfect.  You'll see another one on this day in two weeks.

But for now, enjoy!

I'd like to know what's next.  You would think, of course, that if anyone knew, I would.  I have my own personal plans as to what tutorials will be made in the upcoming months, but I want to know what you want.

But, there's a bit more to that.

First, I want to know what lesson's you've done so far (if any).  I want to know how easy for you they were, how much they filled your expectations, and if they were hard, I want to know what was hard about them.

Second, I want to know if there is any part of DirectX I covered that you would like to get more information on.  You may or may not want to answer this question.  I don't mind, really.

Third, I want to know what language you use to program DirectX.  For the most of you, I will assume it is C++ (because this tutorial is in C++).  I also want to know if you would rather program in a different language, such as C# or Visual Basic.  Also tell me what version of what compiler you are using, plan to use, etc.

Fourth, I want to know what else you want to know about DirectX and game programming.  There is a vast amount of information, and that information is enough to fill many college educations.  It is virtually impossible to know it all, and literally impossible to teach it all.  So I want to know what specific subjects you want to know about.  This could be anything from DirectX to OpenGL to physics to AI, from 3D graphics art to creating sound effects, to hiring game programmers, to marketing your game, to getting money out of games, to whatever you want!

Fifth, I want to know what kind of games you want to build.  Roll-playing games?  First-person shooters?  Real-time strategy games?  Top-down shooters?  Anything.  Let me know, and let me know anything you are concerned about having to learn to accomplish that, whether or not you think I can help you with it.

Last, I want to know if there is anything else you want to tell me about this website and where it should go in the future.  I care that this site meets your expectations and that you succeed in your game development ideas.

Of course, you don't have to say all of that.  Answer any question you want to answer.  Answer two, answer five, answer them all, answer one.  Answer to your heart's desire, and no further.  To answer, answer here.

Well, I didn't manage to pull off the whole one-lesson-per-day idea.  Alas, it was inevitable.

I've been working hard over the last week to put together a new tutorial.  Before, I was planning on having all the lessons involving meshes be a part of the Direct3D tutorial.  Now, I've decided to split it all up.  There is now the Direct3D Basics tutorial, which covers Direct3D initialization, basic geometry, textures, lighting and so forth.  There is also a new Direct3D Meshes tutorial, which contains everything having to do with meshes.

At this point, I'm planning on putting six lessons in this new tutorial, but I might put more.  Maybe less, who knows?  But for now, there are two.  There is the one that was there before, "Using Basic Meshes", and there is a new one called "Loading Meshes from X Files", which covers how to load 3D models that were built in 3D modeling programs such as 3D Studio Max or Maya.

There is also another lesson called "More on Lighting", which is in the Direct3D Basics tutorial.  It covers what it says, more on lighting.  Specifically, it goes over point lights and spot lights.

Basic Lighting and Basic Meshes.

I'm on a spree.  I did two lessons in one day.  Admittedly, I had the day off today, but as long as I'm on a spree, why not say I'll make another lesson tomorrow?  Two perhaps?

No, I doubt that, but hopefully I'll be able to start churning out lessons day after day.  We'll see how well I do at that.

As promised, I'm producing lessons for topics more advanced than simple transforms.  I've added a new lesson to the Direct3D tutorial on how to do basic textures.  This is the first of two (or maybe three) lessons on this.  Of course, if I get carried away I might just make a whole new sub-tutorial just on textures and what you can do with them.

What can I say, I guess I'm very thorough about some things.  Enjoy.

This is it!  DirectTutorial officially begins, and with it begins three tutorials: a basics tutorial to cover Windows programming and various techniques done using the Windows programming, a Direct3D tutorial, covering from the very beginning to creating 3D models (and I'm working on four more lessons for that tutorial right now), and a DirectInput tutorial, covering the keyboard and mouse, and soon to cover joysticks and other devices.

Take note that none of these tutorials are as big as they will soon become.  Check out the About DirectTutorial section to see what's coming up in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy what is here now, which is a series of very easy tutorials that walk you through the basics of DirectX.