About

“It is still magic even when you know how it is done” ,Terry Pratchett

Why Toymaker?

I see the modern day toy as the computer game and those that create them as the toy makers. Today, as it was in the past, it is a highly skilled and highly creative job.

I hope this site will be an inspiration and help to those who wish to learn how to write computer games.

So how did this site come about?

I used to work as a games programmer (last game was Emperor Battle for Dune published by Westwood Studios) and after some years changed careers and became a lecturer in games programming at the University of Teesside. My long term aim is to get all this games programming knowledge out of my head and on to this site!

If you are seriously interested in a career in games you should consider joining us and studying computer games programming. The University web site is: www.tees.ac.uk. For specific details of the games courses see this page: Animation & Computer Games.

Why adverts?

I do not want to make a profit from this site but it does cost me money for hosting etc. hence the adverts at the top of most pages. I will never have any pop up adverts and hopefully the ones I have will be fairly unobtrusive.

Hosting

When looking for a host for this website I spent many hours comparing offers and features. I finally settled on Powweb as they provided a large bandwidth, all the features (CGI, SQL etc.), were cheap and were well recommended. This was a very successful choice and I would not hesitate to recommend them to others. Here is a link box to their site:

Toymaker has existed since June 28th 2004

Keith Ditchburn

To link to this site you can use this image:

If you would like to help maintain the site a donation would be very welcome (or why not click on a sponsor’s link, you may also find something of interest):

Toymaker is a site aimed at those wishing to learn to program video games. It is aimed mainly at the beginner to intermediate games programmer. Notes and FAQs use DirectX 9 and C++. Notes start from scratch and cover getting a basic Windows API application up and running, initialising and setting up Direct3D and then on to 2D and 3D rendering. The 2D area contains notes on using the D3DX sprite interfaces to render sprites to the screen and how to load a texture along with displaying text. The 3D area is the most extensive area of this site and covers the render loop, Z buffer, FVF, primitives, matrices, camera, 3D model loading and animation using .x files, techniques such as collisions, terrain rendering, skybox, camera, picking etc. Other areas of the site include notes on using DirectInput to record key presses, DirectShow to play back video (.avi) and music files (.mp3) and DirectSound. In addition to these notes there are many pages of answers to common questions and problems faced by the new games programmer, such as solving invisible geometry, how to debug a DirectX application, time issues, loading and accessing texture data etc. Toymaker is owned and all material is copyright © Keith Ditchburn unless stated otherwise. If I have inadvertently used something of yours that I should not have please let me know immediately and I will rectify the situation.

© 2004-2008 Keith Ditchburn