Welcome to my software development site. Here you will find some programs I have written (executables & source code), development tools, and great links to other development sites. By the way SoftLight is the name of my one-man software company.
Use the navigation buttons to the left to find your way around the site.
Background & areas of interest:
Game programming - most of the resources you will find on this site relate in some way to game programming. More specifically the game related material on this site relates to development of Win32 applications that make use of Microsoft's Direct X software development kit (SDK). I believe game programming is one of the most changing areas of software development. Games usually place a higher demand on a computer than do most other programs, it is essential that they execute as fast as possible to achieve smooth graphics. Because of this professional quality games are often partially coded in assembly language and work closely with graphics and IO hardware. Games also deal with difficult programming task like animation and need to implement physics, trigonometry and other advanced subjects. You will find game programming to be very frustrating if you are not at least a intermediate level programmer with a full working knowledge of the C/C++ programming language.
Direct X - is an overall name given to the (SDK) that is broken down into many specialized components. The main components are: DirectDraw, Direct3D RM, Direct3D IM, DirectSound, DirectPlay and DirectMusic as of version 7. I'm not going to go into detail about these components here but you can download the SDK from Microsoft for free, it comes with lots of source code, documentation and tutorials, check out my links page. Direct X is for Win32 programs ONLY, that means Win 95 and up. There are still lots of games written for DOS but Direct X is really taking over. If you want to be a serious game programmer you need to know Direct X in and out. There are many books out there that do just that. With the newer versions, you can access Direct X with visual basic but all my code here is in C/C++.
MFC - The Microsoft Foundation Classes is a tool that comes with Microsoft's line of Visual C++ development products. It is designed to ease the development of Win32 applications. For most of my applications here I chose to use MFC rather that the standard Win32 SDK. This means the code here will not compile or run with out it.
This site was designed and maintained by
Tony McCall (Copyright 2000) - Questions and comments welcome: sssmoker@hotmail.com
Last Update: 12/06/00