Published on Wednesday, April 20, 2011 6:55:00 PM UTC in
Programming
Edit 2011-12-10: This article is compatible with the final version of Silverlight 5 (5.0.61118.0).
Published on Monday, April 11, 2011 5:33:00 PM UTC in
Programming
In the parts of the series so far, we have looked at individual features of game programming on the phone in an isolated manner. We learned about graphics, animations, input, audio and others, and for each of these samples, we created new empty game projects and put the logic in the main game screen and few helper classes. In a real world scenario, your game will combine various different aspects and features, and you naturally would want to structure your game a lot more. Once again some of these details are also subject to restrictions given by the certification requirements. In this article, we will take a look at the concept of "places" and game screens that can be used to create a navigational structure for your game. As always the article includes full source code. You can read it over at Silverlight Show.
Published on Friday, April 1, 2011 11:47:00 AM UTC in
Programming
No, this is not an April Fools' joke :). As announced in the post where I explained how I created and optimized the dynamic trees of my Eco Contest 2011 entry "Do you twig?", I'm releasing the full source code of the project here. The entry was chosen for the first runner-up award by the judges, which I was and still am very happy about. In the following, I explain some details of the application. You can find the source code at the end of the post.
Published on Friday, March 25, 2011 1:59:00 PM UTC in
Programming
What would a game be without sound effects and music? Naturally Windows Phone 7 offers enough possibilities to add a rich acoustic experience to your apps and games. However, due to the nature of the device, there are some things to keep in mind. Even with the lack of real multi-tasking, you don't have the whole platform at your disposal exclusively. The user may already listen to music from the media library when they start your game, for example. In addition, a mobile device may also be used in an environment where noise is not welcome. These are things you have to consider when you add audio to your game. Some of these aspects are even regulated in the certification requirements for Windows Phone 7 applications and are a potential source for certification failure if implemented incorrectly. In my new article, I'll take a look at how audio can be integrated in your games and what the implications are for playing sounds and music in Silverlight and XNA. As always, source code for the discussed samples is available for download.
Published on Saturday, March 19, 2011 12:18:00 PM UTC in
Programming
A few days ago, Google has released a first beta version of an AdMob SDK for Windows Phone 7. People seem to be interested in that especially outside the U.S., because at the moment, Microsoft's own Advertising program is only available to developers based in the United States. Here is a short walk-through of how to use the AdMob SDK in your app and what you can expect from it at the moment.
Published on Thursday, March 17, 2011 12:38:00 AM UTC in
Programming
In my extensive post about how you can upload images to an SQL database from your Silverlight client (read it here), I mentioned some potential problems with the amount of data that is being uploaded. The issue arises because when you load an (compressed) image from disk, it is converted to an uncompressed bitmap in memory. Storing that image in your database can result in data that in extreme cases can be up to 100x or even more bigger than the original image. In this post, I'll show you how you can improve the code to achieve a much better result with regards to that.
Published on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 4:54:00 PM UTC in
Programming
Detection of and reaction to collisions is a very fundamental element in games. As soon as it has moving components of some sort, it is likely that collisions are of concern. For example, the player character may collide with the scenery of the game. The player may also collide with other characters (enemies, monsters etc.), and of course many games work with projectiles that can hit various other parts on the game screen. But what exactly are collisions in a game, and what are good ways to detect and handle them? This article tries to give answers with several samples and explanations. The full source code is included for download.
Published on Wednesday, March 9, 2011 3:18:00 PM UTC in
Programming
Some days ago someone in the Silverlight forums asked about how an auto-complete box that highlights the matched parts of potential hits could be made. Something like:
Published on Wednesday, March 9, 2011 3:15:00 PM UTC in
Programming
In the last article we learned about touch input and gestures, which probably is the first choice for user input in most games on the phone. However, the hardware of Windows Phone 7 devices offer more possibilities in the form of additional sensors that can be used for input, in particular the accelerometer. For example, Microsoft's game "Kombo" that was available on the phone very early proved that using the accelerometer as primary input for a game is very well possible (give it a try, it's free). In this part of the series we will learn how you can use this type of data for input and take a peek at advanced topics and further resources. As always, the source code of all samples is available for download.
Published on Sunday, March 6, 2011 11:39:00 PM UTC in
Programming
In the Silverlight forums people frequently ask for help with storing images in their databases using RIA Services. Even though this looks like a pretty common thing to do, it is far from being straight forward, and searching the web does not seem to produce any good results (or I'm just doing it wrong). So I decided to write this quick walk-through of how to do that. This post describes all steps and possible pitfalls to create a complete application for this from scratch, from the database to the UI.
