Silverlight Games 101

Never enough time...

It seems like there is never enough time for everything and I have had my share of juggling to do, and one of the things that has suffered is new game tutorials here. I will be getting back to these hopefully in the not too distant future but there was something even more neglected that I need to take care of first.

My original beginning game programming blog called XNA 101 .Net was originally written against XNA 1.0 beta and release, and hasn't been updated for the new releases. With the release of XNA 3.0 beta, it was a good time to finally get these up to date. I also wanted to get off of Windows Live Spaces for that blog, it was too limiting in its extensions and the notification system was flaky at best. So I'm pleased to announce that I have started porting the old tutorials in that blog to XNA 3.0 Beta and they are available here:

http://www.bluerosegames.com/xna101

and the RSS feed is at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/xna101

Some of the concepts covered there also apply to Silverlight, and if you're interested in doing games in Silverlight that also can work in XNA, I hope to cover some of that in the future, and as I go through updating the series I will make changes that will make that transition easier.

New CodePlex project for text effects in Silverlight 2 RC0

I have created a new control called a PathTextBlock that lets you draw outlined text and allows you to distort the text. It started out as a need I had to draw outlined text, and then I saw a few people asking for drawing along a curve, etc. and figured I could create a control to do both.

How it works is that the font file is converted to a XML representation of the font which contains the Path data, and then the Path object is used in Silverlight to render the text. You can also apply transforms to the text and create your own transforms.

I'm making the code available free through CodePlex under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL).

You can see more about the PathTextBlock project here:

http://www.codeplex.com/sltext

If you create something cool with it please let me know, I'd love to see it.

3D in Silverlight? How about an FPS?

This falls in the file of how the heck did they do that? Or even, is this a hoax? Innoveware is working on porting Quake to Silverlight. They only have a video up right now, and I won't 100% believe it until I can run it myself, but it's pretty impressive:

http://www.innoveware.com/

Hopefully we'll get some information about their techniques but this looks about as good as anything I've seen online.

Silverlight Sports Game Contest Results

The TeamZone Sports Silverlight Sports Game Contest is over, and the judges have weighed in. We had some great entries but could only pick 3, so here they are:

First Place: Hook Shot by Andy Beaulieu

Second Place: Ball Blocks by Matt Casto

Third Place: John Brummel University's Blunderbuss Olympics Vol. 1 by David Sushil

You can check out the winners and all of the entries here:

http://www.teamzonesports.com/silverlightgamecontest

A much cleaner Game Loop in Silverlight 2 RC0

Silverlight 2 RC0 is now available. See the details here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/25/silverlight-2-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

They've made it much easier to do a game loop now with a new event that has been added. This event fires before the rendering of each frame. So now you don't need an empty Storyboard or a DispatcherTimer. Let's see how we can animate a rectangle, here's the page.xaml:

<UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication34.Page"

    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 

    Width="400" Height="300">

    <Canvas x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">

        <Rectangle x:Name="rect" Fill="Red" Width="50" Height="50"/>

    </Canvas>

</UserControl>

Then for the game loop, all you need to do is something like the following:

public partial class Page : UserControl

{

    double x = 0;

    public Page()

    {

        InitializeComponent();

        CompositionTarget.Rendering += new EventHandler(CompositionTarget_Rendering);

    }

    void CompositionTarget_Rendering(object sender, EventArgs e)

    {

        x+=.3;

        rect.SetValue(Canvas.LeftProperty, x);

    }

}

You can then add things like elapsed time between renders, etc. I'll follow up with a post on converting the game loop logic covered before to use this method.

Silverlight Sports Game Contest deadline tonight

I can't believe it's already here, but we're reaching the deadline for submissions in the TeamZone Sports Silverlight game contest. If you've been working on a game, make sure it's submitted by Midnight Eastern time on Monday September 8.

Submission instructions here: http://www.teamzonesports.com/silverlightgamecontest/submit

Drop me a note if you have any questions.

Tampa User Experience Users Group First Meeting September 10

The Tampa User eXperience User Group will have its first meeting next Wednesday. The presentation will be MS Ajax Client Script 101 by Jay E. Kimble. We will be meeting at  Answers Systems (4029 Tampa Road, Oldsmar, Fl 34677... right next to the Oldsmar Fleamarket).

Pizza and drinks will be supplied, so come on out. One lucky winner will walk away with an MSDN Premium subscription!

No web site yet, but go to Jay's blog here if you plan on coming and let him know:

http://theruntime.com/blogs/jaykimble/archive/2008/09/03/tux-tampa-ux-is-next-wednesday-sept.-10th-at-630pm.aspx

Silverlight Sports Game Contest Registration and Submission now live

I'm happy to announce that you can now register and submit your games for the TeamZone Sports Silverlight Sports Game Contest. The deadline is approaching, games must be submitted by September 8th. With $2000 in prize money, we're looking forward to seeing some great submissions. I encourage you to go ahead and register now even if your game isn't ready to submit since we will be sending out any important information to registered users if needed.

You can get details about registering and submitting here: http://www.teamzonesports.com/SilverlightGameContest/Submit

Silverlight Game Contest rules and FAQ now online

I previously posted about a Silverlight game development contest that is being sponsored by TeamZone Sports http://www.teamzonesports.com (who happens to be my employer) and I wanted to briefly update you that the contest site is live, with official rules and FAQ. The submit page isn't quite ready yet, I'll post again when this goes live.

The official contest page is here:

http://www.teamzonesports.com/SilverlightGameContest

Good luck with your games and I'm looking forward to seeing them!

Developing games that work with both XNA and Silverlight

Yesterday I co-presented a session at GameFest 2008 on Silverlight game development, and one of the things I showed was a sample of abstracting out the differences between Silverlight and XNA so that you could write game code that would run against both.

The quick and dirty sample is here:

http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverlightxnasample.zip

I want your input, if something like this was built up into a game library that could run on both Silverlight and XNA and was available on CodePlex, would you be interested? It would be a fairly significant undertaking and I want to know whether people would find it worthwhile. I thought it might be a bit more relevant now that you'll be able to sell XNA Games on XBOX 360. 

Announcing a new Silverlight game contest

I'm happy to announce that there is a new game contest that will be starting soon for Silverlight games. You can read more about it here:

http://www.teamzonesports.com/home/SilverlightGameContest

The games have to be sports related, it can be as little as some sports graphics in your puzzle game, or something as totally sports as a complete soccer simulator.

The complete rules and submission form will be available on August 8, 2008, but you can start working on your game now. If you have any questions, you can send them to contests@teamzonesports.com

Submissions need to be in by September 8, so you have some time to put a great game together. Most importantly, the games have to be fun, gameplay is king.

Edit: We're still nailing down the last details, but it looks like the contest will be open to US residents only, sorry.

Sweet New Vector Graphics Space Game

All I can say about this new game, Vector Space: Zero, is that I'm glad it wasn't entered into the DevX Silverlight game contest or I wouldn't have a chance. Daniel "Dan Dan" Gimenez did an amazing job on this game with parallax background scrolling, retro vector graphics, background music, sound effects and high scores.

You can play it here: http://www.ddtmm.com/vs0/

Wow, just wow...and I'm happy to have contributed in a small way by giving him some early guidance through my tutorials, and he used the Farseer physics engine as well. 

Silverlight Streaming now supports Silverlight 2 Beta 2

I've become a big fan of Silverlight Streaming. It's simple to deploy a XAP file and have your Silverlight application running in seconds. There is also now an REST API to upload and manage Silverlight apps and other files.The have also added support for accessing WMV video files via a URL, so you could use it as a general purpose video server.

However with all of the great things they have been adding to Silverlight Streaming, they took a little while to get it running with Silverlight 2 Beta 2. They have now released that support, so you can start using Silverlight Streaming to host your Silverlight 2 Beta 2 apps. I highly encourage you to check it out.

One other good thing about Silverlight 2 Beta 2 now being supported on Silverlight Streaming is that the games for the DevX RIA Run Silverlight game contest are now also updated to Beta 2, you can play my entry, Stack Attack, here:

http://www.devx.com/RIA/Game/38018?id=271&trk=StackAttack

Use Storyboards for Game Loop, not DispatcherTimer

Ok so I had some earlier posts discussing how to make a game loop using two different methods, one being an empty Storyboard, and the other being the use of a DispatcherTimer. Adam Kinney of Microsoft has researched it a bit, and has posted his findings, confirming some of the empirical results I found from testing the two:

http://adamkinney.com/blog/339/default.aspx

Adam writes:

The DispatcherTimer is a lower resolution timer than the timer behind the Storyboard class, which causes loss in fidelity. Additionally, the Storyboard execution is more stable across the different supported OSs and Browsers.

So it looks like to get the smoothest movement in your game, you should use the Storyboard technique that I talk about in my Silverlight Game Loop tutorial.

Silverlight Games 101 Posts and Samples Updated to Silverlight 2 Beta 2

I have updated the new iteration of samples and tutorials to Silverlight 2 Beta 2. The Zip files for the sample source code have also been updated. If you see any issues with the samples, please let me know and I'll update them ASAP.

Also to help with getting to the tutorials easily, I have added a quick access listing of tutorials to my Blue Rose Games site here:

http://www.bluerosegames.com/brg/silverlight_game_development.aspx

I'll update this list as I add more samples.

Now that Beta 2 is released, expect more game related tutorials in the near future. I've been holding off on doing too many because they all had to be updated for Beta 2. Now that Beta 2 is released, it should be easier to create some content that will work with Beta 2 and beyond.