Archive for March, 2010
Silverlight seminar with Daron Yöndem in Sofia
Daron Yöndem, Silverlight MVP will be a special guest at Sofia University on 31 March at 7PM talking about UX and Multi-touch with Silverlight. He will join a regular seminar on RIA for students in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI).
What we will be talking about?
Are you ready to get both some fun and technical coverage as well? In this session we will look into Silverlight about how it changes what? The actual question we will answer will be “Why Microsoft is building Silverlight?” With the understanding of some hidden perspective we will top the UX with some Multi-touch implementation both on the web and windows! If I were you I wouldn’t miss this session
Who is Daron Yöndem?
Daron Yondem is the founder of Deveload Software – a UX company based in Turkey. He is a Microsoft Regional Director with a Gold Global Impact Award in year 2009. Daron is an international speaker leading the INETA MEA Speaker Bureau, he is the Turkey Country Lead of INETA, a Silverlight MVP and author of two ASP.NET AJAX books. He is passionate about UX and can host sessions everywhere anytime. He has more than 220+ sessions hosted in year 2009 including a full night of free Silverlight community training called SilverNight! You can follow his thoughts at http://daron.yondem.com
If you are interested in the seminar you are more than welcome to join.
Add comment Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Book review: 3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner’s Guide
If you want to be a part of the next generation games on the web, this surely is the right book to read. Gaston C. Hillar has written a practical beginner’s guide to creating really powerful and yet simple real-time online games. You can learn amazing techniques and best practices simply by following the step-by-step examples.
The book begins with a brief introduction in the 2D game development. It carefully explains how to convert different assets from one type to another so that you would be able to use them in a real Silverlight 3 game. If you have been programming using digital assets you will certainly find that part of the book truly helpful because you would know that it is not always that simple to convert your digital assets to the needed format. Then the 3D Game Development adventure begins, introducing you with the 3D game models and how to prepare them for use in Silverlight. The book explains how to use Balder and how to work with 3D DCC tools to export 3D models in XAML. It guides you through creating and animating powerful 3D characters made of one or more complex meshes. Furthermore the book introduces the Farseer Physics Engine, which is useful for applying real-life effects to your characters, without worrying about the underlying math formulas. Another important game development issue, which is covered, is how to apply artificial intelligence. This really takes your game to a next level, where you are free to develop advanced collision detections, chasing algorithms, design special effects or anything else your game requires.
The book has many more amazing features you could use in game development.
What’s missing?
Gaston Hillar has certainly done a great job on this book. If something could be done to make it even better it would be to include more algorithms and patterns concerning the actual game logic. It would be best to make powerful games with great UI and amazing assets but you always have to count on your own internal game logic in the end. The book does provide you with the most important concepts of the object oriented design but you must surely spend some time thinking about the game internal logic and how would it be best to use the help of the design patterns, to keep things simple but truly powerful.
Add comment Friday, March 5, 2010
