Games

After surviving the flu I am back to working on Perenthia. I did some work on Pirates but I am still having some positioning issues that I can't seem to get worked out and may have to rebuild a good portion of the game.

I should have a screen shot or two of the progress on Perenthia in another few days, I will see how it goes.

I have a good portion or rather the majority of the Perenthia Server finished and have been working on the Silverlight front end. I am still not sure whether or not I will be using sockets for communication or a custom IHttpHandler implementation.

Xaps

One of my favorite new features of Silverlight 2 is the new Application model.  Moving on from version 1.0, where JavaScript instantiation was the only way to start your app and you were restricted to the same origin as the web page, enter the Xap.  The new packaging model, not only bundles your assets into one file enabling simpler deployment, it also enables application instantiation via the object tag.  Plus, the Xap can live on a separate server than the web page, which enables the creation of embeddable applications with Silverlight.

Source code: http://silverlightrocks.com/cs/files/folders/silverlight_2_tutorials_source_code/entry337.aspx

So I did this with the old tutorials, and a little differently, this time I'm going to try to keep it a bit cleaner and to follow better namespacing and project layout, etc. One of the goals of this blog is to help you write games faster, and one way to do that is to give you some helper classes that can get you going and you can use in your own games. I have added a class library project to the SpaceRocks solution called BlueRoseGames.Helpers and when it makes sense, I'll add classes there so that you can use them in your own projects.

I have updated "Sort the Foobars" to Silverlight 2 Beta 1... Have fun sorting!

Source code here: http://silverlightrocks.com/cs/files/folders/silverlight_2_tutorials_source_code/entry324.aspx

Ok so I got a few comments after the last post asking why I didn't use the new DispatcherTimer for my game loop. The answer is that that is what this post was going to be about, and it still is.

I've done a bit more experimenting with the two different techniques (Storyboard or DispatcherTimer) and have come up with the following observations. I encourage you to do your own tests and see if you get the same results.

In case you missed it, I have an example Silverlight 2 application that I wrote to work out my understanding of Silverlight 2 (for my course http://www.silverlight-tour.com):

The source code is now available for this example.  This example utilized a lot of features, both Silverlight 2 and future .NET technologies:

• Silverlight 2
  • Control Templates
  • Data Binding
  • Web Service Integration
  • DataGrid
  • Popup's
• The Entity Framework
• WCF Services

Once ADO.NET Data Services release their new Silverlight 2 library, i'll re-work this example to use that library too and add saving of data to the database.

miniclip.com now has a silverlight 1.0 puzzle game to their catalog.  this is pretty good to see among the massive catalog of casual games they offer.  this game is built using silverlight 1.0 and is a good use of a lot of the capabilities (and in some cases maxing them out) for the 1.0 platform. ... (read more)

got an email today about something i hadn't seen yet, another silverlight 2.0 game, Pirates!  cameron emailed me about a cool prototype he's working on with the farseer engine.  here's a shot:

... (read more)