Silverlight Games 101

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.