Games on Blue Rose Games now on Silverlight 2 RTW
I've updated Dr. Popper and Stack Attack to Silverlight 2 RTW, you can play them here:
http://www.bluerosegames.com/brg/free-web-games/games.aspx
Enjoy!
Find me at PDC for a Dr. Popper badge and maybe win a book
Adam Kinney, the PDC Badge Evangelist, had a post about creating your own badges for PDC, and so I decided to create one:
This is inspired by evangelists Joe Healy and Tim Heuer who have said that their daughters love Dr. Popper. I've actually also heard this from other people as well, and it's my daughter's favorite game too, she actually inspired the game because she played a similar game at school.
So if you want this badge, find me at PDC, and there will be a URL on the back with a secret code. If your code is a winner, you will receive a free copy of Hello! Silverlight 2 when it's published in the spring.
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.