Silverlight Games 101

The last time I started creating a sample game on this blog, I had to go through creating a game loop, handling keyboard input, dealing with vector mathematics, and a few other low level tasks. Along the way I created a helpers library which people could use to get started with their own games. A good amount of code from these samples made its way into SilverSprite, a free open source library that I created to make it easier to get XNA 2D games running in Silverlight. Because of my work on this library and other life changes such as writing a book and becoming an independent consultant and then finally ending up at Vertigo, this game development blog became almost non-existent. I’m looking to change that now.

Last night I released an Alpha 2 of the SilverSprite library for Silverlight 3.

One of the major changes is that I split out some of the core functionality that I thought would be useful to Silverlight game developers that didn’t need all of the XNA related graphics and content management stuff. This core assembly, named SilverArcade.SilverSprite.Core.dll is 69k, and in your XAP file it will compress down to under 29k. This isn’t a major size hit, and gives you the following:

• An easy to use game loop class
• Vector2, Vector3, and Matrix structures
• MathHelper methods including linear interpolation helpers
• A color tint pixel shader that can be applied to any element
• Keyboard input helpers
• Mouse input helpers

I will also be looking at moving some of the sound effect classes into the core going forward.

Along with this new assembly being available, I’ll be starting over on my Asteroids clone sample using this assembly and will cover its key features as we progress. I look forward to being able to focus on common game development tasks and letting the SilverSprite code assembly take care of a bit of the plumbing.

If you are already familiar with SilverSprite, one of the other major changes with this release is that we are now using the Microsoft.Xna namespaces to make it easier to get XNA code ported over. There are some great free libraries such as physics engines which can be useful for Silverlight games and these are now a whole lot easier to get working. SilverSprite is distributed under the MIT license and is free to use in binary form in any commercial or non-commercial project.

http://silversprite.codeplex.com