Silverlight Games 101

I get a huge kick out of other people using things that I’ve created and especially when they do things that I haven’t even imagined and take it to the next level. Adam Kinney posted about doing a torn photo effect with the image blitting methods that I contributed to the open source WriteableBitmapEx project on codeplex. For those not familiar with image blitting, it is when you copy a bitmap into another bitmap as fast as you can.

What’s especially cool about this post is that he was reproducing a tutorial previously done in Flash and it would have been much more difficult without these methods. Even more exciting is that Adam has contributed some extra blending modes that he needed back into the project so everyone can benefit from them. I took at look at the original Flash tutorial and it seems more complicated than the Silverlight version but I don’t know enough about Flash to have more than a general feeling about it.

Here is the final result of Adam’s sample:

Pretty cool and it will take any image and do some random and dynamic effects to make it look torn and crumpled.

Adam’s original post is here: http://adamkinney.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/image-blitting-in-silverlight-with-writeablebitmapex/

This is a video of a presentation I did for the XNA Calgary Users Group recently. It runs about a 30 minutes and is a good introduction to getting started with Silverlight game development and some of the things to watch out for. I also cover using the SilverSprite library to make game development easier for those already familiar with XNA. Please forgive the stuffy nose as I was a bit under the weather when doing this presentation.

Click on the image below to go to the video hosted on Screencast.com

The samples and powerpoint for the presentation can be downloaded at http://www.bluerosegames.com/slgamedev.zip

My laptop has a 16 inch screen with 1920×1080 resolution and my eyes aren’t what they used to be so I run in high DPI mode 125%. This makes all of my icons and text bigger, but it also sets IE to 125% zoom. This is fine for the most part except for some apps that don’t handle it properly. For the most part these apps have been Flash, such as the Radar Map on Weather.com:

http://www.weather.com/weather/map/interactive/USFL0291?from=36hr_topnav_undeclared

Try it with a zoom other than 100% and you’ll see what I mean. One of the worst cases of this I saw was a series of AT&T banner and skyscraper Flash ads that didn’t handle zoom properly and had a lot of black space on the right and bottom. Not the best user experience for your ads. UPDATE: Found an AT&T ad having the issue:

For the most part, Silverlight handles this zoom for you and scales your application automatically. I have however run into a couple of Silverlight apps that have issues. Generally it seems to have to do with javascript integration and if you rely on values coming back from Javascript for positioning and don’t take the zoom into account.

A little unrelated, but here is a tip related to browser zoom and Silverlight. If someone has developed a Silverlight app that is too big for you to fit on the screen you can crank down your browser zoom (75%) to make it fit. This is especially useful for netbooks with their lower resolution screens.

Browser zoom issues will become more common as more people on Windows 7 discover the high DPI settings. These have been made easier to get to and understand while the screen resolution settings have been hidden away.