50.05%

 

+

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50.05% Silverlight Install Base

Stats come from www.riastats.com

New Silverlight 3 Book Uses Farseer Physics

Gaston Hillar recently contacted me to let me know about a recent book he’s written that uses the Farseer Physics Engine. (I built the Farseer Physics Engine a few years ago and have since handed it off to Ian Qvist, who has been running it for the past year or so.)

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon: 3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide

Here is the description from Amazon:

A practical guide to creating real-time responsive online 3D games in Silverlight 3 using C#, XBAP WPF, XAML, Balder, and Farseer Physics Engine

• Develop online interactive 3D games and scenes in Microsoft Silverlight 3 and XBAP WPF
• Integrate Balder 3D engine 1.0, Farseer Physics Engine 2.1, and advanced object-oriented techniques to simplify the game development process
• Enhance development with animated 3D characters, sounds, music, physics, stages, gauges, and backgrounds
• Packed with inspiring, realistic examples offering impressive graphics, strong performance, and a rich interactive experience

Looks interesting and definitely worth a look.

-Jeff Weber

Tire Storm Featured in new Mashooo Reward System.

The fine team over at Mashooo has just released the beta version of it’s new reward system.

By playing certain participating games, players can earn “Mdollars” that will eventually earn them various tangible prizes.

Tire Storm is currently one of the games you can play to earn these “Mdollars”.  Each day, the top score in Tire Storm will receive 4 Mdollars.

Mashooo also runs periodic contests that can earn you even more “Mdollars”.   See the “Last man standing” challenge in the screenshot below.

Very cool stuff.  I really like where Mashooo is going with their site.  Why don’t you head on over an earn some  “M-ching”.

-Jeff Weber

2 Down 28 To Go

I recently started building out the 30 dives that will make up Diver 2.  Things will hopefully move pretty quick now that level building is all that needs to be done.  Keep in mind though “quick” is a relative term when everything needs to be done in my spare time.   I hope to be able to average a level per day or so.

So far I have 2 levels complete… well almost complete.  I still need to create some new background images.  I’m tired of the existing three backgrounds from Diver 1

The 2 levels I have completed aren’t really anything too new.  Just some simple straight in dives to warm players up.  The next level I’m going to build will introduce the new “spinner” obstacle.  It’ll knock you around pretty good if you have the fortune of hitting one.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of the first 2 levels. 

Diver 2 (Dive 2-1)

Diver 2 (Dive 2-2)

Now, back to work…

-Jeff Weber

Almost to the Fun Stuff -- Diver 2 Progress Update.

Just a quick posting of where things are with Diver 2.

I had to add one more thing to my list that I forgot to add originally.  I needed to build the web page to host the game and decided to clean up the rest of the site a bit as well.  I’m working on that now and I’m close to done.

After that, it’s nothing but the fun stuff… making levels!

Here is the updated progress list.  The crossed out items are things I decided to cut in the interest of time.

To Do:

• Design/Create 30 new levels

• Create new landing page with spinner on it.

• New video trailer

  • Possibly see if someone would like to help with this as I suck at making vids.
  • Could give away early access to the game in trade.
  • Got a couple people interested in doing this. (great!)

Working On It:

• Cleanup website

Completed:

• Add support for Google analytics

• Number of dives started
• Number of succeful divers

• Update the render loop to use CompositionTarget instead of Storyboard. (Thanks Silverlight 3)

• Look into local storage code to make sure it’ll work with the new version of the game.

• Reduce the game foot print on the screen. (Currently takes up to much space vertically)

• Refactor load-level logic to reduce duplicate code

• Implement spinners to be built using a Canvas + child paths.

  • Utilize multiple geoms per body.
  • Canvas = Body

• Make diving boards configurable from Expression Blend.

  • Create a bare-bones custom control with some simple properties that can be read out in code

• Enable GPU acceleration (thank you Silverlight 3)

  • Particles
  • Diver
  • Spinners
  • H20

• Try updating to Farseer Physics Engine 2.x (Diver is currently built on an old version of the engine)

  • Thoroughly test everything in the game.
  • If the upgrade doesn’t go well stick with existing version of engine.
• Trees/Plants (non-interactive only.) time permitting.

-Jeff Weber