As you can see, something weird is also going on with the website. I'm experimenting with Squarespace as a potential new home for Mr. Phil Games.
I've decided to enter the Ludum Dare this weekend. So, in honor of the Ludum Dare I put GalCon back as the feature game because it is a Ludum Dare 8 (aka LD 8) child.
Here's my first post over at Ludum Dare Link to Ring.Insert(My.Hat)
I'm excited to have the chance to join this time. I’ve completely cleared the weekend and should be able to spend 100% of my weekend sleeping and gamedev-ing. Might even have a couple nights this week to do some warm-up!
This will be my second Ludum. Last time was a few back; I think the theme was Growth, so that would make it LD 7. I wasn't able to finish that one because I got hopelessly mired in my graphics code. This time around I’m going to use IndieLib and be able to focus on game play. I really want to walk away from this experience with something visible and modestly fun. I’ve been working a long time on game development without something visible to show off. It’d be nice to finally get something out there I can point to with pride!
Good Luck,
Mr. Phil
Mr. Phil Games
One of the gotchas I pointed out earlier was that Validation and Intellisense doesn’t work right for XAML files. A related trap that took me quite a while to figure out is the WPF Designer in Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t understand SilverLight XML! I had to right click my XAML file and tell it to open with the XML Editor in order to make all the errors go away. Even then it still complains about the “x:name” attribute. This is what I think they meant. All quirks, I hope, God willing, will go away with Visual Studio 2008, Glory be to Digital Lord Gates.
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SilverLightDevCampDC
An interesting question is how pop-up blockers and such interact with SilverLight. I personally had troubles with AVG freaking out when I was installing the SilverLight SDK. I finally got it to install correctly after I disable the "Resident shield." I then promptly turned it back on only to have it mess up the creation of a SilverLight project. So at this point AVG gets turned off any time I’m dealing with SilverLight.
For now protection software makers’ are playing catching up and are slowly becoming aware of SilverLight. I’d wager that pop-ups will be a problem for about a year, so plan accordingly.
When Pete Brown was building the Carbon Calculator pop-up blockers where a big concern. His solution was to use a page redirect and query strings. The crux of the problem is if a blocker comes up, then the user has to enable pop-ups, which causes the page to refreshed, thereby zapping all the data!
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Here are several gotchas I learned about at SilverLight DevCamp DC. You might not even understand what some of these are talking about, but hopefully by the end of this series you will.
- Keyboard input doesn’t work right for fullscreen mode
- Blend’s Media encoding fails sometimes
- You need to deploy debug (.pdb) files in order for Firefox to work
- You need to save the root element passed during the onload event so you can do a find controls with it later
- Validation and intellisense don’t work right in xaml files
- Attached properties don’t show-up in intellisense
- Do not start animations in the constructor
- No design time support for UserControls in Blend
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This is an amazing video of a sun flare. The TRACE satellite caught this flare which is what they call an X-Class flare, one of the largest and the kind responsible for blackouts and communication disruption. These loops are generating massive radiation and are estimated to be hotter than ten million degrees!
SilverLight DevCamp DC
This weekend I hauled myself down to DC to attend the SilverLight DevCamp DC. I learned quite a few things so I’ve decided, instead of one really long post about it all I’d do a series of quick posts about the things I learned.
I’d like to send a big THANK YOU to Frank La Vigne for organizing this event and recognize all the speakers because they did this as volenteers:
Apparently I came the furthest for the event and so was given a free copy of the just released SilverLight 1.0 Unleashed. I was quite happy because it was a book I was thinking about getting. If that wasn't surprise enough the book is filled with bright colors!
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nuggest #1
The first nugget I'll share is that a Windows Mobile version of SilverLight is in the works. Apparently there was a working demo at MIX07 and I found a video of the presentation by MLB.com, the mobile part is right at the end.
Links to the rest of the series:
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nugget #2
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nugget #3
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nugget #4
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SilverLightDevCampDC
Millions of people installed SilverLight in the last 48 hours:
Halo 3 ships this week, and no doubt many people will find themselves afflicted with a sudden illness that requires them to stay home one day this week. To help get you ready, watch one of the High Definition Halo3 Videos here (for a lower resolution video click here), and browse the Halo3 Game Guide here. Both are built with Silverlight 1.0.
Scott Guthrie
This explains the early bare bones 1.0 release which focuses on media functionality.
Technorati Profile
Even though I'm not done I've decided to post my research so far on SilverLight. I've tried to find working examples for everything and cross-reference everything as much as I can. I apologize for the link happy post, but I want you to be able to get the info from the horse's mouth and judge for yourself. First I'll give you the executive summary. If you want more details follow the related link below.
Executive Summary
SilverLight allows you to deploy vector graphics and media rich applications through the browser unto Windows and Mac. Essentially it is a stripped down (currently 1 meg download for 1.0, 4 megs for 1.1) version of the .Net framework that runs in a browser (IE, Firefox, Safari and more planned.) It will allow games to switch to fullscreen mode, collect keyboard and mouse input, play videos and music seamlessly and save to a special sandbox area of the client.
The graphics are described in a new html like language called XAML which has a complex event system that allows the graphics to respond to changes in the game data. Think of a GUI layer that is responsible for itself, making changes to the way it looks based on user input and changes inside the game world.
One important thing to note is that search engines will be able to see the XAML.
SilverLight should be viewed as a new API for the web. It isn't just a way to embed games and videos on an html page. It will become a complete replacement for ASP.NET and HTML. Entire website will be made with XAML and run by SilverLight.
Is SilverLight a new gaming platform? Yes
User Experience
Blue Rose Games' Dr. Popper - Seemless Fullscreen Mode, look for button with arrow in the top right of the game frame
Terralever's Zero Gravity
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Load bar while the game sets itself up
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Video transition to game canvas
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Seamless music , you can't tell when the loop repeats and the sound FX are on queue
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Website navigation - imagine gamers easily looking at online manual, jumping to order game, and popping into the community forums effortlessly.
Netika's GOA WinForms - Incredible clone of the Windows/Office look and controls. You just have to go see them to believe.
Infragistics' has a tech demo - rich user controls stepping beyond the current windows forms look
Technical
Tim Sneath's post Introducing Microsoft Silverlight - “The first release that we're shipping later this summer is about a megabyte in size, then we're going to ship the next release, we're calling it 1.1, is going to be about 3 to 4 megabytes in size.”
Scot Hanselman's post Putting Mix, Silverlight, the CoreCLR and the DLR into context - “The Mac version of Silverlight is a Universal Binary and runs the same code and renders the XAML exactly the same on the Mac as it does on Windows.”
Steve C. Orr's Introduction to SilverLight - “Silverlight's team has a long term secret goal of keeping the download size under 5MB. Shhhh! Don't tell anybody!”
Rafe Needleman ‘s What is Silverlight, really? - “search engines, like Google, can scan XAML”
Danny Thorpe , MIX07: Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight - “Silverlight running in different browsers on the same machine will use the same isostorage area on the machine.”
The .NET Show: Silverlight (Transcript)
Misc
The Tater Salad Blog has the best firsthand account of using SilverLight to make games I've come across so far: Silverlight Game Development Post Mortem
Joel on Software recently wrote a post titled Strategy Letter VI although he doesn't mention SilverLight and might not even be thinking about it I definitely think SilverLight could be the "second coming of Microsoft Windows."
Microsoft is providing free streaming with up to 4 GB for SilverLight
Resources
How to compile using Visual Studio 2005 instead of Orcas
Silverlight Project Template for Visual Studio 2005
Chris Bowden's List of SilverLight Games
List of 50 SilverLight Applications
Dave Relyea's Blog : Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Layout System and Controls Framework
I was very happy earlier this week when I logged onto the GameProducer.Net Insider Forums to discover that they had been ported to vBulletin. I can't put my finger on it, but vBulletin is my favorite forum technology. It makes it easy to find new posts; it’s easy on the eyes; fast; and it doesn’t get in your way. I can’t say that about any other forum technology I’ve tried. I expect one day I’ll run my own forums with vBulletin.
Check the forums out, especially because Juuso has added public forums so you don’t have to be an Insider to participate, although there is still a private area for members only.
Teresa Martin,
Civilian Employee,
U.S. Army Confirmed Dead,
Pentagon
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
Reflexive Arcade is doing something amazing for its affiliates! They are allowing us to participate in the launch of Ricochet Infinity. This means I have a brand spanking New Release that not even Big Fish Games or PopCap have! Sweet. In honor of this special moment I’ve made Ricochet Infinity Game of the Moment! It is a pretty cool game, very polished and full of action. It makes my brain buzz. So, it is definitely worthy of the honor. Here I’ll even ad an image. That's how excited I am! Okay... it’s late... Must... go to Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.