This week I played around with the Bing Maps Silverlight Control to find out how easy it would be to get a map up and running in an application, place pins on said map and get the name of the country that the user has clicked on. I soon discovered that achieving this functionality was incredibly easy!
The simple application I created can be found at http://jason-mitchell.com/uploads/bingmaps/bingmapstestpage.html
UUC hosted Northern Ireland’s first ever location for the Global Game Jam between 28th-30th January 2011. Overall it was a great experience however at times I was so exhausted that I could barely code at all; nothing a 2 hour kip in the car didn’t solve.
The purpose of this article is just to list the members of our team and link to their blogs:
When I am working with XNA, I frequently found myself writing the same code in order to maintain lists of objects in memory and track free items that can be reinitialized to reduce garbage collection. Eventually I had enough of doing this and decided to implement a generic Pool class in C# that would take care of this for me.
I have recently been spending a lot of time working with WCF for my final year project which requires frequent and efficient communication between different types of devices including smartphones. My initial approach was to occasionally and asynchronously poll the services to see if there was any new data available. The problem with this is immediately obvious – constantly polling the server will impact the overall performance and will also drain the battery of any smartphone utilising the services so I began looking into duplex WCF services over HTTP. I found it to be pretty easy to dig up some useful information on the subject and I must give credit to Frank Quednau for his “no frills, bare-bones example to Duplex WCF” article which served as the foundation to my own work.
I have uploaded the slides and XNA demo project from my Windows Phone 7 presentation I gave at my University on Wednesday. You can download them here.
When using Silverlight, developers have no direct access to the file system on a user’s computer. However Silverlight does use isolated storage as a virtual file system to store data on machines providing the application has the correct file permissions to do so. Additionally, Windows Phone 7 uses isolated storage for saving data to the phone which prevents applications interfering with each others data.
Since the Windows Phone 7 developer tools were released, I have playing around with developing little apps for the phone to get to grips with the basics of app development for the platform. When I got around to playing with isolated storage on the phone, I quickly got tired of writing the same code over and over again (I like to try and keep my code DRY). For this reason, I decided to create a short helper class which uses delegates to help reduce the amount of repeated code I was writing.
I’m currently working on a 3D XNA 3.1 (need to use 3.1 for the third party library we are using at the minute) game for a piece of coursework at university and decided I would implement a 3D particle system in order to create some cool explosion effects. This system is very similar to the particle system I described in my previous article since I basically lifted a load of code from there. Since this is simply for a piece of coursework, I didn’t implement the full feature set that can be found in my 2D particle system because:
(See end of article for download)
UPDATE: I’ve added a download to an XNA 4 version of this particle system
Basically since I got into XNA (about 3 years ago) I have been tinkering with particle systems for games. Using a particle system has allows game developers to create really nice, complicated looking effects without too much effort. Personally I find them pretty mesmerising and often found that with each new effect I create, I could sit back and watch it run for about 10 minutes.
I’ve made quite a few iterations of my particle system but eventually managed to settle on one that I felt had pretty decent performance and was fairly flexible allowing for the creation of a range of effects with the one system. A couple of months ago I decided to publish this to CodePlex and can be downloaded here.
This is just a quick article to share a nice way to create a camera for 2D games. There are a couple of ways to do this; I originally did it by making a class that held a position for the camera and then subtracting the object and camera positions when drawing to offset the sprites. This turned out to be a problem prone approach and caused me a few issues in my Imagine Cup game.
I was recently working on a project in Silverlight and required the ability to toggle between two states in a UserControl. When I started working with Silverlight, I would have handled click or mouse events to change the visual state but I soon moved on to work with behaviours and actions so I could remove such code from my code-behind files. Since an to toggle between two visual states did not exist, this seemed like an ideal opportunity to make my first custom action.