A useful tutorial for getting up and running with Windows Phone 7.
Full disclosure: I was invited to embed this video by Unruly Media, who is working directly with Microsoft, and I may make a few cents per view. However, I wouldn’t be posting it here just for the money if I didn’t think the content wasn’t worth viewing.
Read more...So I’m working on porting Falling Balls over to Windows Phone 7. I have the animated stick figure, the motion code, the blood spatter, and sound effects all working. I’ll eventually need a real device to get the accelerometer stuff working, but in the meantime, I moved onto drawing the balls. In the game, I need to be able to make circles of arbitrary, random sizes. I looked into doing this with textures, starting with a circle bitmap and scaling it up or down, but we all know what happens when you start scaling bitmaps. Although it was a worthy experiment, it came out about as crappy as I expected it would. What I really needed was a way to dynamically draw a primitive circle.
Read more...Visual Studio’s tooling is almost clairvoyant. It knows what I want to type almost before I type it. Actually, it’s not so much that it does anything all that amazing. Everything it does is pretty much what you want an IDE to do. It’s the reason you use and IDE and don’t just code in notepad / textedit. But Visual Studio … JUST … GETS … IT … RIGHT. Other IDEs to pretty much the same stuff – except when they don’t, which is all too often. VS just has a lot of little things that click together that makes life easy while coding. Also, there’s a surprising simplicity to it. I’ve worked with mostly Eclipse and XCode over the last few years, and although I feel I’ve come to “master” both of those environments at least to the degree that I needed to for my own purposes, I still find both very complex, confusing, and cluttered. XCode 4 is trying to change things up, and while it definitely has made some good steps towards the goal of simplicity, I still feel like it’s a mess. When I look at Visual Studio though, I feel a sense of simplicity and almost miinimalism. It is actually more in line with what I would expect Apple to design as a coding environment.
Read more...If you’re not up to speed, make sure you go back and read Part I and Part II of this tutorial.
A Few Fixes
Before we go into user interaction, I wanted to make a few changes to yesterday’s code. We had a variable called ballSize which was set to 40, the circumference of the ball image. The actual position of the ball was the top left corner of the graphic, as that’s how textures are drawn. So in checking if it had hit any of the walls, I was checking for position.X < 0 on the left and position.X + ballSize > width on the right. I’m changing that up a bit here now. The position will actually be the center of the ball. To do this, I changed ballSize to radius and set it to 20. This allows the wall collision code to become:
Read more...Assuming you’ve gone through Part I, you now have a ball showing up at location 100, 100 on the simulator screen. Now let’s get it moving. Here’s the plan: we’ll set up another Vector2 for velocity, and add that to position on each frame, then check to see if we’ve hit any walls and bounce off them.
We’ll jump ahead hear and add a few more variables that we’ll eventually need, just so they’ll be there. Again, right with the rest of the class variables:
Read more...This morning, at 8:11 a.m., I downloaded and installed the Windows Phone 7 developer tools from here:
https://developer.windowsphone.com/
Less than 12 hours later, I am writing a tutorial on it. AND, I fit in a 5 mile run, a haircut and shower, a trip to the library and grocery shopping in there too. That’s gotta say something about how easy it is to get up and running with this stuff. Either that or I’m just freaking brilliant, and my wife insists that’s not the case.
Read more...Internet Explorer 9. Go ahead, laugh. It’s a good browser. Just made it my default. 24 hours in and I don’t miss Chrome yet.
Fences. Organize your Windows desktop icons. Killer feature – double click desktop and all fences with all icons vanish. Mmmm… cleanliness. I popped for the $9.99 for the pro version, but have received no confirmation or any download link yet. Hmm… I’m sure it will come soon.
Read more...The traditional markets that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years are still struggling with this newfangled digital media stuff, trying to impose old world restrictions on it that just don’t work. I’m all for an author, musician, artist or programmer getting paid for their work. But DRM as it exists is doomed. Virtually all DRM is eventually cracked and it just becomes a race between the manufacturers creating more complex DRM and hackers breaking it, and lawyers and judges threatening jail terms and huge fines to people doing no more than they have for decades – sharing their albums and books. You know something is wrong when the word “sharing” becomes redefined to mean something synonymous with “criminality”.
Read more...I know I’m fanning the flames here, but I thought it was a bit funny. Not hilarious, but cute. Of course, you could make a follow up ad that showed the woman trying to check her email or whatever…
Read more...I’ve used these tools a few times before, but couldn’t remember the names just now. Figured I’d post this for my future self. The next time I can’t remember, I’ll search my own blog.
Anyway, two cool tools, one a port of the other. The original is sfxr and you can get it here:
https://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
That’s Windows only, so if you’re on Mac, check cfxr here:
Both allow you to make random, or not so random 8-bit type sound effects for games, UIs or whatever. If nothing else, they are really fun to play with. 🙂
Read more...