I want to make a simple 2d game in Silverlight, but it seems like things have changed since the last time I tried to make a game using mode 13h graphics. Can someone give me a run-down of how you'd go about it.
I just mean at a high-level, focusing on the silverlight-specific aspects; not general game design.
A fictional example might be:
'The main game loop shouldn't be a loop, use a DispatchTimer instead. Use a Canvas as the main drawing object; but realize that we don't bother drawing individual pixels - all of your in-game objects should be represented by controls. Be sure to set the 'UseHardwareFlag' to true'. Etc, etc...
If you want to stick to the mode 13 way of programming have a look at the WriteableBitmap.
Some very nice demos here
I succeeded in porting Wolf3D (2 and a half D) to Silverlight this way.
I used the CompositionTarget.Rendering event
EDIT
I also found this, it is less mode 13 and more in line with your example.
Related
I need to knock out a quick animation in C#/Windows Forms for a Halloween display. Just some 2D shapes moving about on a solid background. Since this is just a quick one-off project I really don't want to install and learn an entire new set of tools for this. (DirectX dev kits, Silverlight, Flash, etc..) I also have to install this on multiple computers so anything beyond the basic .Net framework (2.0) would be a pain in the arse.
For tools I've got VS2k8, 25 years of development experience, a wheelbarrow, holocaust cloak, and about 2 days to knock this out. I haven't done animation since using assembler on my Atari 130XE (hooray for page flipping and player/missile graphics!)
Advice? Here's some of the things I'd like to know:
I can draw on any empty widget (like a panel) by fiddling with it's OnPaint handler, right? That's how I'd draw a custom widget. Is there a better technique than this?
Is there a page-flipping technique for this kind of thing in Windows Forms? I'm not looking for a high frame rate, just as little flicker/drawing as necessary.
Thanks.
Post Mortem Edit ... "a couple of coding days later"
Well, the project is done. The links below came in handy although a couple of them were 404. (I wish SO would allow more than one reply to be marked "correct"). The biggest problem I had to overcome was flickering, and a persistent bug when I tried to draw on the form directly.
Using the OnPaint event for the Form: bad idea. I never got that to work; lots of mysterious errors (stack overflows, or ArgumentNullExceptions). I wound up using a panel sized to fill the form and that worked fine.
Using the OnPaint method is slow anyway. Somewhere online I read that building the PaintEventArgs was slow, and they weren't kidding. Lots of flickering went away when I abandoned this. Skip the OnPaint/Invalidate() and just paint it yourself.
Setting all of the "double buffering" options on the form still left some flicker that had to be fixed. (And I found conflicting docs that said "set them on the control" and "set them on the form". Well controls don't have a .SetStyle() method.) I haven't tested without them, so they might be doing something (this is the form):
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer, true);
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, true);
So the workhorse of the code wound up looking like (pf is the panel control):
void PaintPlayField()
{
Bitmap bufl = new Bitmap(pf.Width, pf.Height);
using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bufl))
{
g.FillRectangle(Brushes.Black, new Rectangle(0, 0, pf.Width, pf.Height));
DrawItems(g);
DrawMoreItems(g);
pf.CreateGraphics().DrawImageUnscaled(bufl, 0, 0);
}
}
And I just called PaintPlayField from the inside of my Timer loop. No flicker at all.
Set off a timer at your desired frame rate. At each timer firing twiddle the internal representation of the shapes on the screen (your model) per the animation motion you want to achieve, then call Invalidate(true). Inside the OnPaint just draw the model on the screen.
Oh yeah, and you probably want to turn Double Buffering on (this is like automatic page flipping).
2d Game Primer
Timer Based Animation
Both of these give good examples of animation. The code is fairly straightforward. i used these when I needed to do a quick animation for my son.
I am trying to create a WPF application using C# to run on Pixelsense that is basic version of the tangram puzzle. I am able to draw my 7 shapes and translate and rotate them all around the screen.
Could anyone give me advise regarding how I should go about saving the pattern (with shapes in specific positions and orientations) so that when a user creates the pattern next time, the application can match it to the saved one and tell the user if it's correct.
It's a pattern matching and recognition problem that I am trying to solve.
I have been stuck on this for a while now :(
Define the solution as a collection of objects with shapeType, position, and orientation properties. Have the solution include one shape at position 0, 0 and an orientation of 0. Now loop over all the shapes the user has actually placed to find the ones with a shapeType that matches the shape your solution has at 0,0,0. Calculate the position and orientation of every other shape relative to where the user put this one. Compare those values to the rest of your solution. You'll need to experiment with how much tolerance to allow because this stuff is not precise - to make the game fun, err on the side of having high tolerances. If needed, you can follow this up with some performance optimizations to only re-evaluate pieces that moved.
Hopefully you are using physical shape prices with tags on them instead of this purely a virtual game. I always wanted to build this when I was on the Surface team but it never happened. One challenge you will run into is defining how the tag's position/orientation relates to the actual shape. If you'll be putting tag stickers on multiple tangram sets, you almost certainly won't get the on precisely the same each time so you may need to add a "calibration" mode to your app (have the user place each piece in a specific spot and then push a button so you can record where the tag is relative to those spots). The TagVisualizer WPF control should help a lot for building your UI - definitely look into using it (this scenario was top of mind when we designed that API). The default behavior of that control (if you tell it the ID of a tag to look for but not how to visualize it) is a "crosshair" that can help you find tune your offset values.
Good luck! If you wouldn't mind recording a YouTube video when you are done and posting a comment here linking to it, I'd really appreciate that
You can use ObservableCollection or List of a custom class. That class can consist of various values such as position, orientation etc as properties.
When a new pattern is drawn or when the pattern change its position you can update that particular object stored in the collection. As you have all the details of the pattern(positions and orientation) you can iterate the for loop and check the position of the new pattern when added.
I am writing a geoscience visualization application that uses wpf 3d. The user needs to be able to zoom deep into detail and out quick with minimum resources taken. I've decided to divide my slice (ModelVisual3D) into subrectangles (GeometryModel3D), so that each has it's own texture that changes when the camera zooms in (similar to Google maps).
The problem is that "cracks" are appearing between subrectangles, even though they actually have no empty space between them.
How to hide these? or is there any other way to assign multiple materials with different sizes to one ModelVisual3D?
PS I've tried making the background gray, light-gray, silver and white-smoke. It helps a little, but it's not acceptable. I've also tried overlapping the subrectangles, with no result.
Instead of your current setup you might want to make several textures at different resolutions and switch between these depending on the zoom level. (Mipmaps)
When getting really close you might replace the entire object and switch it for a much smaller one) and use a highly detailed texture.
It will require a bit more pre-processing but you will be able to use a single geometry.
Seems like changing ImageBrush's stretch to Stretch.None and using textures larger than the subsquare helps. Although now I need more precise control over texture coordinates for the surface.
Where can I get started drawing animated geometry in C#? I would like to draw a sort of countdown timer by drawing a partially shaded circle. At start the circle would be fully shaded, at 75% 3/4 of the circle would be shaded and at 0 completely unshaded. I really don't know where to begin with something like this.
If you still don't understand what I need, a lot of games use this sort of animation to represent a "cooldown" on an item or skill. Like a second hand going around a clock, revealing what is beneath it.
WPF is my target application but I imagine I will need to use some sort of GDI api.
You could start out with the drawing examples here, for how to make your pie-like graphic:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/PieChartDataBinding.aspx
It looks like they use StreamGeometryContext, along with LineTo and ArcTo.
You could then work on applying an animation to the properties on that graphic, so the "slice" gets bigger over time, by changing the arc length:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752312.aspx#applyanimationstoproperty
You could then wrap this all up nicely in a UserControl, with custom dependency properties, so you can reuse this throughout your app.
Edit: I was thinking you meant the shaded pie like in World of Warcraft. What you want is actually simpler. See can poyrazoğlu's answer for the graphical approach to take (although you really only need the top black circle, if you're going with an opacity approach).
Yes, it's really easy with WPF.
Just create another circle on top of the circle, make that one black, and let a timer update the opacity of the top circle from 1 to 0 by time (or whatever you want).
This is the "easy" way. A more "convenient", or "WPF-style" approach would include Bindings and possibly value conversions, you'll be binding the opacity of the circle to a custom value with a value converter (or decrementing that value, anyway there are lots of ways).
Choose whatever you want. They'll both work.
I need to knock out a quick animation in C#/Windows Forms for a Halloween display. Just some 2D shapes moving about on a solid background. Since this is just a quick one-off project I really don't want to install and learn an entire new set of tools for this. (DirectX dev kits, Silverlight, Flash, etc..) I also have to install this on multiple computers so anything beyond the basic .Net framework (2.0) would be a pain in the arse.
For tools I've got VS2k8, 25 years of development experience, a wheelbarrow, holocaust cloak, and about 2 days to knock this out. I haven't done animation since using assembler on my Atari 130XE (hooray for page flipping and player/missile graphics!)
Advice? Here's some of the things I'd like to know:
I can draw on any empty widget (like a panel) by fiddling with it's OnPaint handler, right? That's how I'd draw a custom widget. Is there a better technique than this?
Is there a page-flipping technique for this kind of thing in Windows Forms? I'm not looking for a high frame rate, just as little flicker/drawing as necessary.
Thanks.
Post Mortem Edit ... "a couple of coding days later"
Well, the project is done. The links below came in handy although a couple of them were 404. (I wish SO would allow more than one reply to be marked "correct"). The biggest problem I had to overcome was flickering, and a persistent bug when I tried to draw on the form directly.
Using the OnPaint event for the Form: bad idea. I never got that to work; lots of mysterious errors (stack overflows, or ArgumentNullExceptions). I wound up using a panel sized to fill the form and that worked fine.
Using the OnPaint method is slow anyway. Somewhere online I read that building the PaintEventArgs was slow, and they weren't kidding. Lots of flickering went away when I abandoned this. Skip the OnPaint/Invalidate() and just paint it yourself.
Setting all of the "double buffering" options on the form still left some flicker that had to be fixed. (And I found conflicting docs that said "set them on the control" and "set them on the form". Well controls don't have a .SetStyle() method.) I haven't tested without them, so they might be doing something (this is the form):
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer, true);
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, true);
So the workhorse of the code wound up looking like (pf is the panel control):
void PaintPlayField()
{
Bitmap bufl = new Bitmap(pf.Width, pf.Height);
using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bufl))
{
g.FillRectangle(Brushes.Black, new Rectangle(0, 0, pf.Width, pf.Height));
DrawItems(g);
DrawMoreItems(g);
pf.CreateGraphics().DrawImageUnscaled(bufl, 0, 0);
}
}
And I just called PaintPlayField from the inside of my Timer loop. No flicker at all.
Set off a timer at your desired frame rate. At each timer firing twiddle the internal representation of the shapes on the screen (your model) per the animation motion you want to achieve, then call Invalidate(true). Inside the OnPaint just draw the model on the screen.
Oh yeah, and you probably want to turn Double Buffering on (this is like automatic page flipping).
2d Game Primer
Timer Based Animation
Both of these give good examples of animation. The code is fairly straightforward. i used these when I needed to do a quick animation for my son.