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• Where&rsquo;s my start button?

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  I have to be honest here for a moment. The one thing people most complain about when they talk about Windows 8 is that they miss the Start Button. You know, that dreaded thing that everybody hated when it was introduced… I usually don’t go into these kinds of discussions unless I am personally involved but this one I cannot let go. Why are people doing this? Windows 8 is a great OS. They have changed, updated and perfected so many things so there is enough to talk or write about. Yet, all articles or discussions come down to “Where’s my start button?” In order to save myself from having to explain this every single time I wrote this post and from now on I will simply refer to this blog when I get asked that question. Here it is. Your start menu is there. It’s right in front of your nose. It’s two dimensional, it’s got huge buttons (although they are more than just buttons, they’re alive and therefore called Live Tiles). Just go through those tiles and click what ever you want to start up. Don’t want to look for an item? Just start typing. Really it is that simple. When you are on the start screen just start typing (part of) the name of the program you want and you’ll find it.  As you see in the attached example I started typing “word” and it found Word, Wordfeud, Wordament etc. If you want to find something else besides a program (say you want to change the region you’re in) just click on Settings (it will already show you how many hits there are in that section). People, my request is: dive into something before you complain about it. Look around. This feature is so much easier to use than the old stuff. But you have to know about it. So. I won’t get into this discussion anymore.

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• How do I draw a point sprite using OpenGL ES on Android?

  - by nbolton

  Edit: I'm using the GL enum, which is incorrect since it's not part of OpenGL ES (see my answer). I should have used GL10, GL11 or GL20 instead. Here's a few snippets of what I have so far... void create() { renderer = new ImmediateModeRenderer(); tiles = Gdx.graphics.newTexture( Gdx.files.getFileHandle("res/tiles2.png", FileType.Internal), TextureFilter.MipMap, TextureFilter.Linear, TextureWrap.ClampToEdge, TextureWrap.ClampToEdge); } void render() { Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0.6f, 0.7f, 0.9f, 1); } void renderSprite() { int handle = tiles.getTextureObjectHandle(); Gdx.gl.glBindTexture(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D, handle); Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE); Gdx.gl11.glTexEnvi(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE, GL.GL_COORD_REPLACE, GL.GL_TRUE); renderer.begin(GL.GL_POINTS); renderer.vertex(pos.x, pos.y, pos.z); renderer.end(); } create() is called once when the program starts, and renderSprites() is called for each sprite (so, pos is unique to each sprite) where the sprites are arranged in a sort-of 3D cube. Unfortunately though, this just renders a few white dots... I suppose that the texture isn't being bound which is why I'm getting white dots. Also, when I draw my sprites on anything other than 0 z-axis, they do not appear -- I read that I need to crease my zfar and znear, but I have no idea how to do this using libgdx (perhaps it's because I'm using ortho projection? What do I use instead?). I know that the texture is usable, since I was able to render it using a SpriteBatch, but I guess I'm not using it properly with OpenGL.

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• Having to check collisions twice per game tic

  - by user22241

  I have vertically moving elevators (3 solid tiles wide) and static solid tiles. Each are separate entities and therefore have their own respective collision routines (to check for, and resolve, collisions with the main character) I check my vertical collisions after characters vertical movements and then horizontal collisions after horizontal movements. The problem is that I want my platform to kill the player if it squashes him from the top, and also if he's on a moving platform (that is moving up) that squashes him into a solid block. Correct behaviour, player on solid blocks being squashed from above by decending elevator Here is what happens. Gravity pushes character into solid block, solid block collision routine corrects characters position and sits him on the solid block which pushes him into the moving elevator, elevator routine then checks for collision and kills player. This assumes I am checking solid blocks first, then elevator collisions. However, if it's the other way around, this happens.... Incorrect behaviour, player on accending elevator gets pushed into solid blocks above Player is on an elevator moving up, gravity pushes him into the elevator, solid block CD routine detects no collision, no action taken. Elevator CD routine detects character has been pushed into elevator by gravity, corrects this by moving character up and sitting him on the elevator and pushes him into the solid blocks above, however the solid block vertical routine has now already run for this tic, so the game continues and the next solid block collision that is encountered is the horizontal routine. This detects a collision and moves the character out of the collision to the left or right of the block which looks odd to say the least (character should get killed here). The only way I've managed to get this working correctly is by running the solid block CD, then the elevator CD, then the solid block CD again straight after. This is clearly wasteful but I can't figure out how else to do this. Any help would be appreciated.

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• How can I perform 2D side-scroller collision checks in a tile-based map?

  - by bill

  I am trying to create a game where you have a player that can move horizontally and jump. It's kind of like Mario but it isn't a side scroller. I'm using a 2D array to implement a tile map. My problem is that I don't understand how to check for collisions using this implementation. After spending about two weeks thinking about it, I've got two possible solutions, but both of them have some problems. Let's say that my map is defined by the following tiles: 0 = sky 1 = player 2 = ground The data for the map itself might look like: 00000 10002 22022 For solution 1, I'd move the player (the 1) a complete tile and update the map directly. This make the collision easy because you can check if the player is touching the ground simply by looking at the tile directly below the player: // x and y are the tile coordinates of the player. The tile origin is the upper-left. if (grid[x][y+1] == 2){ // The player is standing on top of a ground tile. } The problem with this approach is that the player moves in discrete tile steps, so the animation isn't smooth. For solution 2, I thought about moving the player via pixel coordinates and not updating the tile map. This will make the animation much smoother because I have a smaller movement unit per frame. However, this means I can't really accurately store the player in the tile map because sometimes he would logically be between two tiles. But the bigger problem here is that I think the only way to check for collision is to use Java's intersection method, which means the player would need to be at least a single pixel "into" the ground to register collision, and that won't look good. How can I solve this problem?

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• How do I render only part of a texture to a point sprite in OpenGL ES for Android?

  - by nbolton

  Using the libgdx framework, I've figured out how to render a texture to a point sprite. The problem is, it renders the entire texture to the point sprite, where I only want a small part of it (since it's an isometric tile image). Here's a snippet from some demo code I wrote... create() { renderer = new ImmediateModeRenderer(); tiles = Gdx.graphics.newTexture( Gdx.files.internal("data/tiles2.png"), TextureFilter.MipMap, TextureFilter.Linear, TextureWrap.ClampToEdge, TextureWrap.ClampToEdge); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0.6f, 0.7f, 0.9f, 1); Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D); Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL11.GL_POINT_SPRITE_OES); Gdx.gl11.glTexEnvi( GL11.GL_POINT_SPRITE_OES, GL11.GL_COORD_REPLACE_OES, GL11.GL_TRUE); Gdx.gl10.glPointSize(s); tiles.bind(); } render() { Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); renderer.begin(GL10.GL_POINTS); // render 3 point sprites at various 3d points renderer.vertex(-.1f, 0, -.1f); renderer.vertex(0, 0, 0); renderer.vertex(.1f, 0, .1f); // ... more vertices here if needed (one for each sprite) ... renderer.end(); }

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• Character movement on a 2D tile map

  - by Chris Morris

  I'm working at making a HTML5 game. Top down, closest thing I can equate it to is the gameboy zeldas, but open world and no rooms. What I have so far is a procedurally generated map in a multi dimensional array. And a starting position on the map. Along with this I have an array of movable and non movable tile ID's. I also have a class for my player and have him being rendered out in the center of the starting tile. My problem however is getting the movement sorted out for the player. I want to be able to have the character free move around the map (pixel by pixel essentially) ontop of this 2D generated world. Ideally this would allow the user to move around the walk able area of the canvas. this is simple enough for me to do, but I am having problems now moving the world. If the user is 20% from the edge of the screen i want the world to start panning in the direction the player is heading. But I'm rather lacking in ideas of how to do this. I've looked around for some tutorials, but am coming up blank on ideas of how to generate the playable area (zoomed in) and to then move this generated area under the player when they reach near the end of the screen. My current idea was to generate a certain amount of tiles full size to fill the screen and place the player i the middle. Then when the user approaches the edge of the screen start generating the tiles offset by the distance moved and the direction. I can kind of see this working but I really have no idea if this is the best or easiest to code of methods for generating the world. sorry for the lack of code but I'm still just in the theory stages of working this all out.

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• How can I improve my isometric tile-picking algorithm?

  - by Cypher

  I've spent the last few days researching isometric tile-picking algorithms (converting screen-coordinates to tile-coordinates), and have obviously found a lot of the math beyond my grasp. I have come fairly close and what I have is workable, but I would like to improve on this algorithm as it's a little off and seems to pick down and to the right of the mouse pointer. I've uploaded a video to help visualize the current implementation: http://youtu.be/EqwWcq1zuaM My isometric rendering algorithm is based on what is found at this stackoverflow question's answer, with the exception that my x and y axis' are inverted (x increased down-right, while y increased up-right). Here is where I am converting from screen to tiles: // these next few lines convert the mouse pointer position from screen // coordinates to tile-grid coordinates. cameraOffset captures the current // mouse location and takes into consideration the camera's position on screen. System.Drawing.Point cameraOffset = new System.Drawing.Point( 0, 0 ); cameraOffset.X = mouseLocation.X + (int)camera.Left; cameraOffset.Y = ( mouseLocation.Y + (int)camera.Top ); // the camera-aware mouse coordinates are then further converted in an attempt // to select only the "tile" portion of the grid tiles, instead of the entire // rectangle. this algorithm gets close, but could use improvement. mouseTileLocation.X = ( cameraOffset.X + 2 * cameraOffset.Y ) / Global.TileWidth; mouseTileLocation.Y = -( ( 2 * cameraOffset.Y - cameraOffset.X ) / Global.TileWidth ); Things to make note of: mouseLocation is a System.Drawing.Point that represents the screen coordinates of the mouse pointer. cameraOffset is the screen position of the mouse pointer that includes the position of the game camera. mouseTileLocation is a System.Drawing.Point that is supposed to represent the tile coordinates of the mouse pointer. If you check out the above link to youtube, you'll notice that the picking algorithm is off a bit. How can I improve on this?

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• How to make image bigger than the screen to be slideable in the screen in monogame for windows phone 8?

  - by Moses Aprico

  (Idk if my title is correct, because when I google it, there is no related result I guess) I am not sure how to explain it correctly, but I am making a plain 2D, tile based, tactic game in windows phone 8 using monogame. I want to make my map is "slideable". With "slidable" I mean I can draw larger images (in total) than my screen and then slide it so I can view a certain area of the drawn images Example : I have a screen which dimension is 1280x720. I have a 1500x1500px image, which consists of 15 tiles, which is 100x100px each, which each tiles is redrawn each times the "Draw" is called. If the image is larger than the screen, the displayed area will be trimmed and of course, making a 220x780px area that is unseenable. The only way to see all of it is through "sliding" the screen around, so I can see all the area. My question is : How to make that happen? Because in default, the screen is unslideable and the image remains trimmed. Sorry if my question and explanation is not clear enough. Clarify it as much as you like. Thank you.

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• How to determine if a 3D voxel-based room is sealed, efficiently

  - by NigelMan1010

  I've been having some issues with efficiently determining if large rooms are sealed in a voxel-based 3D rooms. I'm at a point where I have tried my hardest to solve the problem without asking for help, but not tried enough to give up, so I'm asking for help. To clarify, sealed being that there are no holes in the room. There are oxygen sealers, which check if the room is sealed, and seal depending on the oxygen input level. Right now, this is how I'm doing it: Starting at the block above the sealer tile (the vent is on the sealer's top face), recursively loop through in all 6 adjacent directions If the adjacent tile is a full, non-vacuum tile, continue through the loop If the adjacent tile is not full, or is a vacuum tile, check if it's adjacent blocks are, recursively. Each time a tile is checked, decrement a counter If the count hits zero, if the last block is adjacent to a vacuum tile, return that the area is unsealed If the count hits zero and the last block is not a vacuum tile, or the recursive loop ends (no vacuum tiles left) before the counter is zero, the area is sealed If the area is not sealed, run the loop again with some changes: Checking adjacent blocks for "breathable air" tile instead of a vacuum tile Instead of using a decrementing counter, continue until no adjacent "breathable air" tiles are found. Once loop is finished, set each checked block to a vacuum tile. Here's the code I'm using: http://pastebin.com/NimyKncC The problem: I'm running this check every 3 seconds, sometimes a sealer will have to loop through hundreds of blocks, and a large world with many oxygen sealers, these multiple recursive loops every few seconds can be very hard on the CPU. I was wondering if anyone with more experience with optimization can give me a hand, or at least point me in the right direction. Thanks a bunch.

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• Combining pathfinding with global AI objectives

  - by V_Programmer

  I'm making a turn-based strategy game using Java and LibGDX. Now I want to code the AI. I haven't written the AI code yet. I've simply designed it. The AI will have two components, one focused in tactics and resource management (create troops, determine who have strategical advantage, detect important objectives, etc) and a individual component, focused in assign the work to each unit, examine its possibilites and move the unit. Now I'm facing an important problem. The map where the action take place is a grid-based map. Each terrain has different movement cost. I read about pathfinding and I think A* is a very good option to determine a good route between two points. However, imagine I have an unit with movement = 5 (i.e, it can move 5 tiles of movement cost = 1). My tactical AI has found an objective at a distance d = 20 tiles (Manhattan distance) from my unit. My problem is the following: the unit won't be able to reach the objective in one turn. So the AI will have to store a list of position and execute them in various turns. I don't know how to solve this. PS. In my unit code, I have a list called "selectionMarks" which stores all the possible places where the unit can go in this turn. This places are calculed recursively using a "getSelectionMarks" function. Any help is appreciated :D

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• 2D Smooth Turning in a Tile-Based Game

  - by ApoorvaJ

  I am working on a 2D top-view grid-based game. A ball that rolls on the grid made up of different tiles. The tiles interact with the ball in a variety of ways. I am having difficulty cleanly implementing the turning tile. The image below represents a single tile in the grid, which turns the ball by a right angle. If the ball rolls in from the bottom, it smoothly changes direction and rolls to the right. If it rolls in from the right, it is turned smoothly to the bottom. If the ball rolls in from top or left, its trajectory remains unchanged by the tile. The tile shouldn't change the magnitude of the velocity of the ball - only change its direction. The ball has Velocity and Position vectors, and the tile has Position and Dimension vectors. I have already implemented this, but the code is messy and buggy. What is an elegant way to achieve this, preferably by modification of the ball's Velocity vector by a formula?

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• Is white the best base color to start with when planning to shade sprites within Unity?

  - by SpartanDonut

  I'm looking into prototyping a game in Unity which will consist of solid square sprites / tiles. I figure I can represent different types of objects with different colors for each of the tiles in the game. I figure that I can import a single square sprite and shade it appropriately in Unity as opposed to imported squares of many different colors. My experience with adjusting the hue and saturation within Photoshop shows that white is not an easy color to change as things that are white often stay white. My testing in Unity shows that I can change the "color" of a sprite to anything other than white and the sprite is seemingly shaded appropriately, despite what I would have thought given my Photoshop experience. Since white objects do seem to take on the appropriate color shading when changed within Unity my gut tells me that this is the best base color to begin with, meaning that I can import a single white square sprite and simply adjust the color to represent different objects and object states. Is a white sprite actually the best color sprite to begin with and why does something like this work in Unity as opposed to adjusting the hue and saturation within Photoshop?

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• Map rendering Libgdx Java

  - by user3165683

  Ok, so I am trying to create a 2D non-movable random tiled map. This is what I have so far: private void generateTile(){ System.out.print("tiletry1"); while(loadedTiles != 8100){ System.out.print("tiletry"); Texture currentTile = null; int tileX = 0; int tileY = 0; if (tileX == 120); tileY = 16; tileX = 0; game.batch.begin(); switch(MathUtils.random(2)){ case 0: //game.batch.draw(tile1, tileX, tileY); System.out.print("tile1"); currentTile = tile1; break; case 1: //game.batch.draw(tile2, tileX, tileY); System.out.print("tile2"); currentTile = tile2; break; case 2: //game.batch.draw(tile3, tileX, tileY); System.out.print("tile3"); currentTile = tile3; break; } tileX+=16; loadedTiles ++; game.batch.draw(currentTile, tileX, tileY); game.batch.end(); } } However, I can't see any of the tiles and the screen just looks green. This method is above my render method which I have: camera.update(); batch.setProjectionMatrix(camera.combined); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); game.batch.begin(); //other render stuff Why am I not able to see the tiles?

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• How do I get mouse x / y of the world plane in Unity?

  - by Discipol

  I am trying to make a tiled landscape. The terrain itself is not made from tiles but the world has a grid which I define. I would like to place boxes/rectangles which snap to this grid, at runtime, but in order for me to do that I must get a projection from the user screen to the real-world coordinates. I have tried various examples using the Ray class but nothing worked. It compiles and outputs a constant value no matter where I put the mouse. I have tried to add some tiles and try to detect them but no luck. I also tried with one plane as big as my world but still no luck. I am using C# but even a JS version would be helpful. This technique involves calculating which tile the mouse is under by the x and y positions. Perhaps detecting which tile itself is being pointed to would be a simpler task, at which point I can just retrieve its i/j properties. Update: I got it working thanks to some answers, but the ball freaks out towards the far end of the plane. Why is this? https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9pqnl30lm6uwm6h/AACc2JcbW16z6PuHFLLfCAX6a

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• [C#][XNA] Draw() 20,000 32 by 32 Textures or 1 Large Texture 20,000 Times

  - by Rudi

  The title may be confusing - sorry about that, it's a poor summary. Here's my dilemma. I'm programming in C# using the .NET Framework 4, and aiming to make a tile-based game with XNA. I have one large texture (256 pixels by 4096 pixels). Remember this is a tile-based game, so this texture is so massive only because it contains many tiles, which are each 32 pixels by 32 pixels. I think the experts will definitely know what a tile-based game is like. The orientation is orthogonal (like a chess board), not isometric. In the Game.Draw() method, I have two choices, one of which will be incredibly more efficient than the other. Choice/Method #1: Semi-Pseudocode: public void Draw() { // map tiles are drawn left-to-right, top-to-bottom for (int x = 0; x < mapWidth; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < mapHeight; y++) { SpriteBatch.Draw( MyLargeTexture, // One large 256 x 4096 texture new Rectangle(x, y, 32, 32), // Destination rectangle - ignore this, its ok new Rectangle(x, y, 32, 32), // Notice the source rectangle 'cuts out' 32 by 32 squares from the texture corresponding to the loop Color.White); // No tint - ignore this, its ok } } } Caption: So, effectively, the first method is referencing one large texture many many times, each time using a small rectangle of this large texture to draw the appropriate tile image. Choice/Method #2: Semi-Pseudocode: public void Draw() { // map tiles are drawn left-to-right, top-to-bottom for (int x = 0; x < mapWidth; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < mapHeight; y++) { Texture2D tileTexture = map.GetTileTexture(x, y); // Getting a small 32 by 32 texture (different each iteration of the loop) SpriteBatch.Draw( tileTexture, new Rectangle(x, y, 32, 32), // Destination rectangle - ignore this, its ok new Rectangle(0, 0, tileTexture.Width, tileTexture.Height), // Notice the source rectangle uses the entire texture, because the entire texture IS 32 by 32 Color.White); // No tint - ignore this, its ok } } } Caption: So, effectively, the second method is drawing many small textures many times. The Question: Which method and why? Personally, I would think it would be incredibly more efficient to use the first method. If you think about what that means for the tile array in a map (think of a large map with 2000 by 2000 tiles, let's say), each Tile object would only have to contain 2 integers, for the X and Y positions of the source rectangle in the one large texture - 8 bytes. If you use method #2, however, each Tile object in the tile array of the map would have to store a 32by32 Texture - an image - which has to allocate memory for the R G B A pixels 32 by 32 times - is that 4096 bytes per tile then? So, which method and why? First priority is speed, then memory-load, then efficiency or whatever you experts believe.

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• Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall.  That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions.  Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered.  A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8.  It will also run natively on multiple cores.  They mentioned that they have run it on up to 64 cores to this point.  The phones as you might expect will at least start as dual core.  If you remember there were metrics saying that Windows Phone 7 performed operations faster on a single core than other platforms did with dual cores.  The metrics they showed here indicate that Windows Phone 8 runs faster on comparable dual core hardware than other platforms. New Screen Resolutions Screen resolution has never been an issue for me, but it has been a criticism of Windows Phone 7 in the media.  Windows Phone 8 will supports three screen resolutions: WVGA 800 x 480, WXGA 1280 x 768, and 720 1280x720.  Hopefully this makes pixel counters a little happier. MicroSD Support This was one of my pet peeves when I got my Samsung Focus. With Windows Phone 8 the operating system will support adding MicroSD cards after initial setup.  Of course this is dependent on the hardware company on implementing it, but I think we have seen that even feature phone manufacturers have not had a problem supporting this in the past. NFC NFC has been an anticipated feature for some time.  What Microsoft showed today included the fact that they didn’t just want it to be for the phone.  There is cross platform NFC functionality between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.  The demos , while possibly a bit fanciful, showed would could be achieved even in a retail environment.  We are getting closer and closer to a Minority Report world with these technologies. Wallet Windows Phone 8 isn’t the first platform to have a wallet concept.  What they have done to differentiate themselves is to make it sot that it is not dependent on a SIM type chip like other platforms.  They have also expanded the concept beyond just banks to other types of credits such as airline miles. Nokia Mapping People have been envious of the Lumia phones having the Nokia mapping software.  Now all Windows Phone 8 devices will use NavTeq data and will have the capability to run in an offline fashion.  This is a major step forward from the Bing “touch for the next turn” maps. IT Administration The lack of features for enterprise administration and deployment was a complaint even before the Windows Phone 7 was released.  With the Windows Phone 8 release such features as Bitlocker and Secure boot will be baked into the OS. We will also have the ability to privately sign and distribute applications. Changing Start Screen Joe Belfiore made a big deal about this aspect of the new release.  Users will have more color themes available to them and the live tiles will be highly customizable. You will have the ability to resize and organize the tiles in a more dynamic way.  This allows for less important tiles or ones with less information to be made smaller.  And There Is More So what other tidbits came out of the presentation?  Later this summer the API for WP8 will be available.  There will be developer events coming to a city near you.  Another announcement of interest to developers is the ability to write applications at a native code level.  This is a boon for game developers and those who need highly efficient applications. As a topper on the cake there was mention of in app payment. On the consumer side we also found out that all updates will be available over the air.  Along with this came the fact that Microsoft will support all devices with updates for at least 18 month and you will be able to subscribe for early updates.  Update coming for Windows Phone 7.5 customers to WP7.8.  The main enhancement will be the new live tile features.  The big bonus is that the update will bypass the carriers.  I would assume though that you will be brought up to date with all previous patches that your carrier may not have released. There is so much more, but that is enough for one post.  Needless to say, EXCITING! del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 8,WP8,Windows Phone 7,WP7,Announcements,Microsoft

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• Key Windows Phone Development Concepts

  - by Tim Murphy

  As I am doing more development in and out of the enterprise arena for Windows Phone I decide I would study for the 70-599 test.  I generally take certification tests as a way to force me to dig deeper into a technology.  Between the development and studying I decided it would be good to put a post together of key development features in Windows Phone 7 environment.  Contrary to popular belief the launch of Windows Phone 8 will not obsolete Windows Phone 7 development.  With the launch of 7.8 coming shortly and people who will remain on 7.X for the foreseeable future there are still consumers needing these apps so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. PhoneApplicationService This is a class that every Windows Phone developer needs to become familiar with.  When it comes to application state this is your go to repository.  It also contains events that help with management of your application’s lifecycle.  You can access it like the following code sample. 1: PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["ValidUser"] = userResult; DeviceNetworkInformation This class allows you to determine the connectivity of the device and be notified when something changes with that connectivity.  If you are making web service calls you will want to check here before firing off. I have found that this class doesn’t actually work very well for determining if you have internet access.  You are better of using the following code where IsConnectedToInternet is an App level property. private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e){ // Validate user access if (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None) { IsConnectedToInternet = true; } else { IsConnectedToInternet = false; } NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged += new NetworkAddressChangedEventHandler(NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged);}void NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged(object sender, EventArgs e){ IsConnectedToInternet = (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType != Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.None);} Push Notification Push notification allows your application to receive notifications in a way that reduces the application’s power needs. This MSDN article is a good place to get the basics of push notification, but you can see the essential concept in the diagram below.  There are three types of push notification: toast, Tile and raw.  The first two work regardless of the state of the application where as raw messages are discarded if your application is not running.   Live Tiles Live tiles are one of the main differentiators of the Windows Phone platform.  They allow users to find information at a glance from their start screen without navigating into individual apps.  Knowing how to implement them can be a great boost to the attractiveness of your application. The simplest step-by-step explanation for creating live tiles is here. Local Database While your application really only has Isolated Storage as a data store there are some ways of giving you database functionality to develop against.  There are a number of open source ORM style solutions.  Probably the best and most native way I have found is to use LINQ to SQL.  It does take a significant amount of setup, but the ease of use once it is configured is worth the cost.  Rather than repeat the full concepts here I will point you to a post that I wrote previously. Tasks (Bing, Email) Leveraging built in features of the Windows Phone platform is an easy way to add functionality that would be expensive to develop on your own.  The classes that you need to make yourself familiar with are BingMapsDirectionsTask and EmailComposeTask.  This will allow your application to supply directions and give the user an email path to relay information to friends and associates. Event model Because of the ability for users to switch quickly to switch to other apps or the home screen is just one reason why knowing the Windows Phone event model is important.  You need to be able to save data so that if a user gets a phone call they can come back to exactly where they were in your application.  This means that you will need to handle such events as Launching, Activated, Deactivated and Closing at an application level.  You will probably also want to get familiar with the OnNavigatedTo and OnNavigatedFrom events at the page level.  These will give you an opportunity to save data as a user navigates through your app. Summary This is just a small portion of the concepts that you will use while building Windows Phone apps, but these are some of the most critical.  With the launch of Windows Phone 8 this list will probably expand.  Take the time to investigate these topics further and try them out in your apps. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 7,Windows Phone,WP7,Software Development,70-599

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• How to tile a UIWebView? (iPhone)

  - by franky

  I need to use tiles with a UIWebview to improve the rendering and scrolling of the content. I tried to find some info in Google but it seems that there are no examples or technical info about this subject. I am doing some test with CATiledLayer class without luck... Basically, I want to replicate the same that Mobile Safari does with the content of a website. You can see how Safari makes tiles when you see the squared background. Any help will be very welcome! Thanks in advance, Franky

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• Spring redirect: prefix issue

  - by Javi

  Hello, I have an application which uses Spring 3. I have a view resolver which builds my views based on a String. So in my controllers I have methods like this one. @RequestMapping(...) public String method(){ //Some proccessing return "tiles:tileName" } I need to return a RedirectView to solve the duplicate submission due to updating the page in the browser, so I have thought to use Spring redirect: prefix. The problem is that it only redirects when I user a URL alter the prefix (not with a name a resolver can understand). I wanted to do something like this: @RequestMapping(...) public String method(){ //Some proccessing return "redirect:tiles:tileName" } Is there any way to use RedirectView with the String (the resolvable view name) I get from the every controller method? Thanks

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• The most efficient method of drawing multiple quads in OpenGL

  - by CPatton

  I'm not very keen with OpenGL and I was wondering if someone could give me some insight on this. I'm a 'seasoned' programmer, I've read the redbook about VBOs and the like, but I was wondering from a more experienced person about the best/most efficient way of achieving this. I've been producing this 2d tile-based game engine to be used in several projects. I have a class called "ScreenObject" which is mainly composed of a Dictionary<Point, Tile> The Point key is to show where to render the Tile on the screen, and the Tile contains one or more textures to be drawn at that point. This ScreenObject is where the tiles will be modified, deleted, added, etc.. My original method of drawing the tiles in the testing I've done was to iterate through the ScreenObject and draw each quad at each location separately. From what I've read, this is a massive waste of resources. It wasn't horribly slow in the testing, but after I've completed the animation classes and effect classes, I'm sure it would be extremely slow. And one last thing, if you wouldn't mind.. As I said before, the Tile class can contain multiple textures to be drawn at the Point location on the screen. I recognize possibly two options for me here. Either add a quad at that location for each texture to be drawn, or, somehow.. use a multiple texture for the same quad (if it's possible). Even if each tile contained one texture only, that would be 64 quads to be drawn on the screen. Most of the tiles will contain 2-5 textures, so the number of total quads would increase dramatically with this method. Would it be feasible to add a quad for each new texture, or am I ignoring a better way to do this? Just need some help understanding this if you don't mind :) I've tried to be as concise as possible, and I'd greatly appreciate any responses.. and even some criticism. Programming is often a learning process and one who develops seems to never stops learning. Thanks for your time.

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• WinRT ControlTemplate ItemsPanel

  - by user1427149

  I'm new to WinRT and am trying to create a standard gridview which has a group heading with a number of tiles beneath it. That bit is easy. I'm trying to modify it so that beneath the grid of tiles I can also add a footer using the containers style: <GridView x:Name="itemGridView" AutomationProperties.AutomationId="ItemGridView" AutomationProperties.Name="Grouped Items" Margin="116,0,40,46" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource groupedItemsViewSource}}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource Project200x200ItemTemplate}" SelectionMode="None" IsItemClickEnabled="True" ItemClick="ItemView_ItemClick"> <GridView.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VirtualizingStackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"/> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </GridView.ItemsPanel> <GridView.GroupStyle> <GroupStyle> <GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Grid Margin="1,0,0,6"> <Button AutomationProperties.Name="Group Title" Content="{Binding Name}" Click="Header_Click" Style="{StaticResource TextButtonStyle}" FontWeight="{Binding IsSelected, ConverterParameter=FontWeight, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToFontWeightConverter}}" /> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate> <GroupStyle.Panel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VariableSizedWrapGrid Background="Red" Orientation="Vertical" Margin="0,0,40,0" /> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </GroupStyle.Panel> <GroupStyle.ContainerStyle> <Style TargetType="GroupItem"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate> <StackPanel> <ContentPresenter/> <ItemsPresenter/> <TextBlock Text="*** End of group ***"/> </StackPanel> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </GroupStyle.ContainerStyle> </GroupStyle> </GridView.GroupStyle> </GridView> This almost works but after adding the container style, the grid of tiles no longer shows... the group header and 'End of group' textblock is showing, but I've lost the tile grid. Can anyone spot what I'm doing wrong...?

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• Is there a faster alternative to using textures in XNA?

  - by Matthew Bowen

  I am writing a map editing program for a 2D game using XNA. To create a Texture2D for all of the tiles that a map requires takes too long. Are there any alternatives to using textures for drawing with XNA? I attempted to create just one texture per tile set instead of a texture for every tile in a tile set, but there is a limit to the size of textures and I could not fit all the tiles of a tile set into one texture. Currently the program contains all the would-be textures in memory as Bitmap objects. Is there a way to simply draw a Bitmap object to the screen in XNA? I have searched but I cannot find any information on this. This approach would avoid having to create textures altogether, however any tinting or effects I would have to do to the bitmap directly. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks

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• Update tile notifcation with XML returned by web service

  - by tempid

  I have a Metro app in C# & XAML. The tile is updated periodically and I've used WebAPI to serve the tile notification XML. So far so good. I was then told that I cannot use WebAPI as the server that I was planning to host it on does not have .NET 4.5. No plans to install it anytime soon either. I had to change the WebAPI to a plain old Web service (.NET 3.5) which does the same thing - return tile notification XML. I've enabled HTTP-GET (I know, security concern) and was able to invoke the webservice like this - http://server/TileNotifications.asmx/[email protected] But ever since I made the switch, the tiles are not being updated. I've checked Fiddler and made sure the app is hitting the webservice and the XML is being returned correctly. But the tiles are not updated. If I replace it with the WebAPI, the tiles are updated. Do I need to do anything special with the web services? like decorating the web method with a custom attribute? Here's my web service code - [WebMethod] public XmlDocument GetTileData(string user) { // snip var xml = new XmlDocument(); xml.LoadXml(string.Format(@"<tile> <visual> <binding template='TileWideSmallImageAndText02'> <image id='1' src='http://server/images/{0}_wide.png'/> <text id='1'>Custom Field : {1}/text> <text id='2'>Custom Field : {2}</text> <text id='3'>Custom Field : {3}</text> </binding> <binding template='TileSquarePeekImageAndText01'> <image id='1' src='http://server/images/{0}_square.png'/> <text id='1'>Custom Field</text> <text id='2'>{1}</text> </binding> </visual> </tile>", value1, value2, value3, value4)); return xml; }

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• How to tile a UIWebView?

  - by franky

  I need to use tiles with a UIWebview to improve the rendering and scrolling of the content. I tried to find some info in Google but it seems that there are no examples or technical info about this subject. I am doing some test with CATiledLayer class without luck... Basically, I want to replicate the same that Mobile Safari does with the content of a website. You can see how Safari makes tiles when you see the squared background. Any help will be very welcome! Thanks in advance, Franky

  Read the article

• Help with C# program design implementation: multiple array of lists or a better way?

  - by Bob

  I'm creating a 2D tile-based RPG in XNA and am in the initial design phase. I was thinking of how I want my tile engine to work and came up with a rough sketch. Basically I want a grid of tiles, but at each tile location I want to be able to add more than one tile and have an offset. I'd like this so that I could do something like add individual trees on the world map to give more flair. Or set bottles on a bar in some town without having to draw a bunch of different bar tiles with varying bottles. But maybe my reach is greater than my grasp. I went to implement the idea and had something like this in my Map object: List<Tile>[,] Grid; But then I thought about it. Let's say I had a world map of 200x200, which would actually be pretty small as far as RPGs go. That would amount to 40,000 Lists. To my mind I think there has to be a better way. Now this IS pre-mature optimization. I don't know if the way I happen to design my maps and game will be able to handle this, but it seems needlessly inefficient and something that could creep up if my game gets more complex. One idea I have is to make the offset and the multiple tiles optional so that I'm only paying for them when needed. But I'm not sure how I'd do this. A multiple array of objects? object[,] Grid; So here's my criteria: A 2D grid of tile locations Each tile location has a minimum of 1 tile, but can optionally have more Each extra tile can optionally have an x and y offset for pinpoint placement Can anyone help with some ideas for implementing such a design (don't need it done for me, just ideas) while keeping memory usage to a minimum? If you need more background here's roughly what my Map and Tile objects amount to: public struct Map { public Texture2D Texture; public List<Rectangle> Sources; //Source Rectangles for where in Texture to get the sprite public List<Tile>[,] Grid; } public struct Tile { public int Index; //Where in Sources to find the source Rectangle public int X, Y; //Optional offsets }

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