I’m playing around with the Farseer Physics Engine these days and needed to draw the “collision boundaries”. These are called Geom (Geometries) in Farseer language and these are made up by Vertices.
Cameron Albert have already made code to do this and I have already used it in my Farseer Physics Simple Samples so that were an easy one.

Then I ran into some problems/confusion with the “position” of elements. Basically it was due to that Farseer’s position is at the center of an element, whereas Silverlight’s version of position is at the top left corner. This is actually not that confusing as it is written here, but it can quickly become pretty confusing, at least I think :)

More...

I just saw a little tweet on Twitter about this very good blog post. Here’s a quote from it, see the link at the end if you want to read the whole post, it’s really good reading.

“[Veteran indie game creator Edmund McMillen, known for his work on 2005 IGF Grand Prize winner Gish, Time Fcuk, and Super Meat Boy for WiiWare, shares his opinions and manifesto on making indie games, with 24 clear do-s and don't-s to make your art thrive.]

One of the most common questions I'm asked in interviews is, "Do you have any advice for independent game developers who are new to the scene, or tips for developers in general?" Well, I actually answered it this time: I came up with this list of indie do-s and don't-s.
Now, I'm going to make clear that I'm not perfect and I'm sure as the years go by this list will change. But from where I stand right now, having made independent art/games for a living for the past 10 years, the advice below is crucial to all indie game designers, and all artists for that matter.
Also note that when I refer to a "designer" or "artist," I include programmers. All aspects of art have a fine balance of the technical and creative; just because programming is viewed as a technical field does not mean it is void of creativity. The creative is visible in the work as a whole rather than in the specifics. Light and shadow are vital technical aspects of illustration, but without creativity the piece is nothing more then a photocopy of the subject, void of any personal touch or presence.
This is a list for the creative designer who strives to be independent. This isn't advice on how to monetize your Flash game or survive financially by copying existing trends and juicing the public for their cash. This is a list for artists who are driven by the desire for creative freedom and/or to "just make some cool shit people will love."”

Read more here: Opinion: Indie Game Design Do-s and Don't-s: A Manifesto

The 16. Dec. 2009 I did a talk about game development in Silverlight 3 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Thanks to all the people showing up, hope you had some good hours too :)

One thing that I found especially cool were that one of the attendees was a 10-12 year old boy (he brought his dad of course :) ). He already did a game in Game Maker he told me, very cool!
To the dad of this boy: I told you about some “kids programming language” that I couldn’t remember the name of. I goggled it this morning and found it: http://phrogram.com/kpl.aspx it might be a good start into the world of programming.
The other thing I told you about were GarageGames, take a look at this it comes with a WYSIWYG-like IDE, but it also have it’s own scripting language (similar to javascript) that you can code in. For more info take a look at it here: http://www.torquepowered.com/products/torque-2d

Slides and demos
I have put up the 4 demos, 1 Physics Helper demo for Blend and the powerpoint file, all in a zip file which can be downloaded from here: http://laumania.net/downloads/GameDevelopmentInSilverlight.zip

For the ones who are interested here is the list of, more or less game related, blogs/persons I read/follow.

• http://www.farseergames.com/blog/
• http://www.cameronalbert.com/
• http://blogs.silverarcade.com/silverlight-games-101/
• http://www.andybeaulieu.com/
• http://blogs.silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/default.aspx – The book we talked about is written by this guy, Mike Snow, read more here
• http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/52.aspx

Again I would like to thank people who came and hope you found my talk interesting and learned something.

- Enjoy and marry xmas :)

I will be doing a talk about the basis of game development in Silverlight 3 on the 16th of December 2009.  Please note that the talk will be in danish!

After my talk there will be an open discussion about the subject “Game development in Silverlight” .

For more information and registration see : http://cnug-dec2009.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there.

- Enjoy! 

Today I just discovered, from a Facebook/Twitt by Scott Hanselman, that Lenovo had published ATI drivers that apparently should make my switchable graphics work on my Lenovo T500.

I downloaded the driver from here: ThinkPad Switchable Graphics Driver for Windows 7 - ThinkPad R400, T400, T500, W500

When I tried to install it, it kept crashing on me. I tried all sort of things (reboot, changes in BIOS etc) but nothing worked. (I even asked Win7 to try to find a solution for my, but that didn’t help either – who would have guessed ;) )

So, I googled it. I can’t remember how exactly I found out, but the problem seems to be related to new version of the MFC80U.DLL. Some say it after they installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and some say it because you DON’T have VS2005 installed. The first could be the reason in my case.

The why to resolve this, in my case (and others apparently) is to install an update from Microsoft.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961894

This will guide you to this site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=KB961894&DownloadId=4445

From where I downloaded the: ENU (vcredist_x64.exe)
As I’m running Win7 64bit.

After I installed the update/fix, I could install the Catalyst drivers + software and I were a happy geek (not a nerd, as that just isn’t cool! I just learned that here Hanselminutes on 9 - The Nerds of Tomorrow)

Hope this helps somebody out there.

UPDATE: The installer started up and got the place where I took the screenshot above… now 15 min. later it’s still there… so it’s not working 100% yet. I’ll get back if I get it installed and working.

UPDATE 2: I finally got the drivers installed yesterday. Can't say exactly what I did, but what I know is that I went to BIOS and activated the PCI Express card. Then went into win7 and where then able to install the drivers. (I also found out that I had actually got some Catalyst drivers installed before, which I then uninstalled before reinstalling the new ones). Now the drivers should be installed correctly, but when I try to switch the graphics card, it just "blinks" once, and VERY quickly, but nothing happens. I'm still on the integrated card...

UPDATE 3: Lenovo update have just released an update for the graphics drivers, that Lenovo System Update told me about. I installed it, my screen died, I restarted my T500 and after that all worked fine :)

- Enjoy!

I know, this is not related to ASP.NET, Silverlight, game development or anything I normally blog about. I just wanted to share a site I found the other day, as it has a pretty sweet concept and some nice graphics.

http://customhorror.net is the site I’m talking about.

The guy behind this, David, is making a cute/funny/sad/angry/etc. monster, EVERYDAY! And believe it or not, but most of them are pretty good. You can then buy them on T-shirts, get them framed, on batches, on cups etc. You can even get the EPS file and use it for commercial use with a small license fee.

Check it out, it a pretty cool little project :)

- Enjoy!

Yes sorry, this isn’t Silverlight related at all, but it’s still nice to know, so I thought I would share.

I am currently doing a website that uses a “fancy” menu with a lot of jQuery. It were all working fine, until I added Lightbox2. Well, the product it self is working fine and is actually very nice, but when used together with jQuery, at least the combination of the versions I were using of both, it causes problems – “Error: 'null' is null or not an object”.

To make a long story short, I found the problem. A script that comes from the lightbox2 overwrites the jQuery “$” sign, which isn’t good and makes this error appear. Luckily there is a very easy fix for this.

Replace “$()” with “jQuery()” – and now your running again, at least I were. Hope this helps you too.

- Enjoy!

It’s been awhile since I have posted anything about Little Longhorn, but this doesn’t mean that it’s put on hold. Actually the game is doing really well and we make a lot of progress. Let me give you the high lights.

Extra developer
We are now two developers on the game, which is really great as you can discuss things with another person who it 100% inside the code, just like my self. This is really great and makes the game come along even faster.

New code-base
As the new developer joined, we decided that we would start all over on the code, both so the new developer could be more into the new code, but also because I learned a lot doing the first version of the code. So it were time to start over and have a clean start, of cause with the knowledge of the first version in the back of my head.

Skipping the “Learning in public” 
As I said when I started this, “it might fail”, and it did :). Well, I can see now that the code very fast becomes too complex to describe to people en blog posts or in video’s, especially, when I don’t want to game to be all open-source. So as a result of this, I just skipped the “learning in public”-thing completely. The good thing about this, is that I can now use more time on actually coding on the game.
Instead I will give you smaller updates on the game, like this blog post.

Just wanted to let the people following this game have a little update on how it’s doing, and to sum it up, it’s doing fine – very fine!

- Enjoy!

My conversion of the XNA starter kit to Silverlight, using SilverSprite, have been accepted into the Silverlight Community Gallery. This is really great and I hope it helps somebody out there. You can view it and download the source from the link above.

You can see my original post about the conversion here: http://laumania.net/post/Porting-XNA-starter-kit-Platformere2809d-to-Silverlight-(SilverSprite).aspx

- Enjoy!

I read this post by Bill Reiss the other day and found out about this marketplace thing that Xbox have. (I don't have an Xbox myself so didn't knew anything about the community actually. I have a PS3). After reading this, I got a little interested in XNA and thereby SilverSprite, as I can see potential in this new “Xbox Live Independent Games” thing. I haven't done any XNA or SilverSprite before, only knew very little about both.
So, I decided to take a look at it as it might be interesting to do my current game in XNA and Silverlight. So I started to do a little research.

First I started by follow be beginning of this guide and eventually got Xna game studio 3.1 installed. Then I downloaded the latest changeset for SilverSprite (which supported silverlight 3), so I had the source for that on my pc.
I created an default xna windows project 3.1, so I had something to try things on. The code that comes with this default project were pretty easy to understand and I quickly made a small "game" where a sprite were sliding around the screen and pressing the space button changed the background color. Pretty simple and easy. I got that working in Silverlight using SilverSprite pretty fast, so I thought I needed something a little more complex.

I saw that Xna Game Studio 3.1 comes with a starter kit “Platformer”, so I decided to give that a try. After about 4 hours I had a playable version of “Platformer” running in Silverlight and Windows with the exact same code base – wow! At first 4 hours might sound like much to you, but I needed to change stuff in the Platformer game code and in the SilverSprite core to make this work and if you keep in mind that I haven’t worked with either Xna or SilverSprite before, I think it pretty fast :)

Play
You can try out the game here (Warning: It’s the same assets as in the XNA version, so the game is about 9 MB) : http://silverlight.laumania.net/platformer/

Source
You can get the entire source from here: http://silverlight.laumania.net/platformer/platformer1.zip

Keep in mind that to be able to build the source, you need Xna Game Studio 3.1 and Silverlight 3 Tools installed.

To see all the things I have changed/implemented search for “laumania” in the entire solution. I have made minor comments. The SilverSprite version in this source, is a modified one as stated. I have submitted the changes as patches to the SilverSprite, so they will be in the original source too soon I guess.

My experience of using Xna and SilverSprite were actually really good and I decided to give my current project a try in Xna and SilverSprite :)

- Enjoy!