Laumania.net

Lenovo T500 + Latest Switchable Graphics drivers = crash!

Mads — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:33:00 +0100

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...

- Enjoy!

Customhorror.net – Go get a monster

Mads — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:22:00 +0100

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!

jQuery - Error: 'null' is null or not an object

Mads — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:44:23 +0100

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!

Little Longhorn – Part 4 – A fresh start

Mads — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:56:55 +0100

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!

XNA “Platformer” added to the Silverlight community gallery

Mads — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:42:47 +0100

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!

Porting XNA starter kit "Platformer” to Silverlight (SilverSprite)

Mads — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:58:00 +0100

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!

Little Longhorn – Part 3 – Collision, Detection and Selection (Help needed)

Mads — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:20:00 +0100

As you might already know, I’m currently trying to get some of the basic stuff implemented for an “Tower defense”-genre (TD) game into Little Longhorn. I’m making progress, but have now run into a little problem. In this blog post I will try to explain which features that are coursing the trouble and hopefully, after I got some input/help from some of you guys out there, I can also post the solution for others to learn from and use.
Let me also make it clear that I’m not asking for complete code samples provided by one of you guys, I’m asking for a good dialog about this problem and different possible solutions for it. I will figure out the code myself, it’s the “thoughts behind” or what you want to call it I’m after here, some inspiration you could say. Hoping for some good input :)

WARNING: This post includes my own hand-made drawings! :)

Course of the problem(s)
Well, the main reason to this/these problems are that Little Longhorn is a little different than a normal TD. In normal TD games I see a lot of use of the mouse to interact with the game, Little Longhorn doesn’t use a mouse for anything. You are now thinking, “But how are you going to place towers, upgrade them etc?”. Instead of a mouse, you have an character you play in the game. This little guy is controlled by the arrow keys at the moment. This little player character will walk around, avoiding being hit by enemies, while he collect gold and build new towers, controlled by you of course. So you actually have to “walk” to where you want your tower and then build it there. It might sound weird to you, if you are use to play the standard online TD games, but believe me, this works and adds a hole different aspect to the game.
The above is what course the troubles I’m having here, but let me explain what I’m trying to archive and then you might see the problem.

The actual problem(s)
The following is what I need to have implemented in the game.

“Normal” collision
I need basic collision in the game. This is actually almost in place in the code and is actually working ok. My implementation is pretty similar to what Joel Neubeck describes in this article, I just have it all divided up in classes etc, but the basics are the same. This collision mechanism should be used to detect is the player is colliding with an enemy.

(Yes, I made this drawing myself :) Keep in mind that all graphics you see on screenshots, drawings etc, are all just “temp” graphics, so don’t get confused if an enemy looks like an alien in one image and a beetle in another one)

This is the most common collision (and maybe the mechanism that all the rest of the features can use? I’ll get back to that later). GameObject A intersect with GameObject B, and a "Collide()” method is called on both GameObject’s which they can act upon.

“Block” collision
At some point in the game, I need to be able to place objects that that player can’t go through, ex. a rock. This is essential the same collision as the “normal” one, I just can’t figure out how to implement it? All my “GameObjects” moves around using the normal “Vector/Velocity” approach (if you don’t know this approach Joel Neubeck describes this too in this article series). I have tried setting the Velocity equals to an “Zero” when the player hits a “rock” (actually i tried it on an enemy just for testing purpose), but it didn’t have the right effect :)

“Detection” of enemies
One of the basic features in a TD game, is the towers ability to detect enemies in a range and shoot at them. I have this implemented in the game right now actually, but it’s done by using the “normal” collision detection described above. This works “ok”, but is it the “right” way to do it? What I have done now is that I have given the towers a big “CollisionSphere”, which is actually a collision object, but act as a “range of sight” for the tower. Is this the right way to do it? I mean, at the moment, when the enemy is inside the towers “range” a collision is happening in every tick of the game. Is that wise or could this be done in another and better way?

“Selection” of elements
As stated earlier you don’t have a mouse in this game, all interaction is done through your player character. In the game you can only build towers on special elements that I (the level editor) put in there. This mean that when you want to build a tower to need to move your player character close to one of these “building” spots, hit “space” and a build-menu will show up. You choose the type of tower you want to build, and hit “space” again and your tower is build on that spot(this isn’t actually implemented in the game yet). The same approach is used when you want to delete or upgrade a tower. Move close to it and hit “space” and the options for this tower will appear.
The problem for me, at this point in time, is this “selection” mechanism. Basically, in my head that is, this is also a kind of “collision”, but at the same time it’s conceptually not, because nothing is actually colliding logically.

Let’s sum it up
All the above can somehow to boiled down to being “collision" related. I just can’t figure out how I should implement these features. I have tried out different things but nothing seems to be “good”. In my mind all of the above should be able to be archived by using the same “intersection” algorithms that I use already and then adjust the behavior of the colliding objects properly, it’s just not that simple. I’m pretty empty on good idea for how to implement this, so all input are welcome. Please let me know if you need more information about something and I will gladly give it to you.

You can get the current source code of the game here. The game is not intended to be an open source game, but I have decided to share the code in this early stage, to give you guys the best possibility to help me out here. And then you can also see how I have build the game so far. Keep in mind that the source is very work-in-progress, which is why there are a lot stuff in there that isn’t used for anything.

Hope for great dialog and some good feedback/ideas.

Thanks in advance :)

Release: Farseer Physics Engine Simple Samples v5

Mads — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:35:00 +0100

The samples have been upgraded to Silverlight 3.0, which means that the source code is now targeted at the Silverlight 3.0 Tools for VS2008. Besides that the Farseer Physics Engine code have been upgraded to version 2.1.1.

Go and get the new release from Codeplex.com

- Enjoy!

Little Longhorn - Part 2 - The hunt for an solid architecture

Mads — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:10:52 +0100

It's been a while I know, but there is a good explanation. After I posted the first post about Little Longhorn (Part 1) I discovered that I couldn't do both Balloon Mayhem and Little Longhorn at the same time. I knew I would end up with none of them getting finished. Therefore I desided to go all-in on Balloon Mayhem:
http://laumania.net/post/Balloon-Mayhem-released-at-Silverarcadecom.aspx

With that game out of the way, at least it's marked as "done", so shouldn't take much of my time anymore, I can start working on Little Longhorn again, yiihaa :)

Changes to the "Learning in public"
My original idea were to have a video screencast at each blogpost about the progress of this game. Sadly I can see now, that it takes to much time to plan, record, edit, render, encode and upload a video screencast for each blog entry about the game. Instead, I will try to do more smaller blogposts, without video screencasts. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any more screencasts, I'm just saying that the amount will be smaller than first planned. So basically video screencasts will appear when they make good sense.

Architecture - To go MVC, or not to go MVC?
As stated in my first post I have looked a lot on the WeAreBugs and Developing a Casual Game with Siverlight 2 - by Joel Neubeck to get inspired for how to build this game. They both heavy make use of the MVC pattern. I tryed making of prototype implementation and it seemed to work pretty good. For some reason I got some kind of an obsession to have ALL in my game to fit into the MVC pattern, which isn't a good idea of course. I just couldn't see it at the time. I got somehow obsessed with this pattern and had to have all my code to live by the MVC rules. I talked with colleagues, other devs over forums and MSN to figure wierd things out, untill I suddently talked to Cameron Albert. Basically he said to me that I should let the pattern be the solution to my problems, not a barrier. Actually I knew that, sometimes you can just be "blinded" while trying to resolve a problem, that you forget why you need to solve it. So, I started to think what I could and couldn't use from MVC.

I couldn't see the use of an "Controller" as the MVC pattern stated, so that were removed. What I could use were the relation between the "View" and the "Model". The View being a Silverlight UserControl (.xaml file), with out any "game logic" and the Model being a pure class with no visuals. The View knows about the Model, but the Model doesn't know anything about the View. Let me show some code as an example.

Please note that this code is altered from how it actually look sin the game, to make it easier to understand the View/Model relation.

EnemyModel.cs

public class EnemyModel : BaseMob
    {
        //Events
        public event UpdatedHandler Updated;
        private Route route;
        public EnemyModel(Route routeToFollow)
        {
            route = routeToFollow;
        }

        public override void Update(int elapsedTime, Rectangle bounderies)
        {
           //Some code to actually follow the route
           if (Updated != null)
                Updated(this);
        }
    }

As you can see, the EnemyModel takes and "RouteToFollow" as an contructor parameter, guess what that's used for ;) - your right, thats the route (collection of points) that the enemy will follow. The important part is that there is no relation to a View of any kind. The way to Model tells the View to do something is by using events. As you can see, the Model fires the "Updated" event. In the View below you can see how the View respond to this.

EnemyView.xaml.cs

public partial class EnemyView : UserControl
    {
        private EnemyModel model;

        public EnemyView(EnemyModel model)
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            //Setup model
            this.model = model;
 
            //Hook up model events
            this.model.Updated += new UpdatedHandler(model_Updated);
        }

        protected void model_Updated(object sender)
        {
            Canvas.SetLeft(this, model.Position.X);
            Canvas.SetTop(this, model.Position.Y);
            Canvas.SetZIndex(this, (int)model.Position.Y);         
        }
    }

The View takes an EnemyModel as an contructor parameter and then hook up to the "Updated" event. When the event is fired, the View updates it's position based on the Position of the current Model.

This relationship I like, I can't say that it wouldn't change, but I like it for now, it solves my problems :)

What's next?
I'm still trying to figure out the best way to build this game, but I have already learned that I can't do this by sitting and thinking, I need to code. You can think a lot of stuff through, but at some point you need to start coding, as you will then realize things you would never have thought about. So, my goal now is to get all the "basic" mechanisms for this game to work, in a as-good-as-possible-way, at this point in time. This is what I mean by, "solid architecture", I can build the rest of the game on.

The mechanisms I'm going to look into are as follows:

A good way to manage transition and swithing between different screens ingame (Splash, Menu, GamePlay, GameOver, Map etc)
Basic "Tower-Defense" elements. (Enemies, Towers, a Player, Projectiles)

I already have looked into them, but the implementations isn't good enough yet, here how the game looks at the moment:

If you have feedback, ideas or anything else, please post a comment - it's free :)

- Enjoy!

Don't miss the #silverlightControlHost style for silverlight 3 in Firefox

Mads — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:16:47 +0100

Just a hit, to save you from using time on this problem as I just did. I don't know if this is something to do with Silverlight 3, I can just say that I have never experienced this problem before.

I'm currently working the game Little Longhorn and have just upgraded it to Silverlight 3. Beside not understanding why they removed the asp:Silverlight control, it went pretty painless. Well, untill I opened up my game in FireFox 3 (3.5). In FF my game where gone! It never appeared. I could see it in the source of the site, but it never showed up. After pretty much time comparing to an "clean" silverlight 3 application, I discovered that I needed the style below:

#silverlightControlHost 
    {
        height: 100%;
        text-align:center;
    }

Actually it were the height that were missing. Apparently FF don't give the surrounding div an height. Just a little FYI if you get into this problem.

Hope it helps.

Silverlight 3 runtime + developer tools are out!

Mads — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:20:00 +0100

Silverlight 3.0 seems to be out, also the developer tools. It seems to be a day too early, as http://seethelight.com/ says "1 day left" at the moment.

It might be Microsoft preparing for the lauch party tomorrow or an error, no matter what they seem to be here both of them, which is nice!

Silverlight 3.0 Developer Tools

Silverlight 3.0 runtime

- Enjoy!

UPDATE: Just saw this on twitter, so it might be smart waiting a little: "@shanselman We're in the process of releasing SL3. I jumped the gun-not ALL sites are ready. Avoid weirdness-wait til t'mrw morning."

Balloon Mayhem - Lesson learned

Mads — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:10:00 +0100

I thought it might be a good idea, to share with you some of the things I have learned during the development of "Balloon Mayhem". I will not go into very much detail about the standard things in Silverlight like explaning VisualStateManager and stuff like that.

Switching between gamescreens
In Balloon Mayhem I of course have different screens/states, actually I have the following:

SplashScreen
Menu
Playing
GameOver
Credits

Like almost all other games, I need to display them at different points in the game based on different events. This is all good, but how do you do that the best way in Silverlight? You have two options:

Do it all in code
Using the VisualStateManager

As I'm a person who want to try out new things and tools, I thought that the VisualStateManager were the best and "right" way to do this. Later I discovered that is wasn't :)

It all started out good as I had 3 states, but as the game got a little more complex I needed more "screens/states". At release the states looked like this.

All these "game states" are hold and controled by the Page class. Every state have an "container" (Grid/Canvas) it displays/hides. It's almost like a 1-to-1 relationship between a state and a container. For instance the "SplashScreen" state, sets the visibility to Visible etc.

The first problem I faced were how the "Base" state should be. "What are you talking about?" are you now thinking. Well, you have two options. Either you make ALL the containers Collapsed in the Base state and then displays the one you need in the particular state. Else you can have them all be Visible in the Base state and then, when you need to go to a particular states, set all the other containers to Collapsed. I chose the first solution as it seemed easiest at first, as I only need to displays the actual container that I want to show.

Sadly, that gave me some other problems, or really not problems, but "complications" when developing the game. When I for instance need to change something on the "PlayingGrid" container, I need to either set the Visibility of that to Visible in the Base state, to be able to work with it. The downside here is, that I pretty often forget to set it back to Collapsed, which makes the game unplayable. The other thing I can do it to click the actual "Playing" state. This is all good, as I then see my game as it will look when played, but beware! If I forget to turn off the "Record" feature, all my changes will be recorded as changes between states and hell breaks loose. To make it really funny, I need to remove this "Record" thing EVERYTIME I switch state inside Blend.

I had a lot of "fun" with this and my conclusion is, that this is NOT the way to handle switching between game screens/states. To find the "right" way, or just a better one I asked on the Silverlight.net forum, what people did. http://silverlight.net/forums/t/100350.aspx It seems that people are doing this kind of switching between screens in code, so that's what I will do in my next project too :) If you look at the thread I link to, you see that CameronAlbert is giving a simple example of how to do this.

Silverlight.live.com - hosting silverlight apps and video
The intro movie in Balloon Mayhem is hosting on silverlight.live.com, which is working really good. I just discovered this service some months ago, so when I needed to add an intro/splash movie to this game, this were the way to go. It works pretty go, easy to use and best of all - free. Not much to tell here, just wanted to point you to it if you didn't knew it:http://silverlight.live.com/

If you have questions or feedback, please leave a comment.

- Enjoy!

Balloon Mayhem released at Silverarcade.com

Mads — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:10:00 +0100

Finally I got “Balloon Mayhem” finished. I still have ideas for improvements, but I have decided (for now at least) that I will release the game as it is now, else I will just keep changing the game all the time. Instead I will leave Balloon Mayhem for now and start up my “Little Longhorn” project again.

For the people interested in “Little Longhorn” I can tell that that project have been put on hold while I finished “Balloon Mayhem”. As I done with that now, I can get back to “Little Longhorn” now, which I’m really looking forward too.

I want to thank all the people helping out with this game, one way or the other, and please see the “Credits” part in game for more info on this.

Here are some screenshots. To play the game, click on it in the menu to the left.

From HEX (string) to Color in Silverlight

Mads — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:51:00 +0100

In my current game (Balloon Mayhem) I needed to pick a random color from an predefined list of colors. The way I solved this were to make an string[] of the colors as hex values (ex. #FF000000 for black) and then just pick a random index into this array each time a need a new color. My problem were to convert the hex values, in string format, to a real .NET Color. I Googled it a little and found some articles about generating brushes this way. I just altered the code a little and got this one:

private Color GetColorFromHexa(string hexaColor)
        {
            return Color.FromArgb(
                    Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(1, 2), 16),
                    Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(3, 2), 16),
                    Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(5, 2), 16),
                    Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(7, 2), 16));
        }

Feel free to use it :)

- Enjoy!

Silverlight graphic and animation links

Mads — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:59:00 +0100

I have now answered a couple of thread on http://silverlight.net about graphics in Silverlight and sprite animation this week. Therefore I thought I might also as well, post the same links here on my blog. Actually I think I have posted all of the links on my blog before, but here they are together in the same post.

Frame-based animation using clipping
For games, the typical animation style is "frame based" animations. This can been archived in Silverlight using "clipping". Bill Reiss over at Bluerosegames.com, have created a pretty good article about how to do this:
http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverlight-games-101/post/Frame-Based-Sprite-Animation-in-Silverlight.aspx

Principles of basic animation in Silverlight
At MIX09 Jeff Paries had a pretty good session about "Principles of basic animation in Silverlight". He shows different ways of doing animation and some basic physics (using vectors to simulate gravity)
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T12F

Deep dive into Silverlight graphics
When doing graphic intensive stuff in Silverlight, like games, it's good to know something about how the graphics pipeline in Silverlight works. Seema Ramchandani had a good session about this at MIX09.
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T17F

Hope this help you in the right direction

- Enjoy!