Book Image

3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug-in that enables the animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight is a great (and growing) RIA platform and games are the next level to exploit in it. But it doesn't offer 3D capabilities out of the box and integrating a 3D engine can involve lot of complex mathematics and matrix algebra. This book will help C# developers to get their fingers on the pulse of 3D in Silverlight. This book uses Balder, an open source 3D engine offering 3D capabilities for Silverlight 3. It leaves out boring matrix algebra and complex 3D mathematics. By the end of the book you will have explored the entire engine, and will be able to design and program your own 3D games with ease! The book begins by introducing you to the fundamental concepts of 2D games and then drives you into the 3D world, using easy-to-follow, step-by-step examples. The book employs amazing graphics and impressive performance, and increasingly adds more features to a 3D game giving you a rich interactive experience. By following the practical examples in this book, you will learn the important concepts, from the creation of the initial models, up to the addition of physics and artificial intelligence. The book helps you to provide realistic behaviors for 3D characters by enveloping models with different textures, using lights to create effects, animating multiple 3D characters using a physics engine (Farseer Physics Engine), and simulating real-life physics. Videos, music, and sounds associated with specific events offer the final touches to the 3D game development learning experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Pop quiz—Answers

Time for action—recognizing digital art assets


One of the best ways of explaining a new game idea is showing it in a very nice picture. This is exactly what you want to do. However, it is very difficult to find a new game idea from scratch. Therefore, in working out how to impress the legendary game developer, you ask for some help in an 8-bit retro gaming community. You meet a legendary space shooter games' expert and he shows you many remakes of the classic 8-bit Invader game—also known as Space Invaders. The remakes are too simple and they do not exploit modern widescreen displays, as they run in very low resolutions inside the web browsers. A dazzling remake of an Invaders game sounds like a very nice idea!

We are going to take a snapshot of the first scene of one of the most exciting 8-bit implementations of the Invaders game—the legendary TI Invaders—as shown in the following picture:

What just happened?

Looking at the TI Invaders scene picture, we can recognize the following digital art assets:

  • Green aliens

  • Blue aliens

  • Red aliens

  • Tents to protect our ship against the aliens' attack

  • A ship

These assets are organized as shown in the following picture:

The aliens are organized in five rows and eleven columns. There are four tents and just one ship to challenge all these aggressive invaders.