Your cell phone rings. An old friend sees your name in the participants' list and calls you because he has some interesting information. He tells you the game has to scale to huge resolutions such as the ones found in exclusive XHD (eXtreme High Definition) displays. These displays can support resolutions as high as 2560X1600 pixels.
Scaling the raster digital assets is a big problem because pixelation becomes easily visible. If you scale the final alien for using it in a higher resolution, it will look really pixelated as shown in the following picture:
You want the game to use the entire screen space, even in the XHD displays. To make this possible, you could prepare another set of raster digital assets for the game optimized for a 2560X1600 pixels screen (4,096,000 pixels). However, the game can also be run using a 1920X1080 pixels screen (2,073,600 pixels). There is another alternative of creating a new set of scalable vector graphics (vector-based illustrations), which are ready to scale to any screen resolution without generating pixelation problems.
This way, you can provide two versions of the same game—one using raster digital assets optimized for a 1680X1050 pixels screen and the other using scalable vector graphics. There is no restriction in the number of games per participant. Therefore, you can submit both versions.
Note
The creation of scalable vector graphics assets for a 2D game is very complex and involves professional skills. We are going to simplify this process by using the existing clipart.
First, we must download and install some additional tools that will help us in converting the existing scalable vector graphics to the most appropriate file formats to use in Silverlight 3:
Note
The necessary tools will depend on the applications the digital artists use to create the scalable vector graphics. However, we will be using some tools that will work fine with our examples.
1. Download the following files:
Application name
Download link
File name
Description
Expression Design
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=design
Design_Trial_en.exeIt is a commercial tool, but the trial offers a free fully functional version for 30 days. This tool will enable us to transform vector assets to the appropriate format for use in Silverlight 3.
Inkscape
Inkscape-0.46.win32.exeIt is a very complete free, open source, vector drawing program. This tool will enable us to import many vector assets in different, popular file formats and export them to a format recognized by Expression Design.
2. Run the installers and follow the steps to complete the installation wizards.
3. Once Inkscape's installation is finished, you will be able to load and edit many vector assets in different file formats as shown in the following picture:
We installed Expression Design and Inkscape. Now we have the necessary tools to convert the existing vector clipart to the most appropriate formats to use in Silverlight 3.
Why do we need to install so many tools to create a simple vector asset to use in Silverlight 3? It's because Silverlight 3 uses XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language), and the best way to add scalable vector content is using objects defined in XAML. However, many tools that offer functions to export to XAML do not work as expected and are not compatible with Silverlight 3. Besides, many converters are still in alpha versions and have problems when we need to convert complex vector art.
The game must be finished on or before the due date. Therefore, to avoid problems related to XAML vector assets, we are going to perform additional steps. But we will be sure that the resulting XAML will work fine with Silverlight 3.