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

Chapter 8. Animating 3D Characters

In order to emulate real-life situations in our games, we must animate our 3D characters in real-time. If we want to show a UFO in a game, it will have to fly like a real UFO, changing its position and rotating at the same time. Hence, we have to add animation capabilities to our models and we must combine the capabilities offered by the cameras with the possibilities to perform transformations to many models on each frame. The camera shows us a part of the whole 3D world in which the 3D models must move, rotate, and scale, creating amazing effects for the player.

By reading this chapter and following the exercises we shall learn how to:

  • Move 3D characters in the 3D scenes

  • Define specific independent behaviors for the 3D characters that compose the 3D world

  • Understand how to perform different transformations to a 3D model at the same time

  • Control many transformations over the three axes of a 3D model

  • Animate complex 3D models based on bones and skeletons

Invaders...