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

About the Author

Gastón C. Hillar has been working with computers since he was eight. He began programming with the legendary Texas TI-99/4A and Commodore 64 home computers in the early 80's.

He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in which he graduated with honors, and he also has an MBA (Master in Business Administration) in which graduated with an outstanding thesis. He has worked as a developer, an architect, and project manager for many companies in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Now, he is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author always looking for new adventures around the world. He also works with electronics (he is an electronics technician). He is always researching new technologies and writing about them. He owns an IT and electronics laboratory with many servers, monitors, and measuring instruments.

He has written another book for Packt, "C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner's Guide".

He contributes to Dr. Dobb’s Go Parallel programming portal http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/ and he is a guest blogger at Intel Software Network http://software.intel.com

He is the author of more than 40 books in Spanish about computer science, modern hardware, programming, systems development, software architecture, business applications, balanced scorecard applications, IT project management, the Internet, and electronics.

He usually writes articles for the Spanish magazines "Mundo Linux", "Solo Programadores" and "Resistor".

He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his son, Kevin. When not tinkering with computers, he enjoys developing and playing with wireless virtual reality devices and electronics toys with his father, his son, and his nephew Nico.

You can reach him at:

You can follow him on Twitter at:http://twitter.com/gastonhillar

Gastón's blog is at: http://csharpmulticore.blogspot.com