What are you playing?

[Jetsetlemming]

It's in C# (so .NET), using WPF for the UI framework. It's a clone of Candyland, which is pretty much the absolute most simplistic boardgame on the planet (it's designed so that kids who can't even read yet can play- you move by drawing cards from a deck, and then moving your piece down the board to the next tile that matches the color of the card you drew). As far as the double blocks go, all the tiles are generated randomly. Whenever a tile is assigned a color, it's immediately compared to the most recent generated tile, the one right behind it. If they match colors, the new tile is rerolled once. So there's a 1 in 36 chance (There's six colors on the board) for getting two repeating colors, and the odds of longer chains get harder from there. I didn't want to explicitly ban long lines of colors, just discourage them, and I think the results turned out pretty good.

[Jonas]

Needs more guns. Then it'll be great.

I'm working with C# right now. The cut-down XNA framework for Windows Phone 7 is a bit shit. I've been working with music all day, and I have to face the fact that there doesn't seem to be a way to crossfade on WP7, or even make a track play from a certain position in the song

[DDL]

Well I've just managed to pull off a co-immunostain with two mouse monoclonal antibodies, so there.

[AEmer]

And I finished up my statistics homework! YAY!

Also, you can't crossfade? Can't you stream the two music tracks into buffers, then weight the volume of them within the buffers, then read the buffers into a common buffer, then stream that to...whatever it is that plays music in XNA?

It'd require reading up on the codec the music is stored in during the stream phase, that is, assuming you even get access to the music as a bitstream...

Probably not worth it to code up, but if you had a good programmer he could probably do it in half an hour to an hour....

[EER]

Well I just made an algorithm approximately 200x better. Then I found something stupid in the algorithm, and improved it another 2x.

Needless to say, the original algorithm was really shoddily implemented.

I haven't really used WPF yet, so I'm interested in the result. Are you using xaml, or are you generating everything from code?

[bobby 55]

Well I just combined hot water , milk, and a brown powdery substance. It's latin name is beverage.


Tragedy! The PC refuses to start. I press the power button, the blue light flashes for a second then it powers off. It musta been the mobo that took the surge eh?

[Jonas]

Can't you stream the two music tracks into buffers, then weight the volume of them within the buffers, then read the buffers into a common buffer, then stream that to...whatever it is that plays music in XNA?

It'd require reading up on the codec the music is stored in during the stream phase, that is, assuming you even get access to the music as a bitstream...

Probably not worth it to code up, but if you had a good programmer he could probably do it in half an hour to an hour....

I'll have to say... maybe? We only have one programmer, and he's doing more important stuff right now (which is why I of all people am making the music system), but I can ask him about it when he has time.

I haven't really used WPF yet, so I'm interested in the result. Are you using xaml, or are you generating everything from code?

What's WPF?

I'm not using XAML, it's missing from the Windows Phone version of the XNA framework >_<

I got half-way into implementing a soundbank and a wavebank before I realised that.

[AEmer]

@EER

As I recall, WPF is already getting deprecated. It's a great little framework...it's a lot like Java Swing and similar old gui frameworks, but it's more intuitive, the looks can be specified in XAML if you really want to so you can have a web designer put together the gui, and it's standard look is pretty native..it looks fairly close to windows vista/7 software that came with the OS.

But Windows 8 uses ANOTHER xml graphics specification...I think it's XHTML 5.0 ? So if you want to specify future programs, you need to use that.

It's a step in the right direction...WPF should've been out back when WinXP came out, or it should've come with servicepack 1, but it didn't, so here we are...the time has come and gone for Microsoft to bank on developers being willing to use closed frameworks, so now they must use open frameworks because they don't dominate the markets they're in as much, so now they must deprecate WPF.

Also, congratulations on your optimization!

[AEmer]

I'll have to say... maybe? We only have one programmer, and he's doing more important stuff right now (which is why I of all people am making the music system), but I can ask him about it when he has time.

It might be too difficult to do or require considerable overhead, depending on what the music encoding looks like.

Also, it depends on how good he is with handling raw encoded data. It's a relatively specialized skillset, even though I estimate it would be a fairly simple task if you have that skillset.

It'd also require a few buffers, but I assume windows phones have a lot of ram these days.
Whether it can be done seamlessly is another issue altogether.

But under the right circumstances, it might be really easy to do.

Anyway, WPF is windows presentation foundation. It's what I used for the fabula user interface.

That and xaml are both missing from windows phone because, as I said before, it's getting deprecated.

[nerdenstein]

Mass Effect 3 Demo. You can get it from the website but you need to install Origin to play it.
I've only played the Intro sequence so far, and from what I've seen, Bioware have improved on almost everything (apart from perhaps Gameplay but I didn't see enough of it to know).

[Jetsetlemming]

I haven't really used WPF yet, so I'm interested in the result. Are you using xaml, or are you generating everything from code?

A bit of both. I have xaml defining the basic layout of the main window- where the canvas is (the canvas is the graphical element I draw the board on), where the button is, where the players will be listed, etc, as well as the window size, title, and general behavior like how it reacts to you reshaping it. However, the game board and tiles are all dynamic, so they're being created in the code and then drawn to the canvas class in the xaml.
As of yesterday I've got the player tokens moving down the board and everything, as it turned out moving them was actually dead simple! Once I add the player tokens, which are unique properties to the individual player variables, to the canvas, if I update the external properties the canvas uses to position items for those tokens, they'll move on the canvas without me having to tell the canvas anything, or even needing an update Event.

Code: Select all

public void DrawPlayer(Player player)
        {
            LocateSprite(player);
            Canvas.Children.Add(player.Sprite);
        }

        public void LocateSprite(Player player)
        {
            int startHeight = (int)(TileHeight * Tiles[player.Position].GridY);
            int startWidth = (int)(TileWidth * Tiles[player.Position].GridX);
            WPFCanvas.SetTop(player.Sprite, startHeight + 1);
            WPFCanvas.SetLeft(player.Sprite, startWidth + 1);
        }

That first method, DrawPlayer, is called for every player at the start of the game, when they're all at the home tile, and then from then on LocateSprite is called whenever a player makes a turn. It updates where the canvas thinks they should be, and so they move, just like magic.

[bobby 55]

The bro-inlaw was not real happy when I told him about the PC. He's going to pick it up and do the repairs himself, then sell it. The overheating piece of crap I'm using atm will have to do me until I can get a decent rig together. That will mean no games for a bit. So I'll see youse if or when things improve.

[Jaedar]

The bro-inlaw was not real happy when I told him about the PC. He's going to pick it up and do the repairs himself, then sell it. The overheating piece of crap I'm using atm will have to do me until I can get a decent rig together. That will mean no games for a bit. So I'll see youse if or when things improve.

[AEmer]

Hope your brother-in-law can figure it out - and that he can deal with it.

I was going to say earlier, such a problem as the one you describe can have a number of underlying causes, but the most common one is ram that are clocked in a fashion that renders them unstable - flashing the bio to default settings will usually solve it.

The other possibilities are if there's a screw or other metalic object creating a short circuit between the motherboard and the cabinet or something similar - or a PSU that's run the cause of its life.

Those are the only issues I've experienced myself, mind - it's equally possible that the motherboard may be altogether busted.

[gamer0004]

Sucks bobby. But at least a new computer won't have these problems