Silverlight Tip of the Day #3: Silverlight Game Support, Limitations and Workarounds
While exploring techniques for game programming with Silverlight I came across some hurdles and discovered some workarounds. I plan to use this blog to track these issues for the purposing of hopefully saving you time from having to do similar research. In addition, I have added a Game Resources section where I will be putting links to other game tutorials for Silverlight.
If you discover any more, please send them my way and I will post them! Thank you.
Game Resources
What Silverlight Supports
- JPG and PNG file formats.
- Transparency through PNG files.
- Keyboard and mouse input
- Sound
- Game UI layout through Grid elements.
- Timers (animating, game loop, etc.)
- Texture blending through Opacity.
- Socket/TCP programming for multi-player networking support
- Events (clicking, etc.)
- Animation - WPF model that uses timers instead of frames.
- Great debugging support through Visual Studio.
What Silverlight Currently Does Not Support
Work around: Use PNG (or JPG) files.
- Creating images from subsets of larger images.
Work around: You have two options:
- Set a clipping region for the image such that you only show the part of the image you want displayed.
- Put each image in its own file. Unfortunately, for such work as animated sprites, this means a lot of individual files. Hard to manage.
- Saving files locally - Due to security concerns, Silverlight 2.0 does not support saving. There is talk to support the SaveFileDialog in the future and I will track this progress closely letting you know what I learn. I need this feature myself (for my map editor)!
Work around: Save to a web server. See Michael Sync's blog here: http://michaelsync.net/category/silverlight under "Uploading with Silveright 2 Beta 1 and WCF"
- Floating point values for positioning - if you tile images together to form a map, them scroll the map's X and Y position by a decimal value, you will see lines forming between the tiles.
Work around: Use rounded values.
- Per pixel bitmap editing, bitmap filters (color matrix, etc) and effects (blur, glow, etc).
Work around: Through opacity you can do some pretty cool effects such as texture blending to smoothly blend transitions between map tiles. See this tutorial for an example.
- 3D rendering – Silverlight 2 does not have any 3D support. However, seen Tip of the Day #71 on Silverlight 3. You will be happy to see that 3D is in the plans.
Work around: There are engines and demos out there that simulate 3D that work fairly well. Examples”
- http://www.markdawson.org/kit3d/
- http://www.codeplex.com/Balder
- Sharing of resources is not allowed. For example, sharing a SolidColorBrush between rectangles. If you have 1000 rectangles, they will all need a separate brush for each rectangle.
- Alignment for text in Textboxes.
Work around: You will have to programmatically center it.
Thank you,
--Mike Snow
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