Implementing graphics for windows-phone silverlight game - silverlight

I need to implement a Snakes & Ladders board game for windows phone (8 or 8.1). There will be the classic snakes and ladders board map, but the graphics might need to change (frozen ladders if it is snowing outside, muddy spots on some of the tiles if it is raining etc)
I need a simple and easy way which will allow me to visualize the player moving through the tiles and ladders graphics etc changing. I have seen that in XAML grid if I set an image as background and then add controls in the grid (eg a button for each tile so I can visualize the player moving on each tile), the background image gets overwritten.
So, any ideas?

Ended up doing this via having a button represent the Player and changing the button's margin to move it through the board (represented by a background image). Was not a clean way but the job got done pretty well.
As for the board-graphics changing, i just had 4 different images with the board state and loaded which one i needed in each case. Also not clean, but again got the job done.

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How to work with Sprite - Byte Array Assembly x86

In the last days, while I'm working on a project, I was introduced to the sprite - Byte Array.
Unfortunately, I didnt find out any kond of information about the sprite which can tell me mote about what is this and how it's works.
I really be pleased if you can give me some information and examples for sprite.
A sprite is basically an image with a transparent background color or alpha channel which can be positioned on the screen and moved (usually involving redraw the background over the old position). In the case of an animated sprite, the sprite may consist of several actual images making up the frames of the animation. The format of the image depends entirely on the hardware and/or technology being used to draw or render it. For speed, the dimensions are usually powers of two (8,16,32,64 etc) but this may not be necessary for modern hardware.
Traditionally (read: back in my day), you might have a 320x200x256 screen resolution and a 16x16x256 sprite with color 0 being transparent. Each refresh of the screen would begin with redrawing the background under the sprites, taking a copy of the background under their new position and then redrawing only the visible colors of every sprite in their new position.
With modern hardware, however, it is more efficient to pass data in a format that the driver can handle (hopefully in the graphics accelerator) rather than do everything by hand.

Can I create a motion colorizing pixel shader in WPF?

I have a video playing of lines being drawn on the screen. Is it possible to create a pixel shader (for WPF) that turns newly colored pixels a certain color for N milliseconds?
That way, there can be some indication to the user to movement on the screen when the lines don't move often and the user isn't always looking at the screen.
You can use DirectShow. Its written in unmanaged code, so you need to use this wrapper DirectShow.NET in order to use it in your C# application which is running in managed environment (samples are included, even with EVR which stands for Enhanced video Renderer which means MUCH better video quality). And when you will be passing a control handle to wrapper method for setting the video output, you need a WinForms control, because only from them you can get your desired control handle. That WinForms control you can then host in your WPF application using the WindowsFormsHost control provided for such situations when you need to use some WinForms control(s) in a WPF application. Its just theory, so i dont know if its an ultimate solution for you.
BTW: The whole idea is based on fact, that DirectShow is just some query constructed from separated filters. Renderer is a filter (EVR, VMR-7, VMR-9). Sound player is a filter. And they are connected through their pins. Its like a diagram. Electronic schema or something like that. And you can put for example Grey scale filter in there. And voila, video output will be greyscale. There is a bunch of tutorials for that. And completed simple filters as well. Unfortunately, filters must be written in C++:(
PS: I never said its gonna be easy:D

How to display a background control in transparent overlapping control?

I'm building a form with two layers of controls. The bottom layer is a set of Panels with defined properties, one of which is a color different from the form background. The top layer is a set of picture boxes I'm using to display a circle. I've set the PictureBox Background to Color.Transparent, and I've offset it from the underlying Panel by one pixel to get the form to draw the underlying Panel. However, the area around the circle in the PictureBox is displaying the Form Background color, not the panel color. I don't want to draw the circle in the Panel, because I want the circles to move between Panels, and actually look like just a circle that's floating across the form independent of the Panel board underneath. Think of the effect as moving a piece on a board game (you see the peg move across the board, possibly on a diagonal not following the normal game path, then stop in a place on the game).
How can I get the PictureBox to have the underlying Form and panels show through, not just the form background color? I'm using C# Visual Studio 2010, and I'm not a terribly experienced programmer, so a code example would be helpful. An image of the form is at:
http://www.imageurlhost.com/images/salgmpcxvcz830c3flt.jpg
Found a way around the problem. I got rid of the Panels for the spaces in the game, and instead drew them as rectangles on the form's background image.

WPF - copying items with brushes attached

I'm developing a multi track video player in wpf and need to be able to copy the video that is playing in one grid layout of the main window into a seperate window that will go out of a projector. The videos are loaded and drawn onto rectangles using drawing brush and are added to a grid. I can't call clone on the rectangle, or the grid, or the canvas, so I'm currently resorting to copying the drawing brushes, passing them through to the otherwindow class and reassigning them to newly drawn rectangles.
However, this gets even worse as I'm 'cross-fading' between two video by drawing another rectangle with a new video in front, then changing the opacity value of the front video to gradually block out the one behind. So I now have two brushes on two rectangles tied to storyboards to animate, and I'm having to pass everything through and basically compute everything twice.
Is there any sensible way of doing this? I'd love to be able to literally grab the pixels from one area of the main video and display them in the second window, but everything seems abstracted away.
Any suggestions would be a massive help
Have you looked at VisualBrush?

WPF, any easy way to work with different screen resolutions?

Given a WPF Application running full screen, a fair amount of controls some of which will animate from off screen to center. I was wondering if there are any special ways to save on the amount of time required to optimize an application for different screen resolutions?
For example, using Blend I've setup some text, which is originally off screen to scroll into view. Now in design mode the start positions are static. If resolution changes the start positions will obviously not be correct.
So I guess to correct this, during app startup. I need to
Check resolution
Move the text box to the desired start location
Adjust the storyboard as required, so the frames all have correct co-ordinates depending on the res of the screen.
I don't mind doing all of this, but if there is an easier way please share!
Thanks
In WPF layout of controls should be made in such way, that when size of window or content changes, controls automaticaly resize/reposition themselves to reflect this change.
This is highly affected how your layout is made, especialy by using specific panels, that do layout of their child elements.
This is also made obvious by using device-independent units for sizes, margins and sometimes positions of controls. And also allows different kind of zooming and scaling of whole UI without any need to redesign the whole thing.
If you are trying to position your controls absolutely, either by using Canvas panel or margins, your are doing it totaly wrong.
In WPF, scene is measured in abstract units, not pixels, and controls are freely scaled. There should be no problems to center something, or what?

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