Search results matching tags 'XNA', 'wp7s', and 'Mix10'

Shawn Hargreaves Mix graphics demo available

paulfo — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:04:51 GMT

Shawn gave a superb demonstration of the five effects available in XNA for Windows Phone. He has now published the demo source up on the XNA Creators Club website. GO GET IT HERE.

XNA: Windows Phone 7 Series GPU performance rocks!

paulfo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:17:38 GMT

For me the best session at Mix 10 was Shawn Hargreave’s CL22 – High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series. Shawn is an XNA demi-god and to see what he can make the new Windows Phone do with XNA is inspiring. The session is packed with technical facts and figures you just don’t find anywhere else, and it really gives you an insight into the power and capability of the Windows Phone 7 Series. For example, did you know that at 800x480 Windows Phone has 25% more pixels to draw then the original Xbox, but having a lot less GPU power you need to take advantage of the built in hardware scaler that enables you to render your games at a lesser resolution – say 600x 340 – then have the scaler fill the screen. The scaling operation is free – because it is part of the hardware pipeline not dependant on the CPU or GPU – so you get full screen games at good frame rates. You do of course relinquish some graphics quality in using this method, but if you don’t need a high frame rate you can render at the full 800x480. Its a trade between performance and graphics quality. But take a look at these device screen shots I captured from session recording – note these are from screen captures on my machine of the video playback of the examples running on a real device but viewed via a visualiser. Yet they still look awesome!

XNA on Windows Phone 7 Series has 5 configurable shaders. From left to right:

Basic Effect – It provides some simple lighting options, and lets you get going with minimal fuss.

Dual Textured Effect – Combine two textures to create sophisticated lighting effects very cheaply.

Alpha Test Effect – Alpha blending on the Windows Phone hardware is free. Use to draw duplicate graphic assets in your 3D world to create the impression of lots of things when really your only having to draw one of them.

Skinned Effect – Drawing characters that move. Animation occurs entirely on the GPU.

(Below) Environment Map Effect – Using a texture and a reflective cube map you can great super shiny shiny elements with minimal processing costs. The four pictures show the effect of different parameters to alter the reflection on the object.

You have to watch the video from 28:00 to really see these solutions in action, most of them are animated and the assets are originally from XNA on Windows examples – your using the same assets on the phone!!

Seeing stuff like this just wants to make you start coding on your own game! So go get the tools and start now!

MIX: Multi-screen gaming with Windows Phone Developer tools preview

paulfo — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:56:07 GMT

Using XNA Games Studio 3.x you could build a game that would run across Windows, Xbox and Zune. Now, unless you travelled to America or lived there you were unlikely to have a Zune or Zune HD. But now with Windows Phone 7 Series we have the promise of a device far more available for our mobile gaming.

With the release at Mix of the Windows Phone Developer Tools preview we now have XNA Games Studio 4.0 support in Visual Studio 2010 and the ability to build games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone!

So lets look at moving the XNA 3.x Platformer starter kit to XNA 4.0 so we can run it on our Windows Phone emulator.

The easiest way to do this is to create a new Platformer game using the starter kit under XNA 3.x. Then to port it to XNA 4.0 in VS2010, you need to create a new XNA 4.0 game in VS2010 and then add to this the code and content files from your platformer XNA 3.x game.

With the Zune version of the platformer game you had to have special low resolution graphics, but with Windows Phone I was able to have a playable game using the same graphics assets as the Windows and Xbox versions! The Windows Phone resolution of 800 x 480 really makes a difference.

Having moved the code other there a only a small number of changes required to get the game running on Windows Phone. This is due to the changes in the XNA 4.0 API, some specific to Windows Phone support.

First I had to change the screen size and target frame rate code:

 private const int TargetFrameRate = 30;
private const int BackBufferWidth = 480;
private const int BackBufferHeight = 800;

Because the screen resolution had changed there are some hardcoded screen offset values in Level.cs file that need altering to fit the new screen dimensions:

  Vector2 screenOffset = new Vector2(0, -60);

A value of –60 worked for ok.

Then to access the file system where the text file level definitions are stored I had to change the code to use a TitleContainer instead of the StorageContainer:

 Stream fs = TitleContainer.OpenStream("Content/" + levelPath);

The final change for the default game was the ability to play the sound effects. When I added the sound files to the content project, the sound effects where loaded with a content processor of Song, not soundeffect. Once I’d corrected this, the game compiled and ran.

I ported my enhanced ZuneHD platformer game which made use of Nick Gravelyn’s ZuenLib to give me landscape orientation and touch screen support. I also use the accelerators in the ZuneHD to move the player from left to right (a touch of the screen causing jump).

In the Windows Phone Developer Tools preview the emulator doesn’t project a route to emulate accelerometers, although the touch screen should work if you have a touch screen pc with Windows 7!

To make the accelerometer code to compile I just had to change the references to include:

 using Microsoft.Devices.Sensors;

And then change the data type for the accelerometer data to AccelerometerReading. Not having a device yet I haven’t been able to test the code.

To make the touch screen functionality compile and work under mouse emulation in the emulator I just had to change the references to:

 using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Touch;

Now the platformer game compiles and plays on the Windows Phone emulator. The source to this point is here. Although it is still not optimised for the Windows Phone platform screen dimensions because the level definitions are a lot wider than the screen and the basic platformer game does not include horizontal scrolling. This, as well as additional pick ups and vertical scrolling, is something I implemented in my Enhanced Platformer game.

And is next on my blogging to-do list.