Game Development and Data Dude

I started my morning in Maor David's lecture on the DB dude. The lecture was a 400 level lecture (for those who complained there weren't enough of those) continuing his talk at the Developer academy (you can download it here).

Maor demonstrated use of the various features of the DB dude (coding in real-time), and called Lior (DBA) from NUconomy to show how he used the application to make his job easier.

Now I'm at Tamir's and Alex's lecture on game development, showing a 2D network car racing game for XBox with WPF. 

Alex began by showing coding the game using XNA. XNA is based on supplying tools common to all game to ease game development. Apparently there are powerful math libraries built-in to ease calculations (like determining location of an object and calculating it's next position). XNA development studio (also available as a free Express edition) is used to develop games for XBox, but writing C# code to create the game. Apparently you can't run more than a single XNA game on your PC at a given time, since classes used are Singletons.

Now Tamir stepped in to show how to make the basic car game Alex showed better by using WPF. You can use XNA in VS 2008 by adding 2 references. He is showing how to use XNA methods to find sessions, handle login and other tasks without having to re-write them. Than he uses WPF designer to turn a raster map to a vector one and marking roads (it's a car game, remember?) in the XAML file. (He also mentioned using Thread safe collection he wrote, which is interesting on it's own). He is also using Linq to query database.

Now the PC and XBox are playing one vs. the other. The next phase is adding another gamer using a web browser on Linux - by using Silverlight. This requires a bit of crazy hacking to overcome Silverlight networking limits. Now the insanity worsen - running ASP.NET 3.5 on Apache using Mono, connecting to iPhone and Live map service.