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A New Android Game in Town (by my brother)
05 February 12 10:36 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

Anyone who has ever written a game knows it’s hard to get it done from start to finish. Sure, I can put on a demo of some game I’ve created in several hours. But creating all the graphics, sound, animation, levels, transitions, scoring, etc, from start to finish is quite a challenge, especially for a single developer. That’s why I’m very proud of my young brother, Yaniv , that has worked hard for the past 10 months (while maintaining a proper day job!) on an awesome fun game called Micro Wars , targeted...

תגים:Fun, Graphics, OFFTOPIC, TECH, Games, Android

Calculating PI in .NET
30 December 11 10:31 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

I always loved mathematics. Although I’m certainly not a mathematician by profession, I’m always intrigued and inspired by math’s pureness and cleverness. One of the simplest and fascinating aspects of math is the number PI . Described simply as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, it’s a constant with infinite digits after the decimal point and most importantly, non repeating (at least as far as I know). There are many ways to calculate PI, as evident within the PI Wikipedia link...

תגים:C#, LINQ, DEV, Fun, BigInteger, Numerics, .NET 4, Mathematics

Windows Phone: Combining Silverlight & XNA in a Single Page
26 October 11 09:30 PM | pavely | with no comments

There are two very distinct ways to program on Windows Phone 7.x: Silverlight & XNA. Silverlight is about UI, retained graphics and is event driven. XNA is about immediate mode graphics, based on a timer and polling; Very different models indeed. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. One of the new features in WP7.1 (“mango”) is the ability to combine the two to get the best of both worlds. Here’s a typical scenario where this need may come up: suppose you’re developing an XNA game (2D or 3D...

תגים:XNA, C#, Silverlight, DEV, XAML, Fun, Graphics, Windows Phone

Porting an XNA game from Windows to Windows Phone (Part 2)
14 August 11 03:40 PM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

In the first part we got our introduction screen up and running, with the starfield scrolling by. However, we couldn’t actually start playing because the game was waiting for a key press… which is nowhere to be found on a Windows Phone device. We simply need a little touch. Adding Touch Support Touch is something the XNA version of Windows and XBOX 360 have no notion of. This is specific for Windows Phone. Touch input information is available as “raw” data (touch points, with positions, etc.) and...

תגים:XNA, C#, DEV, Fun, Graphics, Games, Windows Phone

Porting an XNA game from Windows to Windows Phone (Part 1)
08 August 11 09:58 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

XNA is one of the two APIs that’s supported on Windows Phone 7 (the other being Silverlight), so a natural thing to do is to port an already existing XNA game (running on Windows or XBOX 360) to the new Windows Phone 7 platform. I wanted to see how easy (or maybe not so easy) it would be to do the actual porting. My starting point is a relatively simple 2D game, the one developed throughout the XNA 2D tutorial I did a some months back. We’ll start with the final game project (discussed in the last...

תגים:XNA, DEV, Fun, Visual Studio 2010, Games, Windows Phone

Technology Radio Show, Part 2
21 March 11 10:03 AM | pavely | 3 comment(s)

The second part of the technology radio show on 106.4 FM aired on last Thursday. As with the first part , I was the “Microsoft guy”. This time we were missing the iPhone and Ruby guys, but the show was more to the point (somewhat). You can listen to the recording (if you’re kinda really really bored) here (look for the March 17 show).

תגים:C++, .NET, C#, thoughts, DEV, Fun, Azure, Audio

Technology Radio show that I participated in
02 March 11 08:40 PM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

Last week I was invited to a radio show called “Technofobia” (origin in Hebrew) in the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Hertzliya (Israel) (106.4 FM). This was a “special” talk about development technologies. There was a Ruby guy, a Python guy, a C++ guy (actually a girl), an iPhone guy (the famous Yossi Taguri ) and myself, as the “Microsoft guy”. I had to repeatedly (and during the music breaks) tell the hosts that I don’t work at Microsoft, I just use, teach, mostly like and develop with those...

תגים:C++, .NET, C#, thoughts, DEV, Fun, Audio

COM Fun with Microsoft Agent
25 February 11 03:44 PM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

Whenever I teach COM interoperability in .NET, I try to show some nice demo for this. The classic is to use one of the Office applications (such as Word) to do some automation by creating a document, adding some text, etc. This is effective enough but not really fun. A much more fun way is to use the Microsoft Agent technology. MS Agent is discontinued as far as further development is concerned, but it’s still fun and great for (at least) learning purposes. What is MS Agent? Its most well known appearance...

תגים:COM, .NET, C#, Interop, DEV, Fun, 64 bit, MS Agent

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 14–Last)
31 December 10 06:54 PM | pavely | 5 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects Part 8 : Setting Up Data Part 9 : Creating Aliens Part 10 : Collision Detection Part 11 : More Collisions Part 12 : Displaying Text Part 13 : Game States Over the past posts, we’ve created a game. A simple game, for sure, but the objective was learning XNA, not creating the greatest game...

תגים:XNA, DEV, Fun, Games

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 12)
05 December 10 03:55 PM | pavely | 3 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects Part 8 : Setting Up Data Part 9 : Creating Aliens Part 10 : Collision Detection Part 11 : More Collisions Teched is over. Time to get back to XNA… In our current project, we have a simple game in which the player can shoot aliens. They keep coming, and once the player is killed – the...

תגים:.NET, XNA, C#, DEV, Fun

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 11)
17 November 10 07:25 PM | pavely | 6 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects Part 8 : Setting Up Data Part 9 : Creating Aliens Part 10 : Collision Detection In the previous part we did some collision detection between the player’s missiles and the aliens. If hit, the alien disappeared gradually (as opposed to a big explosion). Let’s add some more collision detection...

תגים:.NET, XNA, C#, DEV, Fun, Graphics, Games

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 10)
16 November 10 10:45 AM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects Part 8 : Setting Up Data Part 9 : Creating Aliens In the previous part we created a bunch of alien enemies that are moving down the screen. Currently, if they hit the player’s ship – nothing happens. If the player’s missiles hit an alien – nothing happens. We need some collision detection...

תגים:.NET, XNA, C#, DEV, Fun

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 9)
14 November 10 10:20 PM | pavely | 3 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects Part 8 : Setting Up Data In the previous post we prepared the data for the aliens and for the game levels. In this post, we’ll put that data to action. The first thing we’ll do is create a custom Alien class, that extends the Sprite class and adds some specific alien attributes. This...

תגים:.NET, XNA, C#, DEV, Fun, Graphics

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 8)
13 November 10 02:46 PM | pavely | 8 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects   What do we have so far? A player controlling a ship capable of firing missiles (with sound), flying through space with a backdrop of passing stars. Clearly, no real challenge for the player yet. It’s time to add some enemies to challenge the player. In this part, we’ll handle setting...

תגים:.NET, XNA, LINQ to XML, C#, LINQ, DEV, Fun, Tutorial

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 7)
11 November 10 10:25 AM | pavely | 5 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles The game as it is now is not yet challenging – there are no enemies to threaten the player – she simply flies through space, shooting at nothing. We’ll deal with some enemies in the next part, but first let’s consider sound. Sound is a critical part of any game. Just for kicks, play your favorite action game...

תגים:.NET, XNA, C#, DEV, Fun, Tutorial