This probably seems like a no-brainer. If it’s sunny, select Day Light. If it’s overcast, choose the Cloudy setting. Those choices wouldn’t be wrong for those circumstances, but why limit yourself? Sometimes you can change the mood of the...
Translating (Moving) a Sprite
Sprite translation, or movement, can be done directly or indirectly. The direct approach involves writing code to move a sprite specifically to one location or another. The indirect approach involves setting up properties and variables that...
When shooting most landscape scenes, the ISO is the one factor that should only be changed as a last resort. While it is easy to select a higher ISO to get a smaller aperture, the noise that it can...
Bringing Bitmaps to Life
A sprite is a bitmap with benefits. XNA provides the SpriteBatch class to draw bitmaps with the SpriteBatch.Draw() method, of which there are several overloaded variants. But despite the name, SpriteBatch does not give us “sprite”...
Throughout the previous chapters we have concentrated on using the camera to create great images. We will continue that trend in this chapter, but there is one additional piece of equipment that is crucial in the world of landscape...
A bitmap is a 2D image, also known as a texture in the realm of 3D programming. Bitmap images can be created in memory, but they are more often loaded from an existing bitmap file. The most common file...
Exploring Windows Phone Touchscreen Input
Programming a game’s input system really does require a lot of design consideration ahead of time because all we really can use is the touchscreen! Oh, there is an accelerometer that can be used for...
Creating the Font Demo Project
A font in XNA is nothing more than a text file—at least, from the programmer’s point of view. When the project is compiled, XNA uses the text file to create a bitmap font on a...
Visual C# 2010 Express
At the time of this writing, the current version of the development tool for Windows Phone 7 is Visual Studio 2010. To make development simple for newcomers to the Windows Mobile platform, Microsoft has set up...
Getting Started with Windows Phone 7
There are two ways we can develop games for Windows Phone 7: Silverlight and XNA Game Studio. Although Silverlight does have basic graphics capabilities, those capabilities are provided to support applications and are not...
