Just as with exposure compensation, flash compensation allows you to change the flash output in increments of 1/3 of a stop. You will probably use this most often to tone down the effects of your flash, especially when you...
Using Windows Phone Isolated Storage
XNA potentially supports many storage devices across all the game systems it targets, but on the WP7, there is only one type: isolated storage. Any type of game asset can be imported into the Content...
Understanding the Relationship between Dynamic and Static Languages
Something that most developers fail to consider is that, at some point, all languages generate the same thing — machine code. Without machine code, the software doesn’t execute. Your computer cares nothing...
There will be times when you have to turn to your camera’s built-in flash to get the shot. The flash on the G12 is not extremely powerful, but with the camera’s advanced metering system it does a pretty good...
Getting Started with Windows Phone Audio
The audio system in XNA makes it possible to reproduce sound effects and music in two different ways, but the WP7 platform supports only one of them. First, we can play audio clips directly...
The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is a new feature of the .NET platform. Its intended purpose is to support dynamic languages, such as Python (through IronPython) and Ruby (through IronRuby). Without DLR, the .NET Framework can’t really run dynamic...
We’ve covered some of the techniques for shooting in low light, so let’s go through the process of capturing a night or low-light scene for maximum image quality. The first thing to consider is that in order to shoot...
GPS 101
Let’s spend a few minutes to just learn the basics of GPS, in order to better use it in our code. What GPS boils down to—the nitty-gritty—are two floating-point numbers representing the X and Y position on the...
Occasionally the light levels might be too low for the camera to achieve an accurate focus. There are a few things that you can do to overcome this obstacle.
First, you should know that the camera utilizes contrast in the...
Prioritized Drawing
We already have the ability to perform prioritized “z-index” drawing of a sprite image with the SpriteBatch.Draw() method, and we have been using the z-index parameter all along, just set to a value of zero. This effectively gave...