Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'xbox'

Silverlight Games today and more on the way

Adam Kinney — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:40:00 GMT

Yesterday Bill Reiss announced the Sports Game in Silverlight Contest which begins August 8th, (the same day as the Olympics, interesting). Bill has been around since the beginning of writing games in Silverlight. His blog Silverlight Games 101 began a few days after MIX07 when he started talking about building games with the Silverlight 1.1 alpha.

Due to this expertise this announcement came after speaking at the XNA Gamefest with Joel Neubeck, another Silverlight game writing master. I really wish I could have been there at the conference. Along with announcement that you'll be able to sell XNA Games on the Xbox 360, Bill demonstrated shared code for Windows, Zune and Silverlight.

And now to match the emerging field of Silverlight game creation, you can enter a contest and win some cash. (Don't worry, if writing games isn't your thing then there is still the other two Silverlight contests going on right now.)

So where are these games I speak of? I'm glad you asked. I've compiled a list below for your viewing, clicking, popping, stacking, shooting pleasure.

	Buddy Knavery Buddy Knavery is an old-school mini-adventure game built on new technology. If you enjoyed "point-and-click" classics such as Maniac Mansion or King's Quest, you'll probably dig this game.
	Bumble Beegger A 2D Silverlight action game called Bumble Beegger. The game uses the Farseer Physics Engine for gravity, movement and collision detection.
	Crayon Cannon Crayon-based games are the latest rage, its as if Elmo has been let loose with Visual Studio and Silverlight. Or in this case Popfly and their new game building updates. Fire the cannon!
	Destroy All Invaders Inspired by Mark Fennell's Wings Flash game, instead of using Google Maps though, Microsoft Virtual Earth Oblique (Birds-eye) imagery is used. The goal is simple: use the mouse to steer your chopper around and destroy the invading UFO's before they destroy you. You can use the Ctrl key to accelerate and the left mouse button to fire.
	Dr. Popper Dr. Popper is a puzzle game similar to Bubblet, Jawbreaker, or Bubble Breaker. Connect pieces of the same color, the more the better. Try out the different game modes each with their own strategies.
	HexMinesweeper Standard minesweeper wasn't quite enough, hex minesweeper just had to be done. Hunt for mines, mark them and don't blow up.
	Line Rider Boy grabs sled. Boy rides sled. In Line Rider the player draws their own landscape with a simple pencil tool creating as many ramps, hills, and jumps as they can imagine. Then they send a virtual sledder careening down the course until he wipes out.
	Shock Danger! Addictive! A full screen Breakout-like game, with some enhancements: more than 10 bonuses, 11 brick types, teleports, explosives, customizable background sounds and secret level codes, tracks high score and related info using WCF. Login not required to play. The Reflexes rating (click Top Score) adds a twist to the game play.
	SilverLander The game counts down and begins the lander on approach from the top left of the screen. Your job is to bring the lander to a safe slow (and upright) landing on the surface inside the highlighted landing zone. Each level increases difficulty by increasing gravity, increasing initial velocity, decreasing available fuel, and a decreasing landing zone radius.
	Stack Attack Stack blocks on the tray up to 5 high. Move the tray with the arrows and use the space bar to place the blocks in the pit.
	Tetrislight A classic among classics, Tetris is one of the most popular titles in video games history. Tetrislight brings the game to the browser and demonstrates Silverlight’s support for animation, music, fonts, and more.
	Tunnel Trouble Shoot a hole in the wall. Then shoot a hole in another wall. You can now walk through one hole and over to another. Pick up gems and items. Solve the puzzles!
	Vector Space: Zero Destroy the asteroids and enemy ships before they destroy your ship! Dig the retro music and parallax background scrolling!
	Zero Gravity Help Lt. Bennet get back to his home before he strays too far into the void of Zero Gravity. Use the W,A,S,D keys to jump between blocks, through teleports, tubes, and switches. You can even be Lt. Bennet's friend on Facebook.
	Zombomatic The electricity is running and your Zombomatic 3000 is broken! To get it working again, you must create a path for the electricity to follow. To do this you need to flip over the panels to reveal more conductors.

For more games check out the games list on Mashoo run by Silverlight Girl.

Xbox Gamercard updated for Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Adam Kinney — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:34:00 GMT

After a few changes the Xbox Friends Watch Gamercard now runs on Beta 2. The few changes I had to make included

updating the project file in Visual Studio to match Beta 2
Adding System.Net as a reference since the WebClient class has moved there
Changing Storyboard.GetClockState to AnimationInstance.GetCurrentState to match the API update.
Moving from ToolTips to the ToolTipService on the HyperlinkButtons.
Changing MouseLeftButtonDown event handlers to handle the Click event on Buttons, now that MouseLeftButtonDown event no longer fire.
The final change had to do with adding a setting in the AppManifest.xml to allow the XAP to be hosted on a different server than the page its embedded on and still make the cross domain call. Emil Stoychev has more detail about the X-Domain Scenario on SilverlightShow.

Get your own Gamercard on the script builder page. Even if you already have the Gamercard on your page, you will still need to update your embed code to reflect the new changes.

Now to find the time to play the Xbox...

Xbox Friends Watch - releasing v1 of the new Gamercard

Adam Kinney — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:50:00 GMT

Xaps

One of my favorite new features of Silverlight 2 is the new Application model. Moving on from version 1.0, where JavaScript instantiation was the only way to start your app and you were restricted to the same origin as the web page, enter the Xap. The new packaging model, not only bundles your assets into one file enabling simpler deployment, it also enables application instantiation via the object tag. Plus, the Xap can live on a separate server than the web page, which enables the creation of embeddable applications with Silverlight.

<applause!>

- More information about Xaps and the new Application Model

Xbox Friends Watch Gamercard

In celebration of this functionality, I've expanded on the Xbox Friends Watch line and added a new Gamercard. Xbox.com currently offers a gamercard which renders a fairly static set of html and images which is embedded via an iframe. Using Silverlight for its interactivity, data stack and portability and the Xbox Gamertag Data Service I thought I would be able to enhance the experience as well as expose the status information provided by the Data Service.

Below is the result of my experiment and using the Gamercard page you can create a script to add the Gamercard to your site.

- Add the Gamercard to your page

Next Steps

My next post will include some of the technical details covering how the Gamercard was created and some of the techniques I used to work with Silverlight 2.

If you're interested in following the saga of the Xbox Friends Watch components you can subscribe to my XBF feed, follow XBF on Twitter or follow XBF on Facebook.

Xbox Friends Watch - v1.1 has been posted

Adam Kinney — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:25:00 GMT

Download 1.1 Now

Performance Improvements
A week ago, I posted the first version of the Xbox Friends Watch Gadget. I received a lot of great feedback and feature suggestions. The most noticeable was the excessive amount of memory consumed for some people. I've gone through and optimized, linted and crunched the code. I've run this version for a few days now and although it still runs higher than I'd like(20k) that's a lot better than the (300k) I had seen before.

Duncan has also optimized and compressed the REST service, the size of the data downloaded is much smaller.

Version Check
Another big feature, is that the gadget now checks to see if it has the latest version. Definitely something I wish I had added with the initial release. I'm guessing 70% of the people who downloaded the gadget's first release won't find this new release or any consecutive ones.

Next Steps
I've added a page just for the Gadget and will be adding Suggestions as well as FAQ. And then I will work on the next update where I will target "access to the gadget context menu", "loading screens" and "more than five friends displayed".

Lots of good Gadget feedback

Adam Kinney — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 08:04:00 GMT

Wow, so much feedback on the Xbox Friends Watch Gadget its crazy. Major Nelson did end up posting a link to the gadget (thanks Duncan) and the flood gates opened. 47 comments so far on my post, 120 comments on Major Nelson's, 1,388 views on the demo screencast on Channel 9 and according to my server logs it appears the gadget has been downloaded 2,471 times.

That's awesome.

But what's not awesome is the gadget doesn't run too well. I originally wrote it as a demo for a presentation and it's the first sidebar gadget I have written. I don't want all of this momentum to go to waste though, especially since the gadget appears like it could be really useful to a lot of people. My plan is to work on an update that will cover a few of the major bugs/feature requests.

Performance - The JavaScript was never optimized and I need to look into the best practices for running with in the Sidebar.
Error Handling - another missing important piece. Currently the render will fail on a Gamer who is in private mode.
More than 5 Friends - One person posted a hack to resize the gadget by changing the html, but I think in docked mode a scrollable list would be best. Then in undocked mode, I'd like to show at at least twice the height, still adding the scroll functionality.
Access to the gadget right-click menu - most requested for opacity.
and Custom Colors - if everything else goes smoothly (crosses fingers)

And now to address a FAQs:

It doesn't work on 64-bit Vista?
Unfortunately Silverlight does not provide 64-bit support, but you can run the Sidebar in 32-bit mode if you want to use the gadget by following the instructions Shane posted in the comments.
Why Silverlight?
No it did not have to be Silverlight, but that was the original point of the demo. Not only am I a big fan of SIlverlight, but you will also find I am a bit biased due to my current position at Microsoft. Bias aside, I think Silverlight can work really well as the UI for Sidebar Gadgets.

Look for version 1.5 coming soon, I'll update the original post once its available.

Xbox Friends Watch - a Sidebar Gadget using Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:42:00 GMT

[UPDATE: version 1.1 has been posted, performance improvements and an auto version checker now included.]

HALO 3 is out and my Xbox is now getting the love it truly deserves. Multiplayer mode in HALO is a lot of fun and even more fun when you can play with friends. Thus, a perfect opportunity was born to create a useful sidebar gadget.

I've recorded a demo on how the gadget works available on Channel 9 and you can download the gadget directly from my server, although I will be posting it to the Gadget Gallery shortly.

Just make sure that before you run the gadget you install Silverlight 1.0, otherwise the gadget will not work.

My data source for Xbox Live information is coming from Duncan Mackenzie's REST service and the UI is done completely in Silverlight 1.0. This turned out to be a really fun project and the Sidebar hosting environment was a great place for a Silverlight application.

One of the most obvious benefits is that within the Sidebar you can make cross-domain calls, no need for any server-side proxies. You also gain access to certain System properties and a small data storage model all through the Gadget API.

I foresee more Silverlight-based Sidebar Gadgets in the future, I'm looking at you Twitter API...

Oblivion, a fitting title

Adam Kinney — Wed, 17 May 2006 08:51:00 GMT

I've had this entry rattling around in my head for a bit and after seeing Phil blog about it, its time to get it out.

For my birthday my wife, with a bit of reluctance perhaps, gave me the gift of Oblivion. Now I was really looking forward to the game, I've always been a fan of fantasy games and it was right around the time when Duncan began playing the game and was raving about how great it is. After popping it in the Xbox and playing for a bit, I could see why it had won such great acclamations. Beautiful scenery, very smooth combat and character control and an interesting skills and questing engine.

After the first hour or so of play, I noticed something though, I was quickly losing interest and not concerned for the progression of my character. All of the pieces were there, but something was missing. There was noone else there. It was just me and my character. Who cared if the face generation tool in attempt to be realistic, seemed to make only really odd looking faces, no human would ever see it besides me. Who cared if I got a new piece of armor that looked cool, no human would ever see it, unless they sat in my living room and watched me play (because we all know how fun that is).

I've always been more of a PC gamer than a console gamer and although the reason my have originally been for the keyboard/mouse combo, mods, and ability to customize your rig, it is now very obvious that the missing ingredient is the online play. The ability to socialize and experience the adventures provided with others real-time. Games like Second Life and World of Warcraft do not match Oblivion in graphics or combat modes, but they do hold my attention much, much longer.

I was amazed at how important this one aspect was to me, but not too surprised. I don't think I've ever enjoyed any RPG video game as much as carefree pencil, paper and dice role-playing from the high school years. If something like playing a video game is going to take up my leisure time I could at least be playing with others virtually.

For an interesting take on the maturing of a tech society that touches about on my rant check out the article from Seed Magazine (great new science mag by the way) entitled: Why we haven't met any Aliens

1,000,000 in Geometry Wars

Adam Kinney — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:26:00 GMT

Yes, its finally happened. This weekend I had a little relax time and was able to play Geometry Wars, which is just about my sole purpose for getting an Xbox360. I unlocked the "Score 1,000,000" achievement! It feels good, I love that game.

MicrosoftGadgets.com XBOX Contest Winners

Adam Kinney — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:38:00 GMT

On November 1st, we announced a Gadget contest on MicrosoftGadgets.com. Last night I was pleased to send congratulatory emails to our three winners. Thanks for the contributions guys, hope you enjoy your Xbox 360!

Donavon
Live Clock

Community rockstar
that set the standard

PopolDal
Xbox Live GamerTag

Multi-language
buddy List

Laurence Timms
Trackword

A classic from
a gadget pioneer