• [00:33] XBox Event May 21, 10AM PDT
• [01:10] Windows AzureConf 2013
• [02:07] Introducing: Code Digger, an extension for VS2012 (Nikolai Tillmann )
• [03:06] TypeScript Announcing 0.9 early previews (Jonathan Turner)
• [04:25] Microsoft Offers Module to Scale Out Real-time Node.js Applications (Richard Seroter, Glenn Block)
• [05:27] Using Visual Studio’s Javascript Memory Analysis tool to find memory leaks on your Windows 8 Javascript app (David Catuhe)
• [07:11] Miguel de Icaza: Mono, Open Source, Visual Studio, and Xamarin (Charles, Miguel de Icaza)
• [07:58] Build your next great game for Windows 8, OpenGameArt.org
• [09:25] Channel 9 Highlight: Introducing Creative Coding and ProcessingJS With Windows (Clint Rutkas, Matthias Shapiro, Rick Barraza )

Picks of the Week!

• Dan's Pick of the Week:[11:52] The power of 3D interaction (Lee Stott), http://drdave.co.uk/page/projects (Dr Dave Brown)
• Clint's Pick of the Week:[12:33] Pizza Hut launching Xbox 360 app that lets console owners order pizza from Xbox Live (Alexa Ray Corriea)

• Windows Store 8 App? Check
• SurfaceRT? Check
• MonoGame? Check
• XAML? Check
• DirectX? Check
• Separation of concerns, with server (Linux in this case) handling logic and client the display? Check
• SignalR? Check

Creating a Windows 8 Store Game with MonoGame (XAML) and SignalR

In previous posts we’ve looked at how we could create a cross-platform game that relied on HTML and JavaScript. What we also did was moving the server-side code over to a server that runs on Linux and uses Apache and Mono with SignalR! Now let’s take this a step further and convert this game client to a Windows 8 Store application using MonoGame with XAML!

Prerequisite; what you’ll need to install first

Before we can dig into the coding part we need to have some tooling installed first. I am going to use Visual Studio 2012 for this. There are however a lot of resources around that tells you how to use MonoGame with MonoDevelop on for instance a Mac.

All you really need to install if you already have Visual Studio 2012 installed is MonoGame. You can grab the latest version (3.0 Beta) over at the MonoGame CodePlex site.

After installing this you should be able to see the MonoGame (XAML) project template in the “New Project” dialog as seen in the image below.

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Recap

This post has gone through a lot of interesting topics and just scratched the surface on many of them. But the idea was to wrap up all the cool things that we’ve looked at with SignalR and Windows 8 for the last couple of months. This post is far to long to fit in a tl;dr but here is a bullet list of the awesome things used in this post:

• Getting started with MonoGame
• Adding basic textures with MonoGame
• Understanding how to add basic images such as PNGs as XNBs with the annoying work-around
• Creating a basic application that uses both XAML and DirectX
• Running MonoGame on Surface
• Communicating with a server using SignalR which runs on Mono, Apache and Linux!
• Wrapping it all together and porting the Tic-Tac-Toe client to a Windows 8 “XNA” Game that runs on Surface!

I probably forgot one or two things in the list above, but you get the point! We looked at some very interesting things and I think that you can take it from here and make some amazing cross platform games and not be limited by what server software you are running (read: this works on linux with Mono and Apache!).

Code? Oh yeah...

Where can I get the code?

Don’t worry, you can download the entire solution that I worked on here. Remember that a lot of the code is based on the other SignalR posts that I’ve done:

• Introduction to SignalR – Creating a Cross-Platform game
• Running SignalR on Mono

Don’t forget to check out my screencast on SignalR, here it is again so you don’t forget:

We're about coding right? So how about we wrap up the year highlighting a open source, c#, game library that will help you build your own cool game? You've undoubtedly have heard of Minecraft? You've maybe wondered if you could create your own like "block" game? Well my friends, today's is just for you!

Voxeliq

Voxeliq is a block engine crafted with C# that can be used to develop block based worlds with any type of gameplay you can imagine. Sandbox games, RPG’s or even RTS games within a blocky world! Engine is still being developed & optimized for production though we already started kicking in our first games with it.

raistlinthewiz / voxeliq

voxeliq is an open source block-based game engine implementation developed with C#. It uses XNA or the Monogame as the basis. It can be compiled with Microsoft .NET or Mono, which means you can run it on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Please see the file LICENSE for license details.

Copyright (C) 2011 - 2013, Voxeliq Studios

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

Stay awhile and listen

• Read the FAQ and check the wiki before asking!
• Check out the forums.

More info

• Voxeliq website
• IndieDB
• Steam Greenlight
• voxeliq@github
• voxeliq@codeplex
• voxeliq@reddit
• voxeliq@twitter
• voxeliq@youtube
• voxeliq@facebook

DevLog Videos

• Devlog-IX - MonoGame support
• Devlog-VIII - Speed Test
• Devlog-VII - Bloom Effect
• Devlog-VI
• Devlog-V
• Devlog-IV - Infinitive Terrain 2.0
• Devlog-III - Infinitive Terrain
• Devlog-II
• Devlog-I
• Bonus - Techno Visualizer

The engine and sample game downloaded and ran for me with no problems. If you're using Visual Studio, you'll need to open it in VS 2010. Due to its usage of XNA, it won't load in VS 2012. You'll also obviously need the XNA Game Studio installed too.

Anyway, once opened, here's a snap of the solution.

Here's some snaps of it running on my notebook;

The cool thing is that this sample game really have very little code behind it itself, with the engine doing all the hard work.

There's bascially two CS files for the entire sample game;

The Program.cs is the usual setup stuff;

The VoxeliqGame.cs just setups the environment, UI, etc, telling the engine what's needed and then runs;

And that's about it. The engine does everything else.

Here's a snap of the engine;

So think you've got the idea for the next killer block game? Voxeliq might be just the thing to get your engine started!

Windows 8, XNA and MonoGame - Part 3, Code Migration and Windows 8 Feature Support

In Part 1 of this series I introduced you to MonoGame for Windows8, an implementation of the XNA namespace that allows you to get your XNA code running on Windows 8 as a Metro Style App.

In Part 2 I documented how to get your development environment configured using GitHub and Visual Studio 2012

In Part 3 I will cover migrating XNA code to Windows 8.and the Windows 8 features you will need to support in order to make your game Windows 8 Store worthy.

What is MonoGame? Bob's covers that well in Part 1;

Using the XNA Framework is not a choice for building a Metro Style App. Official Microsoft guidance on game development is documented here. The recommended way to build highly immersive games on Windows 8 is to use HTML5/JS, XAML/C#, XAML/VB or C++ and DirectX, all great choices. But if you have been developing with XNA and have an existing code base, your only option it would seem is running as a desktop app.

This is where MonoGame comes in…

MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. The goal is to allow XNA developers on Windows & Windows Phone to port their games to the iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux with both PlayStation Suite and Windows 8 support currently under development.

NOTE : This project is not linked with Microsoft or any of it subsidiaries. It is a non-profit, open source project. MonoGame is licensed under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)

MonoGame provides a cross platform XNA Framework implementation for XNA developers who want to take their code to non-Microsoft platforms as well as the ability, thanks to Tom Spillman and James Ford of SickHeadGames, Dean Ellis and several other talented developers, to target Windows 8. Using MonoGame for Windows 8  you can take your XNA code and with a recompile and some additional platformisms create a Metro Style App worthy of the Windows 8 store.

MonoGame is still under development and so any use of it should come with a note of advice to stay on top of that effort. Also as game developers we should always be looking at expanding our game development skills on Windows using HTML5, XAML and DirectX in order to get the most out of the platform. But given that so many developers have XNA games, MonoGame for Windows 8 is a viable migration solution in the near term.

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Part 2 covers getting your MonoGame dev environment setup and ready for coding.

In Part 3 he gets to work converting and writing XNA Windows 8 Store app's (which he gives you the Source for too

Metro Tic-Tac-Toe

My next project with MonoGame was to build a simple 2D game from scratch and add the feature support necessary for Windows 8 Store submission. I decided to implement the ancient game of strategy, intrigue and cunning…tic-tac-toe.

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One of the great tips was how to deal with XNA Content Pipeline projects (which VS 2012 doesn't have support for yet);

The Content Pipeline

From XNA Content Pipeline Overview

The Content Pipeline is a special set of assemblies included with XNA Game Studio that use MSBuild to compile game assets such as image and sound files into streamlined, pre-processed binary files called XNBs (so named for the fact that the file extension of the compiled version of a source file is changed to .xnb) which load quickly at run-time.

At this time, MonoGame does not have an implementation of the Content Pipeline and Visual Studio 2012 RC does not have native support for XNA development therefore we will need another way to create the XNB files from our graphic and sounds assets.
That is where Visual Studio 2010 comes in. You can use Visual Studio 2010 to compile your graphics assets and then add them to your Visual Studio 2012 MonoGame project.

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Finally he provides the information and tips for making your MonoGame a Good Windows 8 Store Citizen

Supporting Windows 8 Features to Make Your App Store Worthy

Once you have your XNA application running on Windows 8 you will want to add the features that the Windows 8 Store requires for all Metro Style Apps. Chris Bowen has written a great piece called The Top Ten Secrets of App Success that details several of the most critical features you need to support. I will cover some of these here. These features include but are not limited to:

• App Tiles and Splash Screens
• Using the MessageDialog
• Screen Management – Snap, Landscape and Portrait
• Process Lifetime Management (PLM)

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While you do have to jump through a number of hoops to make this work, if you have a good bit invest in XNA and don't want to jump to DirectX directly MonoGame could be a viable option for you.

The mono team has tons of info, so here’s a link list.

• Miguel de Icaza has a detailed blog post
• Chris Toshok has some great details as well.
• Moonlight 1.9 Release Notes
• The test sites Moonlight targets, with the status of each
• Silverlight/Moonlight development with the Mac OS X MonoDevelop

They’re hard at work finishing Silverlight 2 support, and have already started adding some Silverlight 3 features, including (from Chris’s link above):

• Easing functions for animations, including user-supplied ones.
• SaveFileDialog, a safe way to allow users to save content from Silverlight applications
• MultiScaleImage (the heart of Deep zoom) API additions (e.g. the AllowDownloading property).
• MediaStreamSource now supports PCM audio data, RGBA and YV12 video data.  This along with other extensions makes it very easy to write codecs entirely in managed code, that you can then distribute with your xap.
• WriteableBitmap is supported.

I’m particularly excited abut the Raw AV support being there, as it opens up a whole world of media format extensibility.

Anyway, great stuff guys! I’m looking forward to a final release and being able to have Moonlight and Silverlight compatibility be something that “just works.”

Miguel de Icaza’s blog has the full details and well worth the read. A few key points:

• This is an implementation of Silverlight 1.0. Thus it has
  • XAML for drawing the user interface
  • Browser JavaScript for application logic (no managed code yet)
  • Media Features
• The codec and file format support is distributed by Microsoft as a binary module that plugs into Moonlight. Users will be prompted to install it the first time they try to play back media. This allows for Microsoft to cover patent license fees associated with the codecs.
• Since we based that module on Silverlight 2 , this includes the VC-1 decoder improvements from Silverlight  2, and WMA 10 Pro.
• Moonlight is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Now the team is moving on to Moonlight 2.0 and Silverlight 2 compatibility, which is currently in pre-alpha. The big work item there is getting the CLR/DLR fully integrated. Once we get that, we’ll have Smooth Streaming working on Linux! As an open source project, they’re welcoming help.

And here’s my favorite Moonlight project I just heard about: Moonshine. It uses Moonlight to emulate the old Windows Media Player OCX embedding model, so that web pages targeting the old player can work in Firefox on Linux. It can also play back local WMV files. Given that VLC hasn’t be able to play back VC-1 content with B-frames, I’m very glad for this.

Screenshot of Moonlight (taken from their page. I still need to get the new SUSE installed; my computers have all been encoding full blast since December).

And thus, the beta 1 of Moonlight 1.0 is now available. Moonlight 1.0 maps to Silverlight 1.0, so you've got good XAML support. But there's no .NET bytecode support, so logic takes places inside the browser's JavaScript engine. Beta 1 also includes support for the "Microsoft Media Pack" described here. Moonlight will automatically offer to download it the first time you hit a media file. Microsoft covers the patent licensing for the included codecs.

Here's a list of supported sites. I imagine most of my demo projects up on Silverlight Streaming should work, as they're all Silverlight 1.0 compatible at this point. Someone who gets this installed, let me know (my personal lameness documented below).

Ars Technica also has a good article about beta 1. It contains plenty of screen shots and such, which I have once again failed to provide due to my lamentable lack of Linux-fu.

Anyway, huzzah to the Moonlight team. I can't wait for the final release of Moonlight 1.0 and the first beta of Moonlight 2.0.

(Yes I did try to install Ubuntu, but as with every attempt I've made to run Linux in the last five years, I quickly got stymied by video driver issues. While I got basic display working, I was using my backup Barcelona box, which has my beloved but ancient LaCie ElectronBlu 22: CRT monitor and a cheapo 1280x1024 LCD. Out of the box, it wouldn't let me run the main monitor at more than the small displays resolution or (more painfully) refresh rate. I tried to fix it until I got to the "type sudo..." phase. I bumped into Miguel de Icaza himself at an event last week (we had a fun chat about GPU compositing), who tells me that the new OpenSUSE 11.1 has a nice GUI configuration utility that should fix the issue.)