I'm very happy to have been able to find more Silverlight games (that run on SL2B2) almost on a daily basis now. I am updating Ze List regularly so check it out now and then at Silverlight Games on Mashooo.com.

I discovered Bill Reiss' Dr. Popper a couple of days ago (Good Job Bill!) only to be surprised by the existence of many Silverlight based Games that I wasn't aware of, go figure. I decided then to compile my finds on search keywords "Silverlight Games" for my own selfish personal enjoyment but realized it could be of great use to other curious spirits. Sadly, many of the games I came across run on prior versions of SL. The list is a compilation of games that were built or were updated to run on Silverlight 2 Beta 2 only. Check it out on Mashooo.com.

My baby is now updated to work on Silverlight 2 Beta 2. One animation and a couple of controls had to be modified with no great hardship and in no time. I did the work on the new Preview June 2008 Expression Blend 2.5, that for what I could see in just a glimpse, has many new features that I didn't even have time to explore due to my hurry to fix Bumble Beegger.

The only animation that didn't work properly on SL2B2 was the falling leaf that shows the level number: The problem was that the text and the leaf image were animated separately and some disphasing took place. Fixing it was as easy as grouping the elements into a canvas and recreating the animation at once.

Click here to give Bumble Beegger a try.

I know, I know, I've been neglecting this blog but I have the perfect excuse: I was very busy creating my very first Silverlight Game. Actually my first game ever. I teamed up with APIjunkie (the guy is a GENIUS) that after this experience I consider my BFFUFN.
I have learned a lot about Silverlight 2 and Expression Blend and I CAN wait to share the knowledge so I'm taking a little vaycayshonne first.
The name is Bumble Beegger and it's published on http://www.mashooo.com. Go check it out and don't be shy to criticize.

 

I have been asked how I did to insert my Silverlight apps in a blog entry. Simply enough it's just a matter of downloading the Silverlight extension and adding to your entry's code the path of your Silverlight app's .xap file.

I stumbled upon this wonderful find at Sean Blakemore's website that has a very becoming domain name: flawlesscode.com

There you will find further details on this plugin.

On my previous post I showed an option to cause a message to appear by clicking on a button. I had played for a while in Blend 2.5 with the obvious functions and animations to achieve this but for some reason it didn't work out. For the opacity of the text the xaml in Blend showed errors. Visual Studio 2008 didn't show any errors but it wouldn't debug either. As for the visibility function it just doesn't work when the timeline recording is on. I get a pop up window describing: "Invalid Property Value: The Property Value is not Valid" (I like how it's refrased in case we didn't get it).

Finally I came up with the last resort, playing with a color animation. Only last night I kicked, digged, dzoned, etc. the article with a very nice result since I received useful comments. Sean made me want to give the opacity another try because it really didn't make any sense that it didn't work. He also mentions that it would be more useful in the case of having a video or an image.  So thanks to Sean here is the result:

This morning I felt like recreating in Silverlight 2, with Microsoft Blend 2.5 March Preview, a little executable I made in WPF. First of all I listened to some lying-in-a-caribbean-beach-sipping-pineapple-and-grenadine-juice music to tame the frustration without having to drink any alcohol.

Back to the subject. I couldn't manage to make a message appear and disappear at the click of an object because the Visibility option "Hidden" is not available. The solution turned out to be very simple. It is actually a color animation. The initial color of the font is the same as the background. Then in the animation I changed the color to Black for 2 seconds. At 02:01:00 I added a keyframe to turn the text back to its original color. Here is the result:

This animation creates the illusion of a message appearing after being triggered by clicking a button and then disappearing. Notice the fading effect achieved by the 0.1" color animation at the end.

Update 2008 Aug 2: The app doesn't work properly because of an Event Handler issue. Will post solution in the future.

Update 2008 Sep 3: The solution is in my post Fix for: Make text appear and disappear.

Update 2008 Oct 15: The text properties are not found in type "button": in this case TextWrapping ="Wrap" and TextAlignment ="Center". I had to make the button longer so the text would fit. I also added the FontSize property because the default size was too big.