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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 types are BMP, PNG, and JPG. For games, we want high-quality bitmaps without lossy compression (in…

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 input, but it is a rare and often niche game that uses the accelerometer to…

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 memory texture and use that for printing text on the screen. This is a time-consuming…

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 a package that will install everything you need to develop, compile, and run code in…

Optimizing your game’s performance Games belong to a class of real-time software. This means that they are not only expected to produce the correct result, but they must also complete this within a fixed time window. In general, game developers shoot for a minimum of displaying 30 frames per second in order to produce smooth,…

Using dual texture effects Dual texture is very useful when you want to map two textures onto a model. The Windows Phone 7 XNA built-in DualTextureEffect samples the pixel color from two texture images. That is why it is called dual texture. The textures used in the effect have their own texture coordinate and can…