two layers of graphics

[hasan2222]

I am trying to do a game application similar to chess, where i need to move the game peaces(graphics) over another graphics which is the game board. using the mouse. How can I do multiple layers of graphics and control their movement?

i hope am not bothering u guys, please in details, I know basic but new to visual

Note: I have visual basic 2010 express, windows xp home

thanks in advance

[Jenner]

DirectX view-spaces have a ZOrder for sprites drawn on them. You can separate layers by using ZOrder range adders. Layer 0 adds 0, Layer 1 adds 100 to the ZOrder, Layer 2 adds 200... etc.

By storing all sprites in a certain layer in a sprite collection of some sort, you can easily organize them since each collection would represent a layer.

[hasan2222]

thank you very much Jenner, but isnt their anyway simpler than that? I am barely good in VB, so how about direct x !!!
I thought there is a way to move two images over each others without going that deep, its not an action game where timeing is an issue, its as simple as moving chess stones over the board

[Jenner]

DirectX is far simpler to use than trying to slide pictureboxes. Don't let "THE GREAT AND MIGHTY DIRECTX!!!" scare you. It requires a little more setup time on your part and some secondary downloads from Microsoft (XNA Game Studio) but after that, you have the basic tools you need to make most any game.

If you try to animate pictureboxes, you'll spend hours trying to time their movements so they look even halfway consistent, days trying to hack in transparency into the system so you can utilize things other than square graphics, and weeks trying to figure out why everything is flickering... all because you're trying to make the business winforms graphics system (GDI+) do what it was never, ever intended to do.

On the other hand, you can download XNA Game Studio, create a new project, make a "Game" object which does all your drawing, rendering and timing control for you. Load in all your graphics as "Texture2D" objects, and slide them around your render window all day in silky-smooth, alpha-blended 60fps ease... all in about an hour's time.

EDIT: I'm going to upload a simple, game-starter example to here and/or the codebank just to prove how simple creating the beginnings of a basic 2D game can be.

[hasan2222]

than u very much, but in the example; try to be as detailed as u can handle, i am totaly new to this

[akhileshbc]

EDIT: I'm going to upload a simple, game-starter example to here and/or the codebank just to prove how simple creating the beginnings of a basic 2D game can be.

I would love to see that.


Edit#1:
I found a basic 2D shooter game tutorial done in XNA and C# : http://create.msdn.com/en-US/educati...etting_started



Edit#2
I found another thing that, XNA is gonna support VB soon. Check this blog entry: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lisa/archive...ual-basic.aspx

[Jenner]

Step 1. Google "XNA Game Studio". Go to Microsoft's site, find it, and install it. You may need Visual C# Express installed to even get the installer to work, though you don't need it to use XNA. For this example, I'll demonstrate using Visual Basic 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.1.

Step 2. Make a new WinForms project. Go into the project references and add "Microsoft.Xna.Framework" and "Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game".



Next, all games need graphics. So I get three of them. Two are animation frames for my movable character that I'll call the "bee".

The third is a background image the bee will travel on top of.


I add them into my project.

Next, I delete the default "Form1" object. I don't need it. "Forms" are for business app programmers, not game programmers

Make a Module and create a Sub Main in it:

Module Module1
    'This exists only to serve as a starting point for the program and launch the game object.
    Public Sub Main()
        Dim g As New Game1
        g.Run()
    End Sub

End Module

Then, make a new object called "Game1" and Inherit an XNA game object to it. The complete code is below:

Imports Microsoft.Xna.Framework
Imports Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics
Imports Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input

Public Class Game1
    'This is not a form!  This is an XNA Game object!
    Inherits Game

    'This sets up the DirectX rendering
    Private gDevMgr As New GraphicsDeviceManager(Me)
    Private gDevice As GraphicsDevice

    'The player location, represented by a 2D vector
    Private playerPosition As New Vector2(0, 0)

    'Timing values for the player animation
    Private timer As Double = 0
    Private interval As Double = 70

    'The game sprites it will draw
    Private mySprites As SpriteBatch

    'Info for our bee.   How many frames of animation does it have?  What is the current frame? 
    Private currentFrame As Integer = 0
    Private frameCount As Integer = 2

    'The direction our bee is facing.  I'm keeping it simple and only using left and right since I don't have the
    'graphics for front and back.
    Private facingLeft As Boolean = True

    'The bee's graphics
    Private beeSprite(1) As Texture2D

    'The background graphic
    Private backgrnd As Texture2D

    Protected Overrides Sub Initialize()
        'This is called when the game first starts.

        'Set my graphics options and set up the renderer.
        gDevMgr.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 500
        gDevMgr.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 500
        gDevMgr.ApplyChanges()
        gDevice = gDevMgr.GraphicsDevice
        AddHandler gDevice.DeviceReset, AddressOf OnResetDevice

        MyBase.Initialize()
    End Sub

    Protected Overrides Sub LoadContent()
        'This part runs after Initialize.  It loads in all your content.  

        'Setup my spritebatch and load my bee images as textures. 
        mySprites = New SpriteBatch(gDevice)
        beeSprite(0) = Texture2D.FromFile(gDevice, "bee1.png")
        beeSprite(1) = Texture2D.FromFile(gDevice, "bee2.png")

        backgrnd = Texture2D.FromFile(gDevice, "back.png")

        MyBase.LoadContent()
    End Sub

    Public Sub OnResetDevice(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
        'This is just here in case the DirectX device gets reset.   If it does, re-set it up.
        If gDevice Is Nothing Then
            Me.Initialize()
        End If
    End Sub

    Protected Overrides Sub Update(ByVal gameTime As GameTime)
        'This is my game loop.  I need no timer.  

        'Get the keyboard status.  XNA has keyboard handling built into it.  
        Dim kState As KeyboardState = Keyboard.GetState

        If kState.IsKeyDown(Input.Keys.Right) Then
            playerPosition.X += 2.0F
            facingLeft = False
        End If
        If kState.IsKeyDown(Input.Keys.Left) Then
            playerPosition.X -= 2.0F
            facingLeft = True
        End If
        If kState.IsKeyDown(Input.Keys.Up) Then
            playerPosition.Y -= 2.0F
        End If
        If kState.IsKeyDown(Input.Keys.Down) Then
            playerPosition.Y += 2.0F
        End If

        'Add the current game time to the timer variable to see if we should flip to the next animation frame.
        timer += gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds

        'Determine which animation frame to show.
        If timer > interval Then
            currentFrame += 1
            If currentFrame > frameCount - 1 Then
                currentFrame = 0
            End If
            timer = 0
        End If

        MyBase.Update(gameTime)
    End Sub

    Protected Overrides Sub Draw(ByVal gameTime As Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GameTime)
        'This is the render loop.  It asynchronously draws to screen.

        'Dray a green background
        gDevice.Clear(Color.ForestGreen)

        'Render all the sprites in the spritebatch.  Since there's only two, this is easy.

        'Begin the render, set some parameters for this batch.
        mySprites.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend, SpriteSortMode.BackToFront, SaveStateMode.None)

        'Draw the bee.
        mySprites.Draw(beeSprite(currentFrame), playerPosition, Nothing, Color.White, 0, New Vector2(0, 0), 1, If(facingLeft, SpriteEffects.None, SpriteEffects.FlipHorizontally), 0)
        'Draw the background.
        mySprites.Draw(backgrnd, New Vector2(0, 0), Nothing, Color.White, 0, New Vector2(0, 0), 1, SpriteEffects.None, 1)
        'Done!
        mySprites.End()

        MyBase.Draw(gameTime)
    End Sub

    'Using DirectX, we get smooth, flicker free animation.   
    'Game and render loops are standard operating procedure in game programming.   Learning 
    'how to time animations with these loops though takes practice.   Here, I’m counting the 
    'gametime  elapsed and checking if 70ms has gone by.  If so, go to the next frame.  

    'If I had to do this for multiple objects, I’d make a class to handle all the repetitive 
    'animation code and instance one per object, otherwise, the game and render loops would 
    'start getting bulky with animation timing routines. 
End Class

That's it! Run it, the effect looks like the picture below. Use the arrow keys to move the animated bee around the forest scene. Look how smoothly it moves!


The final source code is below.
VBNET and XNA Example.zip

Now, you have to admit. That's EASY. That's DirectX, animation, movement in about a single page of extremely basic code. I'm not using anything more complex than an array in here.

[hasan2222]

I tried to do it with 2010 express, its diffirent, i managed to do it until this:

Then, make a new object called "Game1" and Inherit an XNA game object to it. The complete code is below:

how do u make an "object", and where i can write the game intellegance(the code in visual basic)?, how to use the mouse instead of the arrows to control the graphical objects?

[Jenner]

VB.NET is an "object oriented" language. Every component of it, is a generic "object". Think of an "object" like a generic box. Forms are objects. Controls are objects. You can even whip up your own custom objects out of thin air. In VB.NET, a generic, empty object is called a "Class".

If I want to make a new, empty object, I just tell Visual Studio to add a new Class to my project.

One of the aspects of any object oriented language is "inheritance". This allows me to take an already existing, fully fleshed out object, and copy all it's properties and methods to a new object. You do this unknowingly every time you make a new Windows Form for example. This allows you to "customize" that new object with specific data. If you look at the designer file of any Windows Form, you'll see the line:

 Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form

This tells VB.NET to make this object inherited from a generic Form object found at: System.Windows.Forms.Form

In my example, I'm inheriting a Game object to my generic Class. More specifically, I'm inheriting a:

Inherits Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game

My example only shows:

Inherits Game

since I'm using some shorthand notation called "Imports". "Imports" tells VB.NET "If I tell you to look for an object, and you can't find it, also look in these locations."

Looking at the top of my code, you'll see:

Imports Microsoft.Xna.Framework
Imports Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics
Imports Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input

Once you make your "Game" object, you have all the tools to start writing your game logic.
The generic Game object contains several Protected Overrides Subs that you can use for various tasks:

Protected Overrides Sub Initialize() is called when the game first starts.
Protected Overrides Sub LoadContent() is called to load in all your content.
Protected Overrides Sub Update(ByVal gameTime As GameTime) is your game-loop. It's called several times a second as fast as possible to update your game-state.
Protected Overrides Sub Draw(ByVal gameTime As GameTime) is your render loop. It's synchronized with your monitor's refresh and handles drawing the game screen.

In addition to this, the Xna libraries contain oodles of helpful game-designing tools classes and methods.

Keep working at getting my example running. VB2010 and XNA 4 aren't that different from VB2008 and XNA 3.1; not for what I'm showing you how to do. This is like game design 101 stuff. If you add the libraries as a reference to your project, and then make a new class and inherit the game object to it, you'll be good to go.

[Spooman]

Jenner

Love your background image ..

Spoo