14 DAY TRIAL // As the official launch of the first Windows Phone 7 devices is getting nearer and nearer, new info on Microsoft's mobile operating system emerge into the wild. Among them, we can count some Windows Phone 7 XNA Samples that were made available on Friday, along with some demonstrations of applications for the platform, coming straight from Microsoft itself.
When it comes to building games for the forthcoming OS, XNA Game Studio 4.0 is the place to go. Among the samples that were published by the guys over at xna-uk.net, we can count one for using the Accelerometer sensor with the app building environment, one that demos how the touch panel can be used to provide thumbstick-style control on a device, or one that shows the manner in which a list of deployed content for a game can be built.
Other samples, as listed at xna-uk.net here, include: - Bounce: This sample for Windows Phone demonstrates Sphere to Sphere and Sphere to Plane physics through use of the Accelerometer - Fuzzy Logic: This updated sample for Windows and Windows Phone shows how an AI can use fuzzy logic to make decisions. It also demonstrates a method for organizing different AI behaviours, similar to a state machine. - Waypoints: This sample demonstrates basic navigation using waypoints. Waypoints has been updated to support touch controls on Windows Phone. - Sprite Sheet: This updated sample for Windows and Windows Phone shows how to implement sprite sheets, combining many separate sprite images into a single larger texture that will be more efficient for the graphics card. - Stock Effects: This Stock effects sample for Windows provides source code for the five effects (BasicEffect, SkinnedEffect, EnvironmentMapEffect, DualTextureEffect, and AlphaTestEffect), and the default shader used by SpriteBatch (SpriteEffect), built into the XNA Framework. There also is a command-line utility (CompileEffect) that uses the Content Pipeline to compile a .fx source file into a binary blob that can be passed directly to the XNA Framework Effect class constructor. In addition to these samples, one can have a look at the 20 minutes video below, which is focused on some Windows Phone 7 applications Microsoft has come up with so as to show developers what can be done. Some of these applications should land in the Marketplace, while the code of others is set to be released for the world in the near future.