I saw some apps like twitter having recent tweets on Live Tiles. The Tiles are rectangle and occupy whole space and not square like all other apps. How to change or create the rectangle Live tiles..? Any idea?
It is currently not possible to have the rectangle tile. With version 7.8 and 8 apps will have the ability to have multiple size tiles. With 7.5 we are limited to just the square tile. With the square tile you can put into on the back tile. To update the tile see the Tile Overview sample on msdn. You can download the complete sample here.
it is not possible.
at the moment in 7.5, only native app from microsoft such as Calendar and Pictures have rectangle tile.
therefore your existing tile can only be a square.
you would have to wait for 7.8 or 8.0 for possibility of doing so.
Related
Starting with the Digital Twin framework (https://forge-digital-twin.autodesk.io/#), but using a 2d file instead, the zoom performance is very laggy. The total geometry size is 82 MB, but I have the same performance when I hide most layers and only a small layer of polygons is visible. I have removed several features from the original digital twin as well.
I don't know how to make the display more responsive.
Yes, someone is going to say I have not provided enough detail for them to help. Probably true. Consider this a starting point then.
I am writing a program in visual basic 2010 to create a 2D scrolling map. I am using Pictureboxes at the moment, all 50 by 70 in size. It starts with 1, and depending on what is needed may easily end up with 1000 - 2000 of them. They all need to be clickable. I am concerned it might use too many resources and run too slow. Can anyone tell me what the best approach to make something like would be.
Thankyou.
A common method is to only draw the tiles (or pictureboxes in your case) when they can be seen by the player's camera. So you should first determine how many boxes fill the screen and then calculate whether or not they are within the bounds of the player camera as represented by a rectangle. Additionally, you should draw boxes slightly outside the player's view (1 or 2 additional boxes per edge, this is explained below).
When the player moves, move the position of the world, not the player. So if the player moves left, scroll all of the tiles to the right while the player sprite remains stationary. Now when a player's position changes you should check again which tiles are visible in the player's screen. Since you are drawing additional rows slightly outside the view of the player, the edges will smoothly scroll in and will not 'pop' in as is a common problem when starting out.
Since you are only drawing tiles which are visible to the player, your game should run a lot more efficiently. It is OK to store this data in a 2D array in memory for now. In the future when you have huge maps, it may be a good idea to load sections of your map which are far outside of the player's view from disk to memory. You don't want to load in map data from disk which the player can navigate to before it is fully loaded.
Exactly how much map data to store in memory is up to you and depends on what platforms you want to release on and other constraints.
Additionally, you may want to look into different rendering libraries. Common low-level libraries are DirectX and OpenGL. These libraries work directly with your graphics card to dramatically speed up rendering. There are libraries built on top of those for various languages, but I don't know any for Visual Basic. An example for JavaScript is PixiJS. Additionally, there are full featured game creation libraries such as Unity or the Unreal Engine 3.
I'm totally new when it comes to xcode, but there occured a problem:
I'm designing an iPad-App(Retina Display) in html/css with the standard retina resolution of 2048x1536px...the problem is, that when I open the app on the pad, the page turns out to be way too huge. If I'm reading out the UiWebView-Resolution I get 1024x768...am I able to change this to get the real iPad dimension?
thx for your help!
Best regards,
daft
Dimension values on iOS are described in points. Each point can have different number of pixels - depends on screen's pixel density. UIWebView interprets html document size value as point - so 1 html pixel means 1 point.
I suggest you two options to cope with that:
1. Design you're web app to resolution 1024x768 and insert images which are scaled to 50% size to have more pixel density.
2. Leave page in 2048x1536 resolution and use UIWebView api to scale content.
I want to create a custom live tile. I just need to display a number with large digits (1 to 4 digits) in the center of the tile, no icon, no text or anything else and it should be possible to update the tile also.
I have tried the default tile, but it displays the number at the up-right corner with small font and cannot pass number 99.Any ideas? (programming in Visual Basic)
I wrote a guide, how to render your own tiles even with transparency, but beware of the memory consumption in background agent. Typically you should render at max only one tile:
Pro Live Tiles for Windows Phone
http://suchan.cz/?p=110
I'm looking for advice more than direct help.
I am working on an 8 bit platformer game in XNA. I've probably sunk 160 hours into it already, and I'm starting to get into issues with the engine I have. It is basically an adapted/modified version of the XNA platformer demo. All or most of my tiles are 32x32, but some are 64 wide and 32 px tall, like a desk. Some are 32 wide and 64 tall, like a plant.
I am shipping them to the gpu just one .png at a time similar to the way that the XNA tutorial's author does tile mapping. For animated sprites I do use a tile map of different frames of the character. For the tile map data, I read in a text file just like the XNA tutorial.
How should I accommodate for the wide and tall tiles? Should I make a two layered tile system (I figured I should abide by the keep-it-simple-stupid rule)?
Right now I'm using transparent tiles to extend the wide tiles.
Desk with chair:
chair http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8446900/game_screen_desk.png
.....
...h.
..d".
#####
Plant and chair:
desk http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8446900/game_screen_plant.png
..p...h.
..,...,.
########
The chair is 'h', 'd' is for desk, 'p' is plant, and ',' is for a transparent background tile (no interaction with the user). '"' is for a transparent tile that the user can stand on (extending the desk). The problem is, as you can see, the background appears to have a hole in it.
Should I make an actual tile map and combine everything into one large png? Another option I could take is to actually cut each wide or tall tile into two different tiles. How would a pro do this? I'm not looking for a quick and dirty fix, just how a modern day platformer would run.
UPDATE: After reviewing the answer, I found a very useful tool that packs sprites into a sheet.
http://spritesheetpacker.codeplex.com/
UPDATE: My newly upgraded tile engine is much faster and almost just as simple. The advice below was great. Strongly recommended.
First off - don't introduce special-width/height tiles. Make the artist slice up large objects into single tiles (and hence re-compose them on the map editor). Every tile should be a PNG with an alpha channel so they can be correctly composed.
Keeping that in mind, my recommendations are:
Your tiles should comprise of only single tiles that have pre-composed parts of different objects, for example the left part of the desk is a single tile, the right part without a chair is another and one more with the chair behind it. (tilevalue = "dc", perhaps?)
You can define multiple layers of single tiles and render them back-to-front. You can also define a parallax factor for multiple layers and thus get a nice parallax effect between two layers quite easily. Of course, the player must "exist" in one layer at a time or you won't know what collision geometry to use for his/her current position.
You should also not create one texture per tile - but a compiled tilesheet (exactly like a spritesheet) so that the number of renderstate changes you make are minimized. Making many changes per draw call is bad because each time you make a change (current texture, drawing color or something else that affects that draw call) the API, the driver and possibly the GPU itself has to do work to update its state - this adds up quick.
Note that this doesn't mean you should put characters and levels into a HUGE spritesheet - this is bad for other reasons. You could, for example: put all level-related tiles in one tilesheet, the hero's animation tiles on another and all enemies on one (together) or something similar.
Hope that helps, otherwise I'd be glad to explain things further.