Click the Silverlight area first to give it focus then use the ‘A‘ and ‘S‘ keys to drive the truck backwards and forwards .

In this example I build a very simple driving game using the Farseer Physics engine. This add-on for Silverlight allowed me to build this example purely in Blend without having to touch a single line of code!

This example uses the drag and drop joint behaviours available to connect the wheels to the car and allow them to act independantly. I haven’t spent much time tweaking the available variables so the car is a bit too bouncy – so if you’re not careful, expect to roll it!

This example uses the Farseer Physics engine for Silverlight available for download on Codeplex here.

You can see my first example using Farseer Physics here, this earlier example also links to some tutorial videos that will help you get started.

Grab the code

Feel free to download the source for this example here.

Click and drag on any of the objects in this example to start the chaos, collisions and fun!

This example uses no C# work, all the work was done inside Blend using behaviours added from the Farseer Physics Engine.

All you need to do is download the Farseer files found here, follow their instructions to add the required dlls into your project and Blend will feature a list of new plug and play behaviours to start creating fun games or just some cool crazy stuff like above.

This example took minutes to throw together, in fact I spent more time watching the cool crazy mayhem that it created than building it!

I have not had enough time to fully thrash out this add-ons potential, but first impressions lead to some very ‘easy to use’ cool features that will greatly expand your ‘bag of tricks’ in the Silverlight world.

There are some very basic, but easy to follow videos to help get you to grips with this add-on found here and here.

Moving forward

Now I need to spend some more time digging deeper and really unleashing the power of these physics, testing to see how easy the engine can be used to build rich interactive games. I have a feeling I maybe posting a view more examples using these add-ons. I need to spend some time thinking of some cool and purposeful ways to cross use tools like the Farseer Physics Engine, the WPFFX pixel shaders and Deep Zoom Composer.

Grab the example files

As always you can grab the example files here.

Click or use the mouse wheel to zoom into the picture frames to take a journey through the last 10 Presidents of the United States.

This example was put together with Deep Zoom Composer.

I hit a problem with hitting over 4 billion pixels in Deep Zoom Composer, to avoid this I found I could only go 6 pictures in depth.

To get the full 10 pictures working I used the following work around. First off the application won’t let you export a project when you hit over 4 billion pixels, but it will let you run a preview. By running a preview the program will create a .xap file and a Generate Images folder. The preview will open up, but the files it creates don’t seem to work once accessing them after the preview is closed. By changing the .xap to a .zip you can access the contents inside, of which one file is the .xaml file. I copied this across into the exported project (the one containing 6 images deep) and then changed the file extension back to .xap. Then I copied across the Generated Images folder and hey presto I got 10 working. I couldn’t get any more than 10 working, I would have loved to of gone through all 44 Presidents.

You can download Deep Zoom Composer from here or from www.silverlight.net.