Blog

Feb 2

Written by:
Wednesday, February 02, 2011 

A big hello to all readers,

here is a brief status update to let you know where our current development focus lies.

DigitalRune Physics Bundle

A minor update including small bugfixes and improved samples will arrive next week.

We are also working on a Windows Phone 7 dice app. The D20 dice app will hit the Windows Phone 7 market place in the next weeks. The source code will be released as a free premium download for all existing DigitalRune Physics users.

DigitalRune Graphics

Still under development. Currently, the development has sparked two new byproducts: The DigitalRune Game UI library and the DigitalRune Animation library.

DigitalRune Game UI

While developing and designing the DigitalRune Graphics API we looked for the best way to integrate a GUI control library. The byproduct of this research is the DigitalRune Game UI library. It is intended as a replacement for libraries like the Neoforce Controls, the GUI controls in the Nuclex Framework or CEGUI#. The API is heavily inspired by Silverlight – but less complex. Here is a preview video:

A few more things that are not shown in the video:

• The skin of the controls is defined using a texture atlas and an XML file.
• The UI can be controlled using keyboard and mouse (PC), gamepad (Xbox 360), or touch (Windows Phone 7).
• On Windows Phone 7 the controls (scroll viewers, drop down buttons, context menus, etc.) imitate the behavior of Silverlight controls.
• All controls can be translated, rotated and scaled to create animations and transition effects.

As a big thank you for all existing DigitalRune Physics Licensees:

The Game UI library will be free for all existing customers and everyone who buys a DigitalRune Physics License (any Indie or other license) until the end of February.

Alpha builds will be released in the next weeks.

DigitalRune Animation

The DigitalRune Animation library is another byproduct. It is an animation library – but unlike many other “animation libraries” it can be used to animate everything, not only skeletal animation or morphing animation for 3d characters. Currently, we use it to animate our GUI, similar to the WPF/Silverlight animation capabilities and general game objects.

More information about the Game UI and the Animation libraries is coming soon. We will use this blog to keep you informed. And we are finally starting to embrace Twitter and try to provide more YouTube videos of new features.

So long,

The DigitalRune Team