How to add OpenXLive to the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Game

OpenXLive Beta release has been released for 1.5 months and has been well received by developers and players, with five openxlive games entering Windows Phone Marketplace, where 7bomb and super Hoops have made very impressive achievements.

While openxlive in the XNA game, we also heard some complaints from Silverlight programmers. While the XNA Gaming development platform is available in Windows Phone 7, a significant portion of the game is developed using Silverlight. After all, Silverlight is a fascinating fast-growing tool for games that show no high performance.

Fortunately, we considered the possibility of future support for Silverlight in our initial architectural design, so we encapsulated the business logic part in OpenXLive.dll and XNA the Xliveform forms and controls on the The library is encapsulated in the OpenXLive.Forms.dll. We only need to invoke the functionality in OpenXLive in Silverlight.

After providing a simple example code for openxlive on Silverlight, we find that support for Silverlight games is still not enough. First, we only provide the leaderboard part of the sample code, in the absence of documentation, the development of other features of the UI is difficult; second, developers do not want to write a Silverlight UI themselves, but simply want to add openxlive support in the game, Just like in the XNA game.

So, we redefined the capabilities of the OpenXLive Silverlight, implemented all the features in OpenXLive, and encapsulated them in OpenXLive.Silverlight.dll. During the development process, we try to keep the consistency of the XNA and Silverlight frameworks, and if you've ever used openxlive XNA versions, you'll have déjà vu in the Silverlight version, which is exactly what we want.

The point to be prompted is that OpenXLive's Silverlight and XNA versions together use a logical assembly--openxlive.dll, so they are functionally consistent.

In the future, we will add openxlive Silverlight to the OpenXLive SDK and provide Visual studio templates. At a certain point in time, we will consider open source for OpenXLive Silverlight, allowing developers to easily modify OpenXLive Silverlight to the way they want it.

OpenXLive Introduction

Microsoft provides a very good development tool and application framework for XNA and Silverlight game development on Windows Phone 7, making it easier for developers to develop lively and interesting games. But with the development of the in-depth, we found that although the quality of the game we developed can be comparable with the products of large companies, but compared to the big company game user experience is still a lot of difference. Because, we have to spend a lot of time on the development of peripheral functions, such as: The Launch Interface (Splash screen), the Championship (leaderboard) and Game achievement (achievement), and so on, not extravagant talk about the game to add SNS function, such as: View Online users ( Online Player), cloud storage (Cloud Storage), and so on. The development time of these peripheral functions may be more than the development time of the game itself, so what should we do?

OpenXLive is looking for ways to help individual developers and small team developers to have the game features that only large companies can have in the shortest amount of time.

OpenXLive is a cloud online service for smartphone game developers in Windows Phone 7. Support developers to increase the cloud and SNS functions for stand-alone games, helping developers to integrate cloud services into their own games with minimal effort. These cloud services include: standings, game achievement, online vs, Social network and cloud storage. Similar to open Xlive services, as well as OpenFeint on iOS.

OpenXLive currently supports Windows Phone's XNA and Silverlight development framework, which makes it easy to invoke openxlive interfaces and functions in games without the need for developers to write UI code. Because XNA and Silverlight are two different application frameworks, OpenXLive provides a different way of referencing to support XNA and Silverlight games.

This article discusses how to add openxlive to the Silverlight game, and if your game is written in XNA, check out the OpenXLive development primer, which links to the following:

Http://wiki.openxlive.net/Getting-Started-with-Open-XLive.ashx