A tablet PC is also quit a nice platform for games. Imagine using a pen to pull a specific handle in your flightsim cockpit or imagine using a pen to draw a circle around the neighbourhood you want your Sim family to pick a house. In every game I can imagine a good use of the stylus. The “Windows XP Tablet PC edition” (anybody know an easier moniker ?) does even include an ink-specific game : InkBall. Which is installed on every tablet but it took me seeing someone play it at Windows Anywhere to get aware of its existence. It is a nicely animated game in which colored balls bounce against pen strokes. Which can be pretty difficult, the risk is finding out what tablet RSI feels like. Change often, imho a mix of keyboard, pen and mouse make you less sensitive to RSI.
Anyway, the beta of the tablet game SDK is now released. It comes with Arcs of Fire, a demo game. Altough the game uses DirectX (it even requires the feb. 2005 update) don’t expect anything visual spectacular. It’s a classic 2–d game where you hurl objects (in this case artilery shells, on the Atari it was a gorrila throwing bananas) at your opponent. You shoot the shell with the stylus. The angle of the stroke determines the angle under which is fired, the speed drawing the stroke determine the shell’s velocity.
The demo focuses on animating the game. See the shell fly through the air and watch the explosion when it hits something. The demo covers most parts of the Microsoft.Ink.GameSDK dll. For which no source code is included. Despite its name this namespace has a lot of classes which are very handy for any tablet (or even mobile) app. To mention some:
- The Power class wraps up battery life
- The Rotation class wraps up screen rotation
- The Stylus class leverages the pen stylus as programming target. In the existing API you can get very detailed data from the pen. I did some investigation of these in the tablet explorer (background article is still in the making). With the Stylus class you access the pen on a higher level. It has properties like CurrentPosition, IsStylusDown and LastDownPosition
Expect some hurdles for the classes to work. Fi: the demo game only works in landscape mode, no rotation yet.
Worth mentioning is the ArcsOfFire blogfeed. No link, as it’s not really worth subscribing. Is this is the group Scoble meant ? No content, mainly messages to go to the website, and many a link present points to things like about:blank. The website is Ok but most of the info is available as downloadable Word documents. Also the doc’s of the gameSDK are a downloadable doc. It’s content is quite Ok, a story which mixes the history of the tablet with the history of artillery games. It contains some quite nostalgic illustrations. But the layout just doesn’t look right. Oh my hands and pen are itching to do some work there. A little Frontpaging (or whatever other tool) could make this great content so much more accesible.