The Story So Far
For the benefit of those joining us, you are reading the
second instalment of a six part blog which tracks the antics of a developer
hoping to win a $10,000 prize by creating a Windows 8 Metro app from scratch to
take full advantage of a technology-packed Ultrabook. Last time I introduced
myself and the technology I would be using, leaving details about the app
itself cloaked in mystery.
So What Exactly Is
The App?
The Love Hearts® app makes it possible to quickly create media messages on your Ultrabook and send them to your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Email and App-To-App.
 |
| A Love Hearts Sweet |
The message can be tailored to include text,
camera, photo album images and even your own doodles using the built-in art
tool. The app then builds the message as a single image and sends it to your
friend. If you send it to a friend who has the Ultrabook app installed, their
device will notify them that they have a message and will present that message
when they open their Ultrabook.
The App-to-App is an opportunity to experiment with a special feature of the Ultrabook called Always On Notifications. The idea is that when you close your Ultrabook, the app runs in low-power mode, and if someone sends you a new Love Hearts message, the Ultrabook will 'ping' you, even when closed. You can then open it up, and see the message running in the app.
 |
| Send messages any way you like |
In addition, the app has a collection of daily surprises.
For each day you own this free app, you are awarded a ‘surprise sweet’ which
when tapped will open up to reveal what it contains. If you don’t like the
wrapping, you can swipe it away and look at another one. When you see the one
you like, you simply tap to unwrap.
 |
| Some of the actual Love Hearts(r) sweets |
The surprise can be any number of things, from simple games,
to pieces of puzzle that you can later assemble, or additional gadgets and
tools to improve the messages you can send. Messages sent direct to another
Ultrabook will additionally include music, sound and animation effects, all to
make that message that little bit more special.
And to show you really care, you can include a sweet you have already
unlocked in your message, which might be a game you quite like, or a vital
piece of your friends puzzle.
So how does it make money?
No app is complete without a monetisation strategy, and no developer is complete without a freezer full of pizzas.
If you don’t wish to wait and prefer to unlock more than one sweet per day, you
can buy ‘Love Credit’ top-ups, allowing you to unlock as many sweets as you
like. I am toying with the idea that the daily credit is cumulative to
encourage repeat usage. How to make your app pay is a little bit like alchemy,
knowledge only takes you so far.
So What Will Make It
an Ultrabook App?
It’s a great question and one that I will be wrestling with
for the next few weeks. From using the Ultrabook over the last few days, I have
gained a sense of what it does well and how it wants to deliver an app
experience. Selecting tiles gracefully unfolds the app for you. Switching
between Desktop and the Start page is slick and untroubled. I’m not left
waiting for anything, and after an hour of playing I knew where everything was.
 |
| The new Windows 8 start screen |
My gut feel is that the app should be an extension of this
experience. I should be able to operate the app entirely from the touch screen,
swiping and touching my way through every feature. If my keyboard fell off
tomorrow, my app should carry on regardless. In practise, the full range of the
accelerometer can only be enjoyed by putting the Ultrabook on my lap, but I
have noticed the Z axis works great when I lift the keyboard up from the front,
something I would never have thought without playing with the device
itself. As I continue using the
Ultrabook, I am sure more insights will emerge, and I am keen to see how
pre-installed apps are making use of other sensors like gyroscope and ambience.
And What Does It Do
Right Now?
In anticipation of this question, I asked our tomb raiding,
whip cracking coder Steve to knock up a version that I could demonstrate.
Please excuse everything you see right now, and try to see past the app to a
much better app buried deep within.
To protect ourselves from law suits, and to avoid strange
looks in café’s, we've decided to remove the requirement to pick-up and shake
your Ultrabook. Instead, we’ve added a much nicer swipe gesture. In 3D, this
will completely spin the packet in the direction and speed of your gesture so
you get a real tactile experience right from the get-go. Your reward is a
lovely wrapped sweet. The first one is by way of a tutorial and you are asked to ‘tap to unwrap it’. This will open the sweet and it gets added to your collection which is displayed at the top of the screen.
 |
| Sweets you own appear at the top |
The tutorial continues
into this freshly unlocked feature; a tool for designing and sending custom
messages.
 |
| Have fun creating a custom message |
As you can see, you can make some crazy media messages very
quickly and with a single touch, the app sends it to your friend. A friends
list will be added in a week or so.
Back in the main screen, you are free of the initial
tutorial and you can use the app as normal. Swiping the packet will again spin
the 3D model and a new sweet will fall out and float to the foreground. The
sweet is supposed to be wrapped so you don’t see what’s inside. If you don’t
like the shape, colour or style of the wrapping, you can swipe to fling the
sweet away and it will curl its way back into the packet, and the packet will
obligingly push out another sweet. It
just so happens in this demo the next ‘wrapped’ sweet looks fine so I tap to
open and it gets added to my collection. I now have access to this sweet any
time I like, and tapping this one reveals a game menu, with the game I
discovered highlighted as available. In this demo, I can also play a bare bones
version of this side scrolling game of skill.
 |
| An early screen shot of the game 'Wings Of Love' |
Returning to the main screen, I can continue to swipe and
spin the packet, and each time I do I am spending those most precious Love
Credits. When I run out, I cannot have any more spins. The good news is that
everything I unlocked I keep, so whether it’s playing the game again for a
better score or sending an amusing message to a loved one, the app will be
there for you. Better than that, each day you visit you get a free spin and a
surprise to brighten up your day. For a complete list of surprises we have in
store for you, you’ll have to play the app to find out!
Starting With Windows
8
Hopefully no-one has trademarked the word WINRT by the time
this blog goes out, and I can explain what it is and how to use it before
someone changes the name. Before I can
present my app in all its glory, I first need to get to grips with the new
programming paradigm of Windows 8. That is, try to get “Hello World” running on
my Ultrabook.
 |
| Windows 8 boot time is very quick |
Writing an app from scratch using the templates provided by
Visual Studio Express 2012 is simply a matter of studying how they work, and
tweaking enough bits until you’ve got your own program. Trying to port a years’
worth of Win32 C++ engine code and squeezing it into the template is going to
be trickier. Step one is selecting the
right template to start from.
 |
| New Project:Visual C++:Windows Metro style:Direct3D App |
I recommend starting with the Direct3DApp project, NOT the
Blank App (XAML). Chose XAML, and by the time you’ve got through the layers of
helpful abstraction, it will be time for you to retire! I am an old school
coder which means I need a main(), a loop() and an exit(), preferably in the
same function!
 |
| Direct3D Application Template from VS Express 2012 |
You can compile and run this 3D demo and see a lovely
spinning 3D cube, but the good stuff is the framework in which all that
confusing 3D code sits. Look at the bottom of the “Direct3DApp1.cpp”, and you
will find main(). Place a breakpoint
there, run the demo and step into the functions and you will find yourself a
few lines up in the Run() function which creates a timer and establishes a main
loop, where it will sit happily until the window is closed. Pop in some
clean-up code after the loop and presto, you have the makings of a no-frills,
super-fast Windows 8 application.
It is this stripped down template that I will be using as
the basis of my Ultrabook application. I have added it to a newly created FTP Area we can use to share files and demos in the coming weeks:
WEBSITE: http://partners.thegamecreators.com/
USERNAME: ultimatecoder
PASSWORD: ultimatecoder
FILE: Direct3DApp1.zip
Veteran coders who report to a higher power may wonder why I
have just thrown away all the bits that actually do something and produced an
app that does absolutely nothing. The more observant will go one step further
and ask, “where does it say Hello World?”.
Essentially, I need to start from scratch to make room for
my own C++ engine code. In theory, I should be able to drop it in, add some
dependencies, click compile and go for an early lunch.
Researching Win32 vs.
Metro Style
Before I commit to what in reality is a few days of work, I
need to make certain of some basic requirements. Can I use standard C includes
such as <stdio.h>, <malloc.h>.
Secondly, can I use <gl\gl.h> to access my precious OpenGL calls? Already, I can feel the hairs on the back of
my neck bristle. Is it me, or is that the sound of a thousand DirectX
programmers laughing at me, surely not?
Two hours later, I arrived at the conclusion everyone
reading this blog made right away and confirmed by a thousand DirectX
programmers. A metro-style app is unable to include the OpenGL headers, and
they are strictly for Desktop apps only. I can’t even ‘trick’ a Metro style app
to render an OpenGL context. Even hacked, the metro style app would not be a
valid app within the Metro style store as it would break the second it hit a
device that did not have those legacy Desktop APIs. So that’s it friends, its
metro style with no AGK graphics or desktop style with no access to WinRT. At
least that’s what I thought. During my research hope was restored by an article
published recently by Intel which goes into great length on how to access WinRT
sensors from a Windows 8 Desktop app. When you have a few hours to spare, check
out the article: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/ultrabook-and-tablet-windows-8-sensors-development-guide/
The limited WinRT desktop solution has enough COM code to
put hairs on your chest, but it gets the job done and it will integrate
instantly into my existing Win32 engine. I don’t even need to use VS2012 or
learn what those ‘ref’ and ‘^’ symbols do, I can have sensors plugged in within
the day.
Developer Dilemma
A question occurs. Is that the kind of thing the Ultimate Coder
would do? Pick the easiest solution, slap in some cut and paste COM code then
go for a little lie down somewhere. Fob off the judges with a desktop mode
application that isn’t a real metro style app? I don’t think so.
The universe has put me in this challenge, and has just turned
the heat up to see if I explode. I’ve looked at it from every angle, and there
is only one way through. Write my own OpenGL library in DirectX 11.
Maybe not all of it, but enough bits that my AGK OpenGL
routines compile normally, behave exactly as they would running under OpenGL
but driven by DirectX. As luck would
have it, a few months ago we started updating our fixed function OpenGL ES 1.1
code to use OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders in anticipation of adding 3D commands to AGK.
It further transpires that DirectX 11 likes shaders too. It transpires yet
further that a few years ago I created a product called FPS Creator X10. Its
claim to fame was a tech demo, one of the first third party demos to exploit
the DirectX 10 graphics API.
From further research, it gets worse! Not only do metro
style apps limit developers to DirectX, they also remove certain other
liberties such as relative paths, unlimited system access and a blanket eviction
of anything that might remind it of Win32. AGK is a full programming language,
which means I’ll have to replace file, input and device code. The only things I
think I can keep are physics, core logic and higher level graphics commands.
Don’t think me crazy though; there is method behind the mission
to cure metro style apps of their clear lack of Win32 and OpenGL. Once
complete, AGK programs will be able to run as genuine metro style apps, which
means they will run on Windows tablets, and possibly Windows phones and
consoles in the future.
I invite you to check back next week to see whether (a) I
have achieved a small measure of success or (b) gone completely loco.
The AGK Advantage
You might be wondering how I can be demonstrating a running
Love Hearts® app and at the same time agonise over how to render even one pixel
to the Ultrabook. The good news for me is that AGK, the programming language we
are using to run the BASIC script, already runs fine on Windows and several
other platforms. This means Steve, my back-up coder, can
busy himself developing on Windows 7 while I set about making AGK work well
with Windows 8. The magic happens in the next few weeks when I take the BASIC
script that Steve has produced and drop it onto the new Ultrabook platform.
In addition, AGK has touch and sensor commands for many
other platforms, so Steve will be able to add multi-touch and accelerometer
functionality in his BASIC program long before I figure out how to do it on the
Ultrabook.
What’s Next?
Are you kidding! Next week we will find out whether I can
pull off even half of what I’ve just blogged. Steve is taking a short holiday,
and I’ll be taking the opportunity to change all his code around and start the
process of commissioning the artwork, so we might have some nice graphics to
show. The real reveal will be a demo showing OpenGL calls that render to a
metro style app context using DirectX as the underlying API. I’ve done some
Googling, and there is not much on the subject, so it should be a good read!
More Information
Blog Videos
For everyone who likes videos, I have created two. One features
the latest version of the Love Hearts® app, and a second takes a quick peek at
my shiny new Ultrabook. Until next time, have an app-y day!
No comments:
Post a Comment