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Visual Studio LightSwitch can be used as the backend data source for your AngularJs applications…
The end result is a multi-player game that can be played across the internet by users logged into the same page. Unfortunately it’s not a very interesting game, and the question is still open as to whether I can in fact design an interesting game. What I have done, I hope, is to create a framework that can be used to design all sorts of interesting games. As such, a very simple game actually serves the purpose better as it exposes the details of using the framework to create alternative games and simulations and avoids obscuring them with details about the particular game. Maybe there will be a fourth post with an interesting game, but first we have to come up with a game lobby for this one, so who knows?
The large graphic below shows a game in progress, so you can’t see the buttons used to enter the game, shown immediately below. Game play starts as soon as there are at least two players. You can see below that the game is in progress when Red player enters the game and gets the initial Notification “Click button to enter game”.
The goal is to click on an opponent’s player so that your player moves on top. For this particular game, a point is awarded when you are successful, so, back on the Server, the behavior of the particular ooNaThing subtype, in conjunction with ooBerLink and ooBer, is to perform collision detection and increment its score if warranted. A different ooBerLink and ooNaThing might do something completely different, from handling the left mouse click to the consequences of collisions. There’s also nothing to prevent multiple ooNaThing subtypes, all interacting with each other. That’s the part you can plug in.
You can try the game online at http://sinalrgame1.lightswitchhelpwebsite.com/HTMLClient/
This article really starts when I start talking about motivation below, but I want to make the point up front that what I started out to do is not what I ended up doing. What I wanted to do was write some really cool simulations / games. What I ended up doing was writing what I hope is a really cool framework for designing / creating really cool simulations / games and a pretty mediocre game to demonstrate it. But I make lemonade out of that lemon by pointing out that a more complex game would obscure the details of how to use the framework.
Anyhoo, here’s a screen shot of three users logged into the same page and all seeing the same thing but all able to interact with it individually. The idea behind the framework is you can plug in any kind of behavior you want for the simulation objects and rules engine.
The end result is not what I set out to do. I wanted to write games, but what I ended up with was so brittle it evolved into a game framework which I hope can be used to create all sorts of games.
Here’s a screen shot of three users logged into the same page and all seeing the same thing but all able to interact with it individually. The intent of the framework is that you easily can plug in your own behavior and rules to control what comes out of that basic functionality.
You can consume your backend OData Visual Studio LightSwitch services in AngularJs. Coding your business layer in LightSwitch will save you a lot of development time and reduce the code you will be required to write…
Handling complex business logic in a Single Page Application (SPA) is not a simple task. Process flow that is normally easily enforced in a traditional postback web application, can have security holes, because hackers can access the service methods directly...
The primary reason you may want to use WCF RIA Services with Visual Studio LightSwitch 2013 is to: