Visual C# Express 2005: Creating a Poker Application, 1PM (PDT) Thursday, That's Today!
If you want to show up here you go http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=31156.
Now, to give a short disclaimer, I actually bought a head-set this time, so no more crook-necking the entire time. I'm also ten times more prepared for what is going to happen, have much better demos and several great impromptu ideas if I have some extra time to show off more of C# Express. Dan was nice enough to give me some tips as well on things to show off, so I think I'm pretty complete at this point. Features of this web-cast are going to include:
- A layman's introduction to game theory. Nothing complex, just basic stuff.
- My own personal slant on what a game engine is as compared to what everyone else is familiar with (business objects in particular).
- Extreme use of generics. I went out of my way to make the entire application generics ready and to leave you with a reusable card deck.
- A multi-threaded (somewhat) poker gaming engine. It's capable of handling AI and human players out of the box. Hooking up a network player would be trivial, and we might get into that process.
- A very interesting approach to determining winners... I'll leave this vague for now, but the result is somewhat clever.
- Talk about AI. I implement a very stupid AI, but a simple FSM wouldn't be hard to implement during the talk. If I have an extra 30 minutes, I'll prepare one.
- A GDI+ poker interface. I wanted something that was 100% designer created for the web-cast. I'll also try releasing the updated graphics engine after the web-cast that uses Managed DirectX and has the updated hand-drawn deck.
- You get to see some very excellent hand-drawn prototype cards compliments of Brittany Kolesar
- I'm going to run through some advanced techniques at the end (no time for demo, and probably not even time to get to them, but I'll try) for networking and DirectX.